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Personal Growth for Managers: Leading Yourself Before Others
Personal Growth for Managers: Leading Yourself Before Others
Managers occupy a strange position when it comes to personal development. Everyone around them tends to assume the growing is done — you got the role, you must have figured it out. Meanwhile, the stakes for their blind spots just got much higher, because now those blind spots land on other people.
Knowing your weaknesses is a competitive advantage
The instinct to project confidence and competence in a leadership role is understandable and sometimes useful. It becomes a problem when it extends to self-perception — when you stop looking honestly at where you're genuinely less capable because admitting it feels incompatible with the role. Every manager has areas where they're weaker. The ones who do most damage are the ones who don't know what those areas are and therefore can't mitigate them. The ones who do least damage — and grow the most — are the ones who know specifically where they're limited and make deliberate arrangements: delegating to people stronger in those areas, getting explicit coaching on them, building structures that compensate. The tools here are simple: a leadership books reading practice, feedback mechanisms that give you real information rather than filtered pleasantries, and honest reflection in a journal notebook about where things go wrong and what your contribution to that was.Being approachable is infrastructure, not personality
Managers who are difficult to approach create information vacuums that fill with rumor and misaligned decisions. You don't get good information about what's actually happening in your team if people don't feel comfortable telling you things that might be unwelcome. Approachability is partly personality but also partly practice. Specific practices that build it: making time for one-on-ones consistently even when you're busy, responding to concerns without visibly dismissing them, following up on things people raised with you in previous conversations. These are structural, not emotional — you can implement them regardless of your natural temperament. Listening without immediately solving is harder than it sounds if you're a problem-solving oriented person. Sometimes people need to be heard before they need to be helped. Learning to distinguish which situation you're in is a specific skill worth developing.Finding a mentor before you need one
The ideal time to find a mentor is before you're in the situation where you desperately need advice. By the time you're in crisis with a difficult team member or a business problem you've never faced before, the mentor relationship hasn't been built. I've found mentors most useful when the relationship is ongoing and low-stakes — where I'm bringing current challenges regularly, not just big emergencies. The accumulated understanding they have of your context makes their advice much sharper than what you'd get from a one-off conversation. For managers who don't have a natural mentoring network, management books that document specific cases and decisions in detail can serve some of the same function — you're learning from other people's experience with the specific dynamics of leading people.Positive reinforcement as a leadership practice
Encouragement that's specific and genuine does multiple things simultaneously: it reinforces the behavior you want to see more of, it builds the relationship, and it shifts your own attention toward what's working rather than what isn't. Most managers spend significantly more attention on problems than on successes, which skews both their perception and their team's experience. This isn't about false praise or ignoring problems. It's about the ratio. For most managers the ratio of specific positive recognition to specific critical feedback is too low, and the team experiences this as an environment where their work is only noticed when something goes wrong.What I'd skip
The idea that relaxing or admitting you don't know something undermines your authority. In my experience the managers who project the most certainty and take the least time off tend to make the most brittle decisions and have the least resilient teams. Genuine confidence doesn't require constant performance. Honest bottom line: managers who grow as people make their teams better. The development isn't optional — it's multiplied across everyone they lead. Treat it accordingly. Ready to shop? Compare Self-Improvement across stores → 📚 Or browse self-help courses & ebooks in Digital Goods →📢 Affiliate Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. We may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you when you click through and purchase.
