Women Meeting the Challenge: A Handbook for Media Leadership
Knowing Your Leadership Potential: A Test

Leadership begins with self-awareness. It is important for you to understand your own personal style and your strengths and weaknesses related to effective leadership. By determining where your strengths lie, building onto those strengths and learning to rely on them, you can showcase your talents in the best light. By focusing on your strengths and using them to help you through challenging situations, you will release a greater productive energy and reduce the stress in your life. Once you understand your strengths, strive to find the outlets that allow you to express your managerial talents and build your confidence.

It can be difficult to determine your leadership strengths independently. Taking the following test can be starting point. Then talk to your colleagues, your supervisors and the staff that report to you. Ask them their perceptions on your strong points. Think about the talents you are using when you are most satisfied with your work. Most likely, this is when you are relying on your strengths.

Test Your Leadership Potential (answer Usually / Sometimes / Rarely)

Striving to answer "Usually" on each of these questions is a worthy goal for any leader, especially for women leaders who sometimes feel that they must compromise more than male leaders. Any questions you answer with sometimes or rarely, should become areas in which you strive to improve. ©InCA Ltd

However, it is also important to not become too comfortable with only the set of skills at which you naturally excel. When your boss is pushing you to stretch your talents, to go beyond your previous limits, view that as a way to tap into undeveloped skills. The further you are stretched, the more you feel your abilities as a leader are being developed.

Sometimes, it is necessary to encourage your bosses to push you and to remind them to nurture your talents. Zintle Filtane of South Africa offers the following advice, "Believe in yourself. Don't be afraid to go into those areas that are seen to be no-go areas for women."

Not everybody is going to endorse your career development goals. Some people are going to try to sabotage you for a variety of reasons. A woman from Tanzania says that the greatest challenge she faces is "the negative attitudes of my male-counterparts. I am the only woman manager and I'm proving too good for their liking."

Janet Zeenat Karim, owner of Now Publications in Malawi, tells of her own experience with this and how she turned it around. "I was given chances and was really stretched from an early stage in my career. But my immediate bosses didn't like this. I got the last laugh though because I resigned, launched my own publication company and started producing a magazine." She explained that "the managing director took my magazine and literally threw it at our chief executive and said, 'We had this talent here, and it's gone and there is nothing we can do about it.'"

Enlisting the very people who seem opposed to your plans can reap positive results. A woman who participated in the CSLI program said, "I saw the potential of the job and I wanted to stretch myself, so I decided to take my boss on board. If I had an idea I took him with me, I made him think that it was part of his initiative. He would get credit, but the next time he would give me a little bit more leeway. Little by little, I got to get as much as I could from the job by taking him along."