Self-Leadership Profile

Describe your tendencies on well-researched scales, find where each one helps you and where it trips you up, and choose one or two concrete strategies for steering your own behavior, motivation and thinking.

Strong research: self-leadership strategies relate to performance, self-efficacy and job attitudes in a meta-analysis (Harari, Williams, Castro & Brant, 2021), in the Neck and Manz tradition (Neck, Houghton & Manz, 2024). The profile rests on the Big Five (Goldberg, 1990), locus of control (Rotter, 1966) and Schwartz's values (Schwartz, 1992), all strong. Matching a strategy to your profile is judgment, not research.

Use it when:

• You keep running into the same pattern (perfectionism, avoiding conflict, taking on too much) and want to steer it instead of just naming it.
• You are stepping into a role with more autonomy, such as leading people or running your own business, and nobody will manage your habits for you.
• You have test results or feedback about your personality and want to turn them into something you do.

Skip it when:

• You want a reliable picture of how others see you: start with 1.3 Feedback & Psychometric Summary.
• Your question is what you care about and what career fits it: use 1.1 Values & Motivators Worksheet.

This page joins two research lines that are usually kept apart, and both stand on strong ground. The profile half rests on mature science: the five factor structure of personality, found across instruments and observers (Goldberg, 1990; McCrae & Costa, 1987), the general expectation that outcomes do or do not follow from your own actions (Rotter, 1966), and the structure of basic values across cultures (Schwartz, 1992). The self-leadership half adds what makes a description useful: self-knowledge does nothing until you turn it into deliberate ways of influencing your own behavior, motivation and thinking (Manz, 1986). A profile describes tendencies; naming them neither excuses you nor changes them.

One honest limit: the research supports the classes of strategy in general, while matching a particular strategy to a particular profile is judgment. So the page runs one way: describe, find the risks, then pick only one strategy per class aimed at those risks, and end with one change someone else can notice.

Rate each trait 1 to 5 (5 strongly describes you). For each, write one situation where it helps you and one where it backfires. A single self-rating is a rough start; for a reliable profile, use a validated inventory such as the BFI-2 (Soto & John, 2017).

Strong answer: "Conscientiousness 5. Helps: my plans hold and people trust my deadlines. Backfires: when the plan changes mid-quarter I defend it too long, and I polish reports nobody reads closely." (Illustrative.)

Illustrative example: the role, the company and all ratings are made up.

An operations manager at a municipally owned energy company in Sweden, leading three team leads, fills in the profile before her first year review.

Section 1: Openness 4 (helps: sees improvements; backfires: starts new projects before old ones close). Conscientiousness 5 (helps: reliable plans; backfires: rigid when plans change). Extraversion 3. Agreeableness 3 (helps: challenges directly; backfires: blunt in written feedback). Neuroticism 3.

Section 2: strongly internal. She took the blame for a delay caused by a grid operator's permit and worked two weekends instead of escalating.

Section 3: integrity, excellence, autonomy. Excellence and autonomy collide: she rewrites team leads' reports instead of coaching them.

Section 4: behavior: count rewrites each week. Natural reward: put the improvement work she enjoys on Tuesday mornings. Thought: answer "nobody else will fix it" with "what does good enough cost here?"

Section 5: before written feedback, open with what she knows about the person's situation. Her team leads tell her monthly. Review in March.