Assessing your own strengths and weaknesses

Medium effort

High impact

Business leaders often find themselves hurtling from one task to another. There are fires to put out, staff to support and a burgeoning email inbox to tackle. It’s hard to get out of the day-to-day of running a business. However, sitting down and reflecting on your own strengths and weaknesses can help you free up time, decide what to delegate and determine how you could improve as a leader.

We’ve designed our action plans to be completed in the order of steps laid out and explained why each step is important
Customising your action plan lets you set your own completion dates, assign tasks to others and get notifications
Helpful tools are provided for certain steps while a tracking metric at the end will help you determine the long-term success of your effort
A downloadable PDF version of each action plan is available if you’d like to compete it offline

What's involved? Ways to use this action plan Measuring impact

Create a list of 3-5 situations you’ve struggled with and those in which you’ve excelled over the past 12 months, including a one or two-line explanation for each

Impact: low

Why will this help?

Brainstorming the situations that have been challenging will help you spot commonalities. Similarly, knowing where you’ve excelled will help you define your strengths. An adviser or mentor can help.

Get to the root cause of the situations you’ve struggled with and establish where your common weaknesses are

Impact: medium

Why will this help?

Probing what skills or personality traits contributed to these examples will show you where you could improve.

Getting to the root cause of a problem

If you’ve identified a problem in your business, it’s important to get to the root cause before you take action.

Use a skills gap analysis to assess your own strengths and weaknesses, identifying both emotional and practical aspects that you need to work on

Impact: medium

Why will this help?

Completing a formal exercise will highlight key skill sets you need to develop and get you thinking about which ones you should prioritise.

Identifying the skills gaps you have as a leader

Being self-aware empowers business leaders to grow and improve. Our easy-to-follow checklist can be used to identify your skills gaps.

Work out where to focus your energy to increase the focus on strengths, and work on your weaknesses or start delegating

Impact: medium

Why will this help?

Business leaders are time poor, so it’s important to prioritise. What weaknesses do you need to work on? How can you better leverage your strengths? Do particular weaknesses point to activities you should delegate?

Identifying tasks that can be delegated easily

Deciding what to delegate and who to delegate to isn't easy. Our template breaks down the delegation process, allowing you to prioritise what you’re going to delegate to your team.

List the weaknesses you’re going to work on and talk to an adviser or peer to get ideas on how you can improve – and create accountability

Impact: high

Why will this help?

Creating a summary will help you plan the steps forwards. Talking to peers allows you to sense check your assessment and get ideas. Meeting regularly, and getting them to push you on your progress, will build accountability.

Holding yourself accountable to goals as a leader

Your goals are crucial to moving the business forward, but it can be hard to stay focused. Our checklist will help you build a structure.

What can I do with this Action Plan?

Start this Action Plan

Add some extra information to this plan and we’ll help you get it done.

We’ve designed our action plans to be completed in the order of steps laid out and explained why each step is important
Customising your action plan lets you set your own completion dates, assign tasks to others and get notifications
Helpful tools are provided for certain steps while a tracking metric at the end will help you determine the long-term success of your effort
A downloadable PDF version of each action plan is available if you’d like to compete it offline

Download and print

Get a printable template for this Action Plan, fill it in with some target dates, and share it with your team. Pin it on the wall where everyone can see it.

Get the printable Action Plan

Learning Groups

We also run Learning Groups on these topics where you can join other leaders tackling the same challenges.

Find a Learning Group

How will I know if my action plan is working?

Quarterly review of challenging situations

Look at the progress you're making on the big issues

Why this metric?

Writing down the challenges you’ve faced allows you to see if you’ve made progress on your strengths and weaknesses, plus it can be cathartic.

How do I start tracking?

Set a reminder to evaluate your challenges every quarter.