Know Thyself!

Sun Zi (or Sun Tzu) says:

Know your enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles, you will never be defeated. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are sure to be defeated in every battle.

Although I do not usually like to characterize business as warfare, the ideas that can be gleaned from Sun Zi's ancient military handbook have very good applications to today's business world.

In the above classic passage, the application is quite obvious. In business, it is imperative that one is aware of not just the environment in which business is conducted, but who exactly the players are, their strengths and weaknesses, and most importantly of all, one's own strengths and weaknesses.

Towards that end, periodic SWOT analyses are useful. Within a team, personality profiles and team profiles are also useful. Recently, I found this tool on the web and would like to commend it to you. It is called Kingdomality, and is based on a book that describes personality profiles and uses the imagery of a medieval kingdom to describes how different personality types behave and act within the context of a group. I haven't read the book yet, but I have completed an assessment for myself, and it rates me as a Prime Minister. It doesn't really mean that I am supposed to be CEO or the Top Honcho, but just that my personality style is one that uses the style and strategies of a Medieval Prime Minister. I can see that coming across in the way I go about my work. (In previous attempts, I have come out as a Discoverer and Black Knight as well. That is probably because I have styles and preferences that fall into those categories too).

The downfall of such exercises is that one then lets the profiles dictate how one acts, behaves or feels, but the upshot of having completed profiles like these is that one gets to be more aware of one's inner strengths and cultivate them or seek to accentuate them in work and relationships. A little like finding the right shape to fit oneself into.

What is your profile?

I can imagine an entire team within an organization completing this profile and then coming together and discussing their own strengths, weaknesses and uniqueness. Knowing each other in a deeper way can often help with teamwork, cooperation, leverage and collaboration.

What's your team profile? Who do you have on your team? How are you leveraging each other in order to meet your team's goals and objectives?