Measuring Your Performance

There are two ways of measuring the progress you are making in learning how to lead yourself: by carrying out self assessments and by inviting others to give you some form of structured feedback.

Two types of self-assessment are suggested:

• Personality profile: Self-evaluation of multiple dimensions of your personality (including extroversion, emotionality, thoroughness, openness, agreeableness, and your thinking mode preferences—Sensing vs. Intuiting, Thinking vs. Feeling, and Judging vs. Perceiving).
• Individual values assessment: Self-evaluation of your values, the values that you see in your organisation, and the values that you would like to see in your organisation. This Individual Values Assessment measures how aligned you are with your working environment.

Two types of feedback are suggested:

• Johari window: A comparison of the values that define who you think you are, and the values that define who your friends think you are.  Measures agreements, blinds spots and façade—Leading Self Workbook
• Jobari window: A comparison of the values that define who you think you are, and the values that define who your work colleagues think you are.  Measures agreements, blinds spots and façade (includes potentially limiting values)—Leading Self Workbook.

Feedback is important because even though you think you know yourself, you don’t know how you are perceived by others. What may appear in your mind to be one of your strengths may, viewed from the perspective of others, be one of your weaknesses. There may be things that you do that others find irritating. These are your blind spots—things that others know about you, that you don’t know about yourself.

Feedback helps you to reduce your blind spots. Modifying how you operate to eliminate these behaviours is part of personal mastery, and will support you in enhancing your ability to bond and cooperate with others. 

My point here is not just that self-leadership is intimately linked to the full expression of who you are—authenticity—nor that it is a lifelong journey, but that the only way you have of understanding who you are, and where you are on your personal evolutionary journey is by getting feedback from others so that you can improve your ability to get your own needs met.

In addition you can use self-assessments to identify what levels of consciousness you are operating from by assessing your levels of identity and levels of motivation, your psychological evolution, your level of happiness and the type of mind with which you operate.

 

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