MISTAKE 6 – Lack of self awareness
Many business owners refuse to face their fears and insecurities, often because they don’t want to appear stupid or expose a lack of knowledge. They don’t trust other people and want to hold on to everything themselves because they believe no one can do it as well as they can. They have a lack of awareness of their own personality, of their strengths and weaknesses, and their impact on others. Ultimately this means they are less able to build an appropriate team around them.
Many think they’re great delegators – but in reality they are just dumping or they’re micromanaging, so they don’t achieve any real engagement with their people. This then reinforces their view that “you just can’t trust others to do anything…”
It’s really easy – and highly tempting – to blame poor performance on other people or circumstances– but are you yourself the problem?
For instance, do you ever find yourself repeating things such as; recruiting the wrong people; having key people leave unexpectedly; getting yourself overloaded?
We all have patterns that keep coming back – good or bad. It’s worth investing some time in self analysis – taking that long hard look in the mirror – to check out whether we’re really as good as we’d like to believe – or even need to be, to take our businesses forward in these challenging times.
If any area of your business is struggling, then the most likely culprit is you – not the recession, not the government, not your staff. You.
