Self-assessment template for managers: 30 questions

There's a reason most self-assessment templates produce useless answers. They ask you to evaluate yourself in abstractions — "how would you rate your leadership skills?" or "what are your strengths?" — and the only honest answer to most of those questions is "it depends on the moment." This template skips the abstractions. Thirty questions, organized around the five things you actually do as a manager: decisions, communication, delegation, observation, and avoidance.

Why generic templates fail

Most self-assessment forms come from HR, and they're built for HR's purposes — comparing employees, generating documentation, populating performance review software. They're not built to help you actually see yourself. The questions are intentionally vague so they can apply to anyone in any role. The trade-off: vague questions get vague answers, and vague answers don't surface anything you didn't already know.

There's also a subtler problem. When the questions ask about traits ("are you a good listener?") instead of behaviors ("when did you cut someone off this week?"), they invite you to perform rather than report. You answer how you wish you were, or how you fear you are. You don't answer what you actually did, because the question wasn't asking about what you did.

The questions below are different. They're about specific moments — usually from the last three months. They ask what you observed about your own behavior, not what you think about yourself in general. You'll notice some of them are uncomfortably specific. That's the point.

How to use this template

Block 60-90 minutes. Get away from a screen if you can — pen and paper actually works better for this. Don't try to answer all 30 in one sitting; you'll start phoning it in around question 12. Aim for 8-12 in one session, finish the rest within a week.

For each question:

• Pick a specific moment, not a pattern. "I'm good at delegating" is not an answer. "Last week I didn't delegate the Q3 forecast to Maria even though she wanted it" is.
• Write the answer down. Not for HR, not for your team — for you to re-read in three months and see what's changed.
• Skip questions that don't apply — but only after sitting with them for 30 seconds. The questions that feel inapplicable are sometimes the ones with the answer you don't want to write.
• Don't fix yet. A common reflex is to write an answer, then immediately write what you'll do about it. Don't. The fixing comes later. Right now, the work is just to see clearly.
• Save your answers. This template's full value comes from comparing past answers to future answers. The deltas are where growth shows up.

If 30 questions feels like overkill for a first pass, the five-question Mirror Test is a lighter baseline you can use first.

The 30 questions

What you decided

Decisions are the easiest manager behaviors to audit because they happen at specific moments and have visible outcomes. These six questions trace the shape of your decision-making over the last quarter.

1. What's the most important decision you made in the last three months that you're still proud of?
2. What's a decision you made too fast — and what would you do differently if you could rewind?
3. What's a decision you delayed past the point where it would still help?
4. What's a recurring decision you keep making the same way? Should you?
5. When did you make a decision and not communicate the reasoning behind it?
6. What's a decision your team is still re-litigating because they never really accepted it?

What you said

Communication failures are the most under-noticed self-assessment area, because the speaker rarely remembers the moment the way the listener does. These questions probe the gap.

1. What's something true you should have said in a meeting this quarter but didn't?
2. What's a phrase you keep using that might not land the way you mean it?
3. When did you give an answer that was technically correct but unhelpful?
4. What's a difficult feedback conversation you've been postponing — for how long now?
5. When did you talk too much in a meeting instead of letting silence work?
6. What did you promise out loud that hasn't happened?

What you delegated

Delegation is where most managers' self-image diverges most sharply from reality. Almost everyone thinks they delegate well; almost no one does. These questions map the gap — and McKinsey's research on the inner life of leaders consistently surfaces the same pattern: senior leaders' self-assessment of how they distribute work rarely matches what their teams report.

1. What's something you're still doing yourself that someone on your team could do — maybe better?
2. What's something you delegated and then secretly redid because it wasn't done your way?
3. Who on your team is underused, and why are you holding back from giving them more?
4. What did you delegate badly — without context, scope, or follow-up — and how did it land?
5. What are you afraid would happen if you let go of one specific thing right now?
6. What's an area where your team is more capable than you give them credit for?

What you noticed

Half of management is paying attention. These questions ask whether you've actually been paying attention — or whether you've been confusing "things seem fine" with "I haven't really checked."

1. What's the team's mood been like in the last 30 days — and what shifted, if anything?
2. What conflict between two team members are you choosing not to mediate?
3. Who hasn't said much in your meetings lately? Do you know why?
4. What's a complaint your team has voiced more than once that you haven't addressed?
5. Whose work on your team do you not actually understand well enough?
6. What's a pattern in your 1:1s that's started to surprise you?

What you avoided

These are the hardest questions in the template. The point isn't to make you feel bad about avoidance — most management requires it — but to surface the cost of what you've been postponing.

1. What feedback have you been avoiding hearing?
2. What conversation have you been avoiding having?
3. What learning are you avoiding because it would invalidate something you've publicly said?
4. What's a skill you've been "going to develop" for over a year — what's actually stopping you?
5. What's an honest assessment of your performance that doesn't match how you'd describe it externally?
6. What would the version of you 12 months from now wish you had started doing today?

Common mistakes when working through it

A few patterns derail this exercise even when people sit down with the right intention.

Answering the easy ones and skipping the hard ones. The hard ones contain the actual signal. If you find yourself drafting fluffy answers to What you avoided, that's the section you most need to come back to.

Going abstract. "I should be more patient" is not an answer to any of these questions. "On Tuesday in the leadership review, I cut Marco off when he was about to push back on the timeline because I wanted the meeting to end" is. Specifics or it didn't happen.

Treating it as one-and-done. This template is designed to be re-run quarterly. The first time gives you a baseline — useful but limited. The second time, three months later, gives you the actual signal: what changed, what didn't, what you noticed differently the second time around. The work is in the comparison, not the first pass.

Sharing it before you're ready. Some managers, after writing honest answers, want to take the document straight to their team or their manager. Don't. The honesty of these answers depends on knowing nobody else will read them. Run a few rounds privately first. Once you've built the habit of writing real answers, you'll know which sections are worth sharing and which aren't.

What to do next

Pick one section of six questions. Block 60 minutes. Write specific answers — names, dates, moments you remember in detail. Don't share them. Save them somewhere you'll find them in three months.

In three months, run the same six questions again. The differences are where the work shows up — or doesn't. Either way, you'll know what kind of manager you actually are, not just what kind you think you should be. From there, peer feedback becomes a sharper tool, because you have a baseline to test it against. (More on that in How to ask for honest feedback at work.)

If you want to run these 30 questions as a structured Self-360 — with quarterly reminders to re-run, side-by-side comparison of your answers across rounds, and the ability to send the same templates to peers afterward to see how their view of you compares to your own — that's what Mirorly's Self-360 templates handle. The point isn't the template, though. The point is doing the baseline at all. Pick six questions. Start there.