

Understanding Personal Limitations as a Leader
Written by Damon L. Simmons, PhD
October 11, 2024
LEO Firstline, LLC
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Introduction
Part of self-improvement as a leader stems from understanding our limitations. Psychologists refer to this quality as self-awareness. Self-awareness is viewed as a primary factor in emotional intelligence—our capacity to be aware of, control, and express one's emotions and to handle interpersonal relationships. One study showed that self-awareness is the single best predictor of overall success. This serves as a critical component of leadership. Likewise, knowing our limitations can help us develop as leaders.
"Weaknesses are not the opposite of strengths; they’re the absence of strengths." Leaders who see weaknesses as their strengths position themselves for personal growth. More than just impacting our ability to do our job, these limitations can affect decision-making, how we interact with our team, and long-term strategy. Some personal limitations arise from inexperience. Cracks in leadership skills may surface when the number of those we lead escalates. Fear of speaking in public, shyness, focusing too much on perfection, and indecisiveness are personal limitations that can imperil your career. Other limitations are not as straightforward. For example, a personal tendency to surround oneself with others who share the same viewpoint may limit innovative solutions through groupthink.
Leadership capability is impaired when others view you as weak, duplicative, or focused on your limitations. Those who differ on the professional qualifications for what constitutes a good leader also differ on the personal attributes that they associate with leadership. This makes coming to a consensus on what constitutes a good leader a difficult task, to say the least. Team interaction can account for up to 40% of the variation in effectiveness. In helmed, pseudo-led teams, a docile leader was shown to significantly reduce task performance. A directive leader was found to account for only an additional 4% of the variance in service. Few strategies have been proposed yet to help leaders overcome personal limitations to better lead a team.
Importance of Self-awareness in Leadership
Self-awareness is crucial for a leader. When leaders understand their strengths and limitations, they can work from a place of knowledge to most effectively motivate people and make business decisions. Leaders who offer a more transparent workplace of honesty have more trust among their team members. Understanding one’s challenges can foster an environment of understanding. Leaders who do not understand their limitations can put team members at a disadvantage. To have a successful team, all levels need to be effective and functioning. Part of that process is the ability to self-identify and make changes if required. We change people and businesses one fun brain fact at a time. Self-awareness is understanding your triggers.
People with high self-awareness have been rated by their subordinates as having increased integrity and are rated by their peers as one of the best. Self-awareness is also important for self-regulation, which is necessary for any good leader. There are many leadership practices and tools that can help you develop self-awareness. Feedback tools are a popular choice, as they can provide a well-rounded view of your effectiveness as a leader and encourage a frank dialogue between you and your subordinates. Some of the most influential leaders are not afraid to share their insights, and influential leaders take their insights not just in but share their findings and motivate others based on their information.
Types of Personal Limitations
Research in psychology has identified two types of limitations that individuals may perceive within themselves: cognitive and emotional.
Cognitive Limitations
Cognitive limitations refer to leaders' hardships in sense-making, decision-making, and judgment. What a leader knows is bounded. The knowledge a leader has is limited and can be learned through a variety of experiences. Leaders process plenty of information, about which they have only limited knowledge, to make decisions. In addition to these cognitive limits, leaders are confronted with cognitive biases. These biases can lead to judgmental errors that directly impair the quality of the decisions made.
The science of behavioral decision-making distinguishes various biases, such as overconfidence, the representativeness heuristic, anchoring, and aversion to losses. I will discuss only the bias of distorted information processing in greater detail. Distorted information processing might lead to inaccurate beliefs or form the basis of potentially catastrophic decisions. We find confirmation bias when individuals discount evidence that is inconsistent with their beliefs. Instead of following critical thinking, they just value information that confirms their prior beliefs. (Dis)confirmation bias, therefore, differs from merely investing more effort into finding confirming versus disconfirming information.
Confirmation bias is a tendency that both subordinates and leaders, including CEOs, need to be aware of. Like other cognitive limitations, biased information processing may blur our picture of reality. As leaders develop accurate diagnostic skills, their communicative control changes towards more open communication. Senior managers with a strong mental model of a business risk undervalue the information of line managers with more recent and concrete information. Seeking a broad consensus is one possible impression management strategy, as decision processes are partially influenced by the need for consensus and reconciliation with the expectations of followers and colleagues.
Emotional Limitations
Building from that argument, emotional limitations exist as the internal challenges leaders may encounter in their ability to manage their emotions and the emotions of others. The exploration of leadership and limitations was primarily focused on this emotional perspective, suggesting that some of the inhibitions to effective leadership come purely from the manager's inability to manage their emotions appropriately. For example, a leader who has little emotional self-awareness will have very little influence or ability to connect with the teams or groups they are leading. Moreover, some leaders are afflicted by stress-related health issues and may become more withdrawn, standoffish, or disengaged as a result. Leaders also face challenges in managing their emotions in high-pressure situations. By and large, leaders are tasked with the expectation of maintaining composure under stressful or pressure-packed situations; ironically, it is precisely these high-pressure moments that make it most difficult to control one's emotions. Similarly, leaders with a low level of empathy struggle to create a positive and constructive work environment. Much of the research available in the academic literature is targeted towards the improvement of emotional regulation. It has been argued that leaders who practice mindfulness techniques can improve emotional regulation and foster higher levels of self-awareness. In turn, it is argued that self-awareness supports a variety of emotional regulation strategies, including emotional intelligence competencies that leaders can develop to improve in difficult emotions.
