Know Yourself and Pick The Right Environments That Work For You

The below is from an interview of Gautam Mukunda, a professor at Harvard Business School and the author of "Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter."


Eric:
So how can you become a better leader?

Gautam Mukunda:
More than anything else, “Know thyself.” Know what your type is. That if you are, both in the sense that you can use these coding rules to figure out okay, how would I score with the organization? But even more profoundly, think about your own personality… There are types, and I’m not saying be in the wings, I’m saying be who you are, and understand what the downfalls of that are so you can counteract that.
For instance, if you are a classic entrepreneur, you can’t work in an organization. Know that. Know that you should work on the outside, but also know that when you’re an outsider, the great ways in which outsiders fail is one, they either do really stupid things, or two, they don’t understand the context of the situation they’re in in the way that an insider would.

Eric:
Once you understand, “This is my kind of style,’ what’s the next step?

Gautam Mukunda:
Then you’ve got to pick the environments that work for you. This is the thing that, again, context is so important. The unfiltered leader who is an amazing success in one situation will be a catastrophic failure in the other, in almost all cases. It’s way too easy to think, “I’ve always succeeded, I am a success, I am successful because I am a success, because it’s about me, and therefore I will succeed in this new environment.” Wrong.
You were successful because you happened to be in an environment where your biases and predispositions and talents and abilities all happened to align neatly with those things that would produce success in that environment. That doesn’t tell you a whole lot about the next environment down the pike.