Week 1 Day 7: The First Assignment -- Write Down Who You Actually Are

This is not a performance review. It is a mirror. Write one page that covers: what gives you energy at work, what drains you, how you communicate when you are at your best, how you behave when you are stressed, and where you know you need people who are stronger than you. Do not write who you wish you were. Write who you actually are. This document is for you first and your team later.

Here is a template to get started. Take thirty minutes and write honest answers to these questions. What are my two Working Genius areas? What are my two frustration areas? When I am stressed, what behavior does my team see? (Ask them if you do not know.) What type of work do I avoid or procrastinate on? What feedback have I received more than once that I have not fully accepted? What does my team need from me that I am not naturally good at providing? Once you have this written down, you have the foundation for everything else in this course. We will come back to this document in Week 13 when we build your Leadership Operating Manual. For now, just get honest with yourself on paper. The act of writing it makes it real in a way that thinking about it never does.

The practice of written self-assessment has strong empirical support. Research from the Harvard Business Review found that leaders who maintain a written leadership philosophy and update it regularly score significantly higher on 360-degree feedback instruments than those who do not. The mechanism appears to be twofold: the act of writing forces specificity that mental reflection avoids, and the written document creates accountability -- it is harder to ignore a gap when you have documented it in your own words. This exercise is adapted from what Lencioni calls the 'Leadership Operating Manual' -- a living document that codifies how you work so your team does not have to guess. We will build the full version later. This week, the goal is simply to start telling the truth on paper.