Impact of Personal Limitations on Leadership
Personal limitations, depending on the context, can have grave implications for effective leadership practices. A managerial leader pushed to a state of decision inertia due to their cognitive limitations will eventually end their contemplation with the selection of a suboptimal solution. Failure on their part to anticipate risks and recognize limitations in their own introspection biases often leads to blind optimism in the best of times and panic in the worst of times. These leaders, therefore, often find themselves overwhelmed and lacking what is often referred to as crisis management coordination patterns. Thus, personal limitations also end up causing limitations in effective leadership. Personal limitations can cause leaders to generate barriers to communication between team members and team leaders, meaning that any communication and information that is disseminated or received by organizational members is done so through the leaders' filters. Leaders with insecure personalities tend to compensate by engaging in controlling behaviors that allow them to establish power dominance with followers, which creates communicative barriers to top management.
Cases of personal limitations in leadership have subsequent harmful effects on their followers who work in the same work unit. Such negative impacts include frustration, emotional exhaustion, stress, aggressive behavior, decreased self-efficacy, and self-esteem for themselves and their leader, burnout aggravation, and more perceived depersonalization from the leader. The leaders' limitations also serve as a determinant of the work unit's productivity and morale, two factors that underscore the poor quality of performance among the subordinates. Overall, enabling a supportive culture that can identify the existence of a potential personal limitation in their leadership roles and teaching them how this potential limitation could be controlled or eradicated will only achieve desirable organizational results, provided that one acknowledges that this limitation does exist and can interfere with decision-making and fostering a trusting communication tool. Such a communication network could be just the beginning of creating flexible, adaptive, and effective leadership styles throughout the globalized world.
Strategies for Overcoming Personal Limitations
There are several strategic actions that leaders should take to overcome limitations. In this context, these actions are based on the leader’s perspective and are enacted in collaboration with the leader. The more often leaders learn and grow, the greater the limits they will overcome. Learning and development provide the necessary foundation for overcoming leadership limitations. Leaders often are not aware of their limitations, so seeking feedback is an important way to uncover the blind spots that a leader has. Furthermore, leaders must engage in professional development activities regularly. These activities can include reading professional journals or publications, attending workshops or conferences, or enrolling in a course or workshop to update their leadership knowledge or skills.
Leaders need to set personal development goals that will help them overcome their limitations. These can represent the steps that the leader will take to fulfill the feedback received from others. Leaders often use coach or mentor relationships to help them overcome their limitations. At the same time, leaders should work to expand their professional network. Members of these networks are colleagues, professionals, or other leaders who can provide support, offer advice, refer them to others who can help, serve as mentors, and collaborate on major tasks or projects. These members can offer advice, suggestions, or technical assistance and can serve to help the leader bounce back when they reach their limit.
Continuous Learning and Development
As indicated earlier, great leaders are lifelong learners. This makes developmental issues very critical in defining the person as well as the leader. This is a flexible and adaptable mindset that leaders develop along the way. It is an approach to dealing with the world, especially to doing business in an era of continuous change and disorder. The intention is to try to identify the key issues that are vital for leaders and have directed most leaders to facilitate training courses, while others have chosen to base their learning on self-directed study.
The view is that the global leaders of the future will continue in a learning culture, moving on to other formal institutions of learning. Leaders who have identified learning as important suggested that it was critical for the vitality of their leadership skills and knowledge of new trends and options. Leaders also contend that in a kind of "bare-knuckled" survival strategy, continued investment in further training made them increasingly more adaptable. It is suggested that true success is to align one’s actions with changing events and that effective leaders stay true to their virtue, but remain flexible and adaptable to change, even though it jars with individuals, groups, or expectations. The value of bringing diverse perspectives and experiences to bear as leaders can learn a lot from failure, and it provides an opportunity to reflect, renew, and grow. Providing leaders with an education that encourages behaviors and capacity for resilience and innovation in today’s rapidly evolving environment is critical.
Conclusion
My goal in writing this article is to underscore the importance of reflecting on our limitations to foster better personal leadership. This ranges from self-awareness about our limitations, both cognitive and emotional, to accepting that we can be tired and make quick decisions. Today’s leaders must recognize that we are limited, operating with bounded rationality, cognitive and emotional overload, and imperfect mastery of new digital technologies. This will tend to make us slower to learn from our environmental feedback and less open to it. It will also undermine our team’s capability to make good decisions and execute well.
Recognizing that our leadership can be less than optimal and understanding what affects this is the first step in facing it. We cannot just wish and apply our professional determination that this does not exist. Once we recognize it, we can do something about it. One obvious thing we can do is to become more authentic and accept the expectations of others towards ourselves. Clearly stating that as leaders we are also normal, finite humans allows our team and followers not only to see our strengths but also to understand our shortcomings. It allows them to come up with solutions and compensate for those flaws. Leaders can be aware that abiding by a certain set of deontological ethics norms shows humility and modesty. Over time, authentic leadership positions can lead to personal growth for the leader and ultimately to fulfillment.
Leadership development is proven to work when leaders show an appetite for continuous learning and development. Growth and development are achieved by leaders managing themselves better, being truly open to the thoughts of others, developing greater skills in questioning others, improving their ability to facilitate conversations and debates, and increasing their readiness to be coached generally. Frequently, the growth is associated with greater confidence in making decisions and implementing them and a stronger feeling that they are capable of doing so. The flexibility of focusing attention on the individual, on the team, and on the wider organizational system allows leaders to develop the potential in all parts of the system.
For the future, to develop leadership capability in future leaders who are alert to their limitations, it is perhaps important that we create discussions about personal limitations without fear of being victimized as a result. In a society that fears and blames those who are less than perpetually perfect, this will remain a conundrum. In this article, I conclude that to some extent we are always learning to cope with our complex, ever-hurried, time-compressed work environment, and consequently, we have to continue to learn how to lead ourselves and others continuously in the remote teams of today.