Connecting to Admired Leadership
When Self-Assessments Harm Your Personal Development
Episode Summary
A conversation with Admired Leadership Executive Coach and Partner, Alan Nelson and Wes Bender from CRA | Admired Leadership, exploring the potential pitfalls of self-assessments in leadership development. Building on their behavioral approach to leadership, this session challenges the widespread reliance on personality assessments and psychometric tools, examining how these instruments can sometimes limit rather than enhance leadership growth. The discussion provides practical alternatives for building self-awareness and team understanding without falling into the trap of fixed mindset thinking.
Episode Notes
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Key Highlights
- Leadership resides in behavior, not personality: Excellence in any domain comes from what you do, not who you are - leadership is a composite of choices, routines, and actions rather than innate traits or psychological dispositions
- Self-assessments can create self-limiting beliefs: Tools like Myers-Briggs, DISC, and others risk becoming excuses for behavior rather than catalysts for growth, leading people to say "this is just who I am" instead of "who do I want to become?"
- Focus on commonalities over differences: Great teams function because of what they share - values, standards, expectations - rather than constantly highlighting how members are different from each other
- Better alternatives for building awareness: Use direct feedback, smart questions, and honest conversations rather than formal assessments - ask "What's it like to be on the receiving end of me?" or "How do I get to the next number on a 1-10 scale?"
- The Venn diagram approach to development: Focus where two circles intersect - things you're not good at AND things others need you to be great at, discovered through conversation rather than assessment
Notable Quotes
- "Leadership resides in behavior. Who you are as a leader is a composite, a stained glass window of lots of things that you do or don't do."
- "I'm much more interested in teams about what we have in common than what we have in difference. Great teams don't function because they all talk about each other's differences all the time."
- "What a shame that I know what your DISC profile is, but I don't know why you asked your wife to marry you or where you asked her to marry you."
- "Don't work on what you want to get better at - work on what people need from you most that you're not good at."
- "The question is, who do you want to be? Not who are you today. I think that's the wrong question."
- "My job is to hold up a mirror that other people won't hold."
Resources Mentioned