750: Six Questions Every Leader Should Ask Themselves, with Margaret Andrews
Coaching for Leaders
Dave Stachowiak
4.8 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 22 September 2025
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Margaret Andrews is a seasoned executive, academic leader, speaker, and instructor. Her course MYLO (Manage Yourself to Lead Others) has become the most popular professional development program at Harvard. She is the author of Manage Yourself to Lead Others: Why Great Leadership Begins with Self-Understanding (Amazon, Bookshop)*.
Virtually every book, course, and program on leadership begins with self-understanding. That’s no accident; it’s because managing ourselves helps us lead others more effectively. In this episode, Margaret and I explore the six key questions that will help you manage yourself better.
Key Points
When people are asked to describe the attributes of their best bosses, 85% of the responses highlight interpersonal skills.
Our differences are our features, not our flaws. Knowing yourself well helps you lead others better.
Six Questions for Self-Understanding:
Who, and whose thinking, has shaped you as an individual?
What situations and events have helped shape your perspective?
What does success look like for you?
What are your core values, and how have these values changed throughout your life?
To what extent are you aware of—and allow yourself to feel—your emotions?
What feedback have you received over the years about how your actions and behaviors impact others?
Resources Mentioned
Manage Yourself to Lead Others: Why Great Leadership Begins with Self-Understanding by Margaret Andrews (Amazon, Bookshop)*
Interview Notes
Download my interview notes in PDF format (free membership required).
Related Episodes
Enhance Your Self-Awareness, with Daniel Goleman (episode 353)
The Way to Be More Self-Aware, with Tasha Eurich (episode 442)
Discover Who You Are, with Hortense le Gentil (episode 459)
Discover More
Activate your free membership for full access to the entire library of interviews since 2011, searchable by topic. To accelerate your learning, uncover more inside Coaching for Leaders Plus.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Virtually every book, course, and program on leadership begins with self-understanding. |
| 0:07.7 | That's no accident. |
| 0:09.1 | It's because managing ourselves helps us lead others more effectively. |
| 0:13.9 | In this episode, the six key questions that will help you manage yourself better. |
| 0:19.8 | This is Coaching for Leaders, Episode 750. |
| 0:23.8 | Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential. |
| 0:32.2 | Greetings to you from Orange County, California. |
| 0:35.6 | This is Coaching for Leaders, and I'm your host, Dave Stahoviac. |
| 0:40.6 | Leaders aren't born. They're made. And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom |
| 0:46.3 | through insightful conversations. You've heard me say it before on the podcast. Leadership isn't |
| 0:53.2 | about us, but it does start with us. Being able to |
| 0:56.6 | lead ourselves well, to manage ourselves well is so important if we are going to show up |
| 1:03.2 | effectively to support others in our organization and to help our teams and organizations |
| 1:09.5 | to be successful. Today, a look at how we can do a better job at managing ourselves through a number of key questions that will help us to open the doors to do it better. I'm so pleased to welcome Margaret Andrews. She is a seasoned executive, academic leader, speaker, and instructor. Her course, Milo, Manage |
| 1:29.6 | Yourself to Lead Others, has become the most popular professional development program at Harvard. |
| 1:35.7 | She is the author of Manage Yourself to Lead Others, why great leadership begins with self-understanding. |
| 1:43.6 | Margaret, what a joy to know you. I'm so glad you're |
| 1:46.1 | here. Thank you. It's wonderful to be here. I loved reading this book and thinking about how, |
| 1:55.3 | one, I can get better at understanding myself, of course, and also thinking of how we can better do this for |
| 2:03.0 | ourselves and leading teams. And I was struck by a exercise that I know you have done many |
| 2:10.3 | times over the years. You talk about it in the book, the best boss exercise. Could you share |
| 2:16.3 | what that exercise is and what people tend to discover when they |
... |
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