Career Success For Accountants

Leadership: The Benefits Of Being Self Aware

Being a leader presents many challenges. One of the most valuable assets you can have as a leader is self awareness. Why is it so important and what are the benefits?

Benefit 1: You Play To Your Strengths

  • While you can be competent in many areas, it is tough to be great at everything. Being more self aware allows you to focus your time and energies on what you do best. After all, you want to be playing to your strengths.

Benefit 2: You Get Others Playing To Their Strengths

  • Organisations are full of talented people, many of whom are never ever fully utilised. Make the time to find out where others excel and get them focusing on what they do best.

Benefit 3: You Adapt To The Situation

  • Leadership is not something that comes with a step by step success recipe. A lot of it is trial and error, learning and reflection and being able to adapt. The best leaders are highly skilled at adapting to the situation they face.

Benefit 4: You Think Before You Act

  • In any situations there will always be many options open to you. Good leaders know this and will choose their response and options to take account of others’ perspectives.

The Bottom Line: The truth is that raising your levels of self awareness can really make a huge difference to the results you achieve. So what’s your first step?

To help you to assess where you excel and where you perhaps need to develop yourself, I have developed a simple Leadership Assessment.  You can get your free assessment by clicking on the  following link leadership-skills-assessment

About the Author Duncan Brodie

Since 2006 I’ve worked with in excess of 8,000 accountants and professionals in workshops, seminars and one to one helping them land their next jobs and become better leaders, presenters and business partners. Before that I spent 25 years in accountancy climbing the career ladder from Payments Clerk to FD. I’m a CIMA Fellow, Certified Professional Coach and Team Coach Facilitator.

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12 comments
Guy Farmer says 23 June 2011

Great points Duncan. It’s amazing how powerful a little bit of self-awareness can be for leaders. It allows them to understand not only who they are but who they people around them are. It tends to build more balanced leaders who create happier workplaces.

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Juma kalyegira says 1 February 2012

Self awareness also helps you on how to relate with the people around you. more so accepting individuals as the way they are. leaders who are not self aware I hope they still have a lot to do, simply because it may be hard for them to deal with their subjects If they are not self aware.Juma Kalyegira A student at Uganda christian university as well as a radio communicator working with straight talk foundation Uganda.

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