Knowing Who Knows What You Don’t: Acknowledging Your Limits

So much of what we do to leverage our leadership growth relies on building great professional relationships. Each facet we’ve worked through to this point plays a key role but to build on even the strongest qualifications, we’ll need to lean into all the humility we can muster by acknowledging our limits. We’ll need to focus on identifying exactly who knows what we don’t, and we’ll need to be very intentional to connect with them to limit our liabilities.

Earlier as we looked at why so many folks in leadership roles work to avoid feedback, I referenced the discomfort that comes with owning up to a weakness. It’s one thing to consider how that applies to leaders we’ve observed; it’s a far taller order to come to terms with our own weaknesses. Before we’ll be able to successfully identify the people to best support us, we absolutely must admit to our own limitations. I often joke that when I met Cindy, I was not an alcoholic; they go to meetings. I had never been to one of those meetings, therefore I was only a drunk. Had you asked me if that created any problems for me at that stage in my life, I would have answered emphatically that it most certainly did not. I had no problem whatsoever with drinking. In fact, I was quite good at it.

Just like drinking had potential to limit the growth of personal relationships, especially in the quantities I did before Cindy and I met, I had to begrudgingly admit to more than a few limitations that were holding me back professionally. Before digging into those, though, I’ll share that with the exception of one Friday afternoon while spreading litter in the boss’s poultry houses, I never drank on the job. I also never remember missing work because of it, and I was almost always just hung over by the time my shift started.

I’ve repeatedly mentioned my extremely fast-paced and task-oriented behavioral style, and how I viewed that more as a survival mechanism early on. I’ve always been incredibly competitive in everything I’ve done, despite having very little natural talent. Keep in mind, I’ve held a full time job since my early teens so my lack of talent was more of an annoyance when it came to sports; I didn’t dedicate enough time to any particular sport for it to ever get me down. And while I could push myself hard enough to keep pace in most jobs that required physical effort, it didn’t take long in that first role off the manufacturing floor to realize brute force wouldn’t yield the same results with other people as I had learned to achieve when I was running a press or working on a construction crew. Recognizing, then admitting our limits is the first step we can take toward anything that remotely resembles effective leadership.

Once I realized that there were indeed roadblocks that I’d never be able to navigate by attempting to outwork the problem, I had to apply everything I knew about determination and work ethic into learning how to overcome them. I soon learned that I’d need to identify the key experts I could study in each of those areas. Before looking at that in more detail, I’ll challenge you to list at least three areas where you lack expertise. We can’t address a knowledge gap that we’re not willing to admit to! If I’m being completely honest, I can point to far more of my own limits now than I could have (or would have) thirty years ago.