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In training leaders, I place a lot of emphasis on looking within. While learning by osmosis, and learning by observing others, has value, doing so without understanding your intrinsic capabilities to perform leadership roles can lead to developing bad habits. An over dependence on role models can lead to blind faith.

Assuming you have looked within and gained an understanding of who you are, and have come to terms with what you have discovered about yourself, answering one question may help shorten your journey to being a leader: how do your co-workers perceive you?

This question is difficult to answer. Some obstacles are:

• Your co-worker is unable or unwilling to give you useful, actionable feedback, or
• You don’t understand the feedback, or
• The feedback is not palatable and you reject it as invalid, or
• Your over analyze the feedback given to you and take no action, or
• You take the wrong action to fix the problem, or
• You just don’t have the discipline, energy, and resilience to learn what your co-workers think about you.

While it may be difficult, it is not impossible to answer this question. It takes a high degree of self awareness, flexibility, and willingness to experiment with your behaviors. It helps if you can leave your emotions out of it and not take feedback personally. In fact, you can blunt any personal attack and disarm any opponent by providing a rational, unemotional description of the feedback, and ask suggestions for improvement.

As you do this over time, you realize that you have created your own barriers to decode the signals being sent by your co-workers. Taking down these barriers is all you need to do, the benefits will automatically follow.