I once had the displeasure of working in a library whose leader seemed to believe that being the library director meant being the best librarian in the building, across all specialties and subdisciplines. Whenever this director heard someone else in the library being praised for his or her expertise and accomplishments, this person’s response was usually something designed to redirect the praise back to the director, with predictable effects on staff morale.

A wise and effective library leader doesn’t worry about always being seen as the smartest person in the room, and both recognizes and (this is essential) publicly acknowledges the expertise of others on staff and the superior knowledge that each of them has regarding his or her area of specialty.

Believe it or not, that’s the easy part.

The harder part is figuring out what, in fact, you are particularly good at and what you struggle with. To some degree this can actually be pretty easy: if you struggle with procrastination, you probably know that; if you’re good at speaking publicly but not great at writing effective email messages, you probably figured that out long before coming to a leadership position.

But it can be genuinely hard to see our skills and deficits in certain areas, and our failures to understand ourselves in this regard can really get in the way of our effectiveness as library leaders. Leaders who lack self-awareness tend not to have happy staff, and staff who are chronically frustrated by their leaders are not likely to serve patrons and sponsoring institutions well.

So how can you gain awareness of your more hidden strengths and weaknesses when you’re in a leadership position? Here are three suggestions:

• Pay attention to yourself. This sounds obvious, but we don’t tend to do it well. Consciously take an inventory of both your feelings and your effectiveness as you carry out individual leadership tasks. Which ones do you find most frustrating, and which ones tend to give you that pleasant “in the zone” feeling as you carry them out? Do you see small patterns of failure in your own deliverables (like arriving at meetings late, or finding errors in your writing after you’ve submitted documents, or recurring feelings of regret after staff meetings or presentations)? These patterns and feelings provide hints about your strengths and weaknesses as a leader and as a professional more generally. These hints can lead you to seek feedback from others, which leads to my second suggestion:
• Pay attention to feedback from others. If you are listening carefully, you’ll get important and useful hints about your strengths and weaknesses from those around you. Now, actually getting useful feedback can be a challenge when you’re in a leadership position (see “The Higher You Rise in the Hierarchy, the Funnier Your Jokes Get. That’s a Problem“), so you’ll have to listen carefully, and you may have to go out of your way to encourage honest input from those below you in the organizational downline. (Good news: at least a small handful of your employees will be only too happy to provide it.) And you’ll also need to exercise good critical judgment in taking the feedback onboard — not all of it will be reasonable or well-informed. But as you look for patterns in the feedback, you’ll see them, and they’ll help you understand your strengths and weaknesses better.
• Try some formal tools. There are many psychological and training instruments out there designed to help people learn more about their own strengths and weaknesses. A currently popular one is CliftonStrengths, but there are also venerable tools like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and the Enneagram that are designed to help you understand your own personality better. None of these tools is perfect and none will tell you everything you need to know about yourself, but all can provide important and useful self-insight. If you’re in an academic library, chances are good that your host institution offers training using these or other tools and would be happy to send someone to your library to administer them to your leadership team or even your whole staff.

The bottom line is that you didn’t get to your leadership position by being good at everything; no one is. But the better you understand what you are and are not good at — and the better you are at addressing your weak areas with humility and honesty, the more effective you’ll become, and the happier the people who you work for you will be.