The UK Covid Enquiry is a serious matter, but this week it has been grabbing the headlines with some fun facts. It turns out that the former Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, thought you could get rid of the virus by blowing air from a hairdryer up your nose. Meanwhile, his Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, said if the NHS was overwhelmed, he’d be able to take on the life and death decisions normally made by doctors.

Here you’ve got two people clearly believing they are brilliant at everything. They can come up with science-beating antiviral measures or take clinical decisions without a single moment of medical training. You just have to laugh at their lack of self-awareness and their belief that they have no limitations.

The day after I read about this, I was listening to the Breakfast Show on Smooth Radio. Yes, I know how to live. The presenter, Jenny Falconer, was asking listeners to phone in with their own limitations and weaknesses. She, herself, admitted that she was no good at cooking. Many of her listeners were also self-aware, calling in with their various weaknesses and limitations. The point being made was that most people know their own limitations, and that it is a shame that our leaders do not appear to do so.

Later that day, I was at the latest in the series of Buckingham Business Talks, where external experts come along to the Business School to discuss key concepts with our students. This week, the meeting was focused on leadership in a crisis. One speaker was a GP and the leader of his 150-person practice. A student asked him a question about the skills needed as a leader and the doctor’s response surprised the student a little. The GP said that it was really important to understand your weaknesses and to be honest about them.

This was picked up by the other members of the panel, who agreed that good leaders know their strengths and their own limitations. Plus, they are honest with the teams they lead about those weaknesses. The concept of the vulnerable leader is not new. But it is gaining interest these days as more research shows the value of admitting to errors or weaknesses. Last year, Harvard Business Review, pointed out that leaders cannot expect their teams to be honest and understand their limitations if the leaders themselves do not do the same.

One myth about leadership is that great leaders show no weakness. I imagine a certain Mr Putin has read those out-dated management textbooks from a hundred years ago. Indeed, the biggest weakness in a leader is pretending you have no weaknesses. That just shows how insecure that individual really is.

Knowing your own limitations is vital to leadership and to everyday management. After all, Achilles died because he did not know that his only weakness was his heel. Like some of our politicians, his sense of invulnerability was his downfall.

Yet, I suspect that, like me, you have met people who have a perceived sense of self-limitation, which is not true. Students tell me all the time that they “cannot” do something, which later proves to be not the case. I’ve met dozens of businesspeople who say they are “unable” to do certain things. The biggest example is always “I am no good with numbers”. It’s a self-limiting belief in most cases, not an actual weakness.

Knowing your weaknesses is important in leadership. But knowing the difference between real limitations and perceived ones is vital. So, how can you tell the difference? The answer is by defining boundaries and then pushing against them.

For example, your perceived limitation might be not understanding numbers in business as much as you would like. That could be a self-imposed barrier and not a real weakness. The answer is to try something on the other side of that barrier, to challenge yourself. You may find that your perceived weakness was true. But equally you could find that you can do the things you thought you could not. True leaders do this repeatedly. They can be honest about their real weaknesses because they have tested the boundaries to check that their limitations are real and not a self-imposed perception. Just don’t do it with the lives of other people, as our politicians seem to have done.