One of the hardest things I do as a leader is terminate employees. Not because I don't understand the business case — I do. But because I carry weight about the human impact, the conversation itself, the aftermath. For a long time, I avoided acknowledging this discomfort. I treated it as a professional deficiency rather than a human reality.
Acknowledging it changed how I handled it. And that's the beginning of what I call Self Truth.
The Honest Question
Self Truth starts with a simple question that most people resist asking: what am I not good at?
Not "what do I find challenging?" or "where could I improve?" — those framings let you off too easily. The more useful question names the gap directly: what are the things that genuinely fall outside my natural competence, and what am I going to do about each of them?
The answer for any given weakness falls into one of three categories:
Retain and Improve
Some weaknesses sit in areas that are central enough to your role that you can't delegate your way out of them. Termination conversations, for me, fall here. It would be possible to route this through HR or have someone else deliver the news — but it wouldn't be right. This is my responsibility.
So I sought mentorship. I worked with people who handled these conversations better than I did, and I learned from watching them. The weakness didn't disappear, but my competence with it grew — and the relationships I built through that process added value I hadn't anticipated.
Delegate Within Your Organisation
Other weaknesses sit in areas where you have people better suited to the task. Social media analytics, for me, is one. I understand the principles, but the granular interpretation of platform data is not where my attention creates the most value. So I delegate it — clearly, with well-defined outcomes — and stay accountable to the results without doing the work myself.
This isn't abdication. It's allocation. You own the outcome; someone else does the work. The distinction matters.
Outsource
Then there are the weaknesses in areas you don't need internally at all. Graphic design, for me, is a clear example. I can articulate what I want; I cannot execute it to the standard required. External resources handle this, scaling up and down with need, without the overhead of permanent capacity.
Simply admitting to your weaknesses makes you stronger — not in spite of the vulnerability, but because of it.
Why This Is a Leadership Strength
The leaders who refuse to acknowledge their limitations end up bottlenecking their own organisations. They hold on to work they should delegate. They resist input from people who could improve their decisions. They model a kind of false competence that their teams learn to perform rather than to question.
The leaders who name their weaknesses clearly — and then address each one deliberately — build organisations where honesty is normal and improvement is structural rather than accidental.
Your weaknesses aren't secrets. The people around you already know most of them. The question is whether you do — and what you're willing to do about it.