Let’s do the opposite of a performance review. A performance review is done annually with your boss where you highlight all of your accomplishments and minimize (but provide lessons learned) of any shortcomings. Instead, you’re going to take an honest and confidential look to assess your leadership skills and abilities using the SWOT analysis tool.
A SWOT analysis, standing strengths, weakness, opportunities, and threats, is an assessment tool used in business. This analysis tool is used to assess high-level strategic planning to help organizations identify what they are doing well and where they can improve. Using the spirit of this SWOT analysis – you are going to assess your own leadership skills and abilities.
Most importantly: This will not be a performance review.
Instead you will be taking the time to be honest and do a check-in with yourself on the quality of your work, motivations, and future self. How often have you been able to take the time to really plan how to address issues and give yourself some well needed praise for what you are doing amazing at?
Bellow is a FREE specially designed SWOT analysis tool for you to assess your own leadership skills and abilities. Read below for how to complete it and questions to ask yourself to guide you through your SWOT analysis. This will provide you with the opportunity to identify what you are confident with, and what your leadership insecurities are so that you can work on them.
Often, there are so many different courses available to leadership to improve and evolve as a Manager that you don’t know where to start. This SWOT analysis will help you assess where your exact needs are.
You will also identify what your strengths are. Strengths that you could highlight in your next project, or support others in developing through mentorship. These applications of your strengths could definitely be brought up in your next actual performance review.
What are the Classic Elements of a SWOT Analysis?
Strengths
In the business world, strengths focus on what your company does well and does well compared to competitors. It assesses the strength of the collective skills and abilities of the workforce and and intellectual property.
Weaknesses
In a traditional SWOT analysis, weaknesses are shortcomings in your company such as lacking resources or things your competitors perform better than you.
Opportunities
Opportunities for a business SWOT refers to the current leads, future projects that are about to launch, or discovering an under-served market that you can cater to. All of these are considered opportunities.
Threats
In a traditional SWOT analysis, threats are anything that poses a risk to either your company itself or its likelihood of success or growth. This could be financial risks, raising competitors, or changing customer needs.
How do you re-purpose the classic SWOT analysis to assess your leadership skills and abilities?
You do not need to answer each and every question below. There will be some that stick out more to you because they either feel more relevant or there is a little light bulb that goes off. These are the most important ones to answer for each category, because there is a reason that you felt a connection to a particular question.
Using the template, read over the questions in each category. You do not have to answer each question individually, these are just prompts to get you thinking about your own SWOT.
What are the elements of a SWOT Analysis for your own leadership strengths and abilities?
Strengths
For your own SWOT analysis, you will be asking yourself the following questions to guide you in assessing what your true strengths are:
- What do customers compliment you on?
- What do your coworkers depend on you for?
- What is the most surprising praise you received this year?
- What tasks to you think you perform strongly at?
- What do you bring to your role that is unique to you?
- Do you find yourself seeking out collaborations with others within your department or company?
- Do your subordinates come to you with positive ideas for change because they believe you will act on them?
Weaknesses
For your personal SWOT analysis, use the below questions to guide the types of questions that you should be asking yourself. Be honest with yourself, your boss is not going to see what you wrote!
- Are there any tasks you find yourself avoiding?
- Have you passed on any opportunities to challenge yourself because the fallout if you failed would be public?
- Do you have a high turnover in your department?
- Do you find yourself getting so caught up on small details that the big things do not get done?
- Do you have issues delegating tasks to your staff?
- How often do you get frustrated with events that are occurring around you?
- When was the last time that you took a course?
- Could you do better at delegating tasks?
- Could you do better at organizing your desk or calendar?
- Do people need to clarify what you said in an email often? Do they ask follow up questions to expand on instructions you have provided? Could you expand on instructions for greater clarity?
Opportunities
For your own SWOT analysis, you are going to reflect on where you outperform your peers. The direction that your company is going and how to prepare for this transition. Below are some questions to ask yourself so that you are able to strategically prepare for your future.
- What qualities do you admire in your peers?
- What qualities do you admire in your boss?
- Are there any topics that you find yourself curious about?
- Is there a project coming up that you are passionate about?
- Is there a conference coming up where you could network and learn some new industry best practices?
- Is there someone at your organization that you could mentor?
- Is there a potential opening in the future that would be a promotion? How could you get ready to be the best candidate for that position?
- How often is your office door open? Could you promote an increasingly door open policy to encourage your team to come in and chat with you and share ideas?
Threats
Zero in on your own personal threats in a SWOT analysis of yourself. Ask yourself these questions to future-proof yourself.
- Is there anyone that you feel might be undermining you in your role? Read more here on how to heal with employees who undermine your authority
- Do you have a current skill that may start to be obsolete due to a change in customer needs? Change in technology?
- Do you find yourself unsure of why you are successful in your role? Are you confident in what aspects you bring to your role?
- Do you find yourself getting burned out in your current role? Here are some tips for managing your own burnout while supporting your team.
- Do you have any financial barriers to taking additional courses?
- Is there any organizational restructuring in the horizon?
- Is there something in your personal life that could be distracting you at work or have the appearance of distracting you at work? Can it be taken care of? How could you ensure it does not impact your work quality?
- Do you feel bored in your current role? Read more on how to manage a mid career crisis and refocus your goals here.
- Is your workload so high that priority tasks cannot get the attention required for a quality finished product?
What are the final steps to this personal SWOT analysis?
Asked yourself some hard questions? Good. I hope that you found a few questions that caused you to pause and really think about what you could to improve yourself and push forward to the next level.
You will also see that there is a follow up questions or next steps at the end of each SWOT section on the download template. They are:
- Strengths: I plan to use these to support staff by
- Weaknesses: I plan on improving these by
- Opportunities: I plan on taking advantage of these by
- Threats: I plan on preparing for these threats by
Answer each of these questions to develop an action plan. Solidify each plan so that when you do have an official performance review, you are ready to share on a completely different template how great you are, how you have improved yourself, and how to leverage opportunities.