Why Leadership Design Starts with Self-Awareness

Part 2 of our 4-part conversation on leadership design.

How can leaders design their impact if they don’t know themselves first? Host Russel Lolacher sits down with Georgi Enthoven — a seasoned entrepreneur and podcast host who helps professionals align ambition with purpose — to uncover the importance of self-awareness in leadership. Georgi shares how identifying your unique strengths (not just fixing weaknesses) builds the confidence and clarity leaders need to show up authentically and drive meaningful change.

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Transcript

Russel Lolacher: What I'm hearing though is that there needs to be a bit of work around self-awareness first before we can start throwing words or even one word around, we need to know ourselves a little bit better.

Is that a, I mean, I think it's a great place to start because we can't understand what our vision is if we don't know ourselves enough to connect with a thing. How do you, what would you direct someone around that piece. 

Georgi Enthoven: Yeah. Well, I I love that you asked that question and one of the first things that I noticed in coaching and also talking to these people who I call disruptors for good, who are the role models of doing this great work they are really aware of their capabilities, the gifts where they shine, and they not only are aware of it, but are able to communicate that well to others.

And one of the areas of self-awareness is most people are not aware of where they shine. Like even if they're an engineer, they're in a pool of engineers. So they don't really know what is extraordinary about them. And it takes, it does take some excavation work to figure out how you as an individual are unique and shine, and also what your team is, you know, particularly gifted at, or what your company does better than any other company.

It takes some time and some research and observation, and probably a lot of conversations to get there. Obviously as an individual, there's some tools like Myers-Briggs or StrengthFinder that can get you started. But even just asking the people in your life, you know, what do you come, what do people come to you for?

And if you even ask them like, where do I really shine? What am I gifted? Where do I stand out? People can come back and share like four or five things that you can then make sense of and start to understand who you are or who your team is, or who your company is and what they stand, what is uniquely gifted about, you know, any of those levels. And then also then how are you going to communicate that?

So on an individual level, many of us feel boastful owning our gifts and strengths and sort of shy away from that. But I have met some really interesting individuals who are able to just really say, I'm actually really good at this piece And, it feels so refreshing when someone does that in a non boastful way. And they're also then equally aware of where they need support and, and help. And the people that I find who've done that extra work are able to have the awareness to lean into their strengths. I think often, and especially I did in my early career, I lent into my weaknesses thinking I needed to level up all these different areas that it weren't as tangible or easy for me.

And there's always maybe gonna be a piece of that, but if you're not leaning into your strengths, you're doing a disservice.

Russel Lolacher: Well, I mean, we're both around. We're GenXs to some degree. I think you're GenX?.

Georgi Enthoven: A hundred . Agree.

Russel Lolacher: All right. I didn't didn't want assume. Could be a millennial, I didn't know. But having said that, I remember growing up and it was, what are your weaknesses? Well, you need to work on that. Those are your we, yeah. Only in the last decade or so is it, you know, forget that, just lean into your strengths.

Georgi Enthoven: Yeah, well, not in school. I mean, I have children that are about to be all three teenagers and a lot about school is leveling up your weaknesses. So if you're not performing great in math or in writing, then you need to get a tutor or somebody to help you with that area. And nobody is really saying, wow, you're exceptional at this, like, this could be your go-to like, you know, magnificent shine area. So, I think a lot of the messaging we get all through schooling is still how to level up weaknesses.

Russel Lolacher: Oh, or at least get to a baseline so you can graduate. And it's a, because it's a checklist exercise, because you know that kid that's horrible at math, they are gonna avoid anything and everything to do with math the minute they walk outta that school and never want to ever do it again. But there's a baseline that they seem to have to achieve. Oh, well man, we could do a whole thing on school and education. Don't even get me started on even getting into the college realm. I'll shut up on that. But let's go on the leadership design of things. What if alignment doesn't work? I love that you connected the dots between having a tool like Strength Finder, the networking, mentorship, coaching thing where ask around, see if it's right, and then communicating to get it.

Those are three of my baselines for a lot of leadership. Situational awareness, self-awareness, communication. What if you're wrong? But what if you come up with a vision that you're like, okay, I'll try this, and then it doesn't feel like a fit.

Georgi Enthoven: Yeah. Well, there's different ways. I'm sure you have done a lot of podcasts on how you would know if it's not a fit. But one of the ways that on the value side is you can feel it when there's misalignment. You don't wanna go to work. You're feeling agitated, anxious, like, you know, when you're feeling misaligned.

And if you're ignoring that for too long, eventually you have a health issue that something shuts down. So I, I do believe on the value side is if you focus on what's happening in your body, you will understand when you are misaligned. But sometimes it's also realizing that you can bring to the table the piece that is missing.

So it doesn't mean that you have to change jobs, it just means that you may need to find your allies or who to take initiative with that can get behind something or a piece that is missing. 'cause I find often people are when they run into a complication at work or feeling misaligned, their first reaction is to just go the other direction.

And I, without really, again, doing the research and understanding what is behind that misalignment and what you, what are the options, what you could do about it, you may very well find you're in the same situation again. 

Russel Lolacher: And might, you might even be close. You might be just, it might be just a slight tweak because a lot of people, to your point, will go back to, oh, I gotta start all over. Oh, I'm a failure. I did a horrible job trying to align. No, it's new information.

You've learned something about yourself. This is a great opportunity to tweak and readjust for that vision statement. It's those that I think beat themselves up a bit too harshly that I think might have to rethink it.

Georgi Enthoven: Yeah, and actually something that comes to mind also is when it comes to values, I really have seen that it's important for teams to have a similar value system just like it is in a family to keep together and close. It's really important to have different perspectives. So that is a big piece about alignment, that it's okay if the perspectives are different.

It's not okay if you are fundamentally different or on opposing values and making space for

Understanding different perspectives will allow you to reach your customer better, work better as a team, have more empathy for each other, and the people you serve.