Anybody home? My 10 steps to becoming self-aware as a leader.

“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom” – Aristotle

I hold several group conversations with people at all levels every week. I enjoy the thoughtful questions they ask me, and I am inspired by their curiosity and wish to be future-ready. Recently, a clear theme is emerging about how to know our strengths and weaknesses and then knowing that, what should we do.

So, I thought I would share my take on becoming self-aware as a leader and the ten steps I can recommend if this is the path you wish to take. Self-awareness is where the leaders journey begins, it is like opening the door to invite multiple changes of the self, inside. 

A recent study of around 4,000 people by the Hay Group showed that only 19% of women and 4% of men were self-aware. Another study revealed that the more you advance in your career, the less self-aware you become. Could it be that you start believing your own press and that you simply do not have the time to reflect or is it that your big ugly ego is taking over uninvited? Whichever way you look at it, self-awareness is the essential yet often missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle that is exemplary leadership.

Self-awareness is about understanding your needs, desires, motivation, habits, and everything else that makes you the unique individual that you are. It is also the ability to recognise one’s own emotions and the situations that arouse these emotions.

Self-awareness is an integral aspect of emotional intelligence and key to success. It guides you towards opportunities that best fit your skillset, preferences and orientations. Being self-aware helps you to identify situations and people that trigger a reaction within you and enables you to anticipate and consciously manage your response. 

Here are my 10 steps for cultivating self -awareness:

1.      Do you know who you are?

Be your authentic self: Great leaders know themselves, are true to themselves and are authentic. When you allow yourself to be authentic, you do not need to seek the approval of others or focus on being popular. People naturally gravitate towards those who are genuinely authentic. You are who you are as a person, your upbringing, environment and education add to you becoming the unique “you”. You cannot be what you are not. It is futile to “copy” someone else as you will end up becoming a “poor” replica. So, the first step to self-awareness is to know who you are. what your values and ethics are and how far you will go before your values are compromised.

2.      How do others see you?  

Interaction with others: The second part of being self-aware is understanding how others perceive you and respond to you. When you interact with others, there is often a disparity between intent and impact. You can set out to do things with the best of intentions, but the impact of your actions can be incredibly negative. In the diverse world in which we operate, you will need to consider what other people’s frames of reference are, for example, cultural or family constructs. Understanding and appreciating others, is a key element of how interactions are framed.

3.     What do you care about?

Personal Values: As a leader, one is happiest when the game is played within the rules of one’s values. One way to identify your values is to notice what triggers annoyance. If you find that you are consistently upset when you see injustice happening, it could signal that you consider fairness as a significant value.  Similarly, review situations that bring you immense joy and reflect on these to discover you other values. List your top five values, reflect on and refine them as needed. Figure out how you will operate within these values. If a value is non-negotiable for you, articulate that to avoid ambiguity. When you have  values that you wish to instil in a team, then raise these values, reinforce these values and demonstrate them consistently.  For example, I am very clear with my team, that Integrity is a non-negotiable value for everyone in my team.

4.      What do you bring to the table?

Skills and knowledge: Knowledge is acquired through education and life experience but we may not call upon everything that we know. For example, I studied science, however today, I manage a multi-million-dollar budget and a diverse organisation, spread across multiple countries. So, whilst I have knowledge of science, I am not directly leveraging it. When I started my career in the corporate world, I had no first-hand knowledge of working in a corporate environment. Skills can be improved over time with practice. Going back to my example, over a period of 19 years in the corporate world, I acquired skills to create and execute strategies and learned the art of leadership. As we live in a world of agile learning, knowledge can be acquired. Yogi Berra once said, “the future ain’t what it used to be”. The winds of change have been shifting now more than ever before. It is imperative that we understand, utilise and adapt our knowledge and skills to ensure we no longer become “the learned ….in a world that no longer exists”.

5.    What are others saying about you?

Ask for feedback: In addition to informally and periodically asking friends and family for feedback, use formal processes and mechanisms at your workplace. By turning to your colleagues for thoughts on how they experience your leadership style, you can identify discrepancies in how you perceive yourself and how they perceive you and accordingly, chart a self-improvement plan. Invite constructive, formal feedback on specific dimensions that allow better insights into our own strengths and weaknesses. The keys to effective formal feedback are to a) have a process, and b) have an effective manager. After taking feedback, make a note of those things that are important to you but also note any strengths, weaknesses or blind spots that emerge (some of these may be a surprise). Building self-awareness is a life-long effort. It never finishes.

6.      What are you thinking?

Give yourself “Me time”: Looking at things afresh, you will see things in a different light and after a while you get to see the whole picture rather than just a piece of the puzzle. When you reflect, you can begin to clearly see what’s working and what is not. This reflection helps you make better decisions. So how do you reflect? You must distance yourself from the issue and look it without bias and you will be able find that you see it differently. The technique is particularly important when you try to form a broad view of something or gain perspective on a choice, however specific it may be. Many people find that maintaining a daily journal can be extremely rewarding. Try to commit to 15 minutes of daily self-reflection as you maintain a log of what worked well, what didn’t, what you are proud of having achieved and what you’d like to improve. This “me time” is invaluable and should be non-negotiable.

7.      What are the tests saying about you?

Take a personality or psychometric test: The second step to self-awareness is knowing your personality type. What are you really like? We often describe people as introverts, extroverts or ambiverts. Which are you? There are no right or wrong answers to these tests. Your answers will only point you to a set of characteristics that describes you in relation to people around you. They will provide insight into who you are and what drives you. An exercise such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator assessment can help throw light on how others might perceive you.

8.      What are our your weaknesses?

It is fine to have weaknesses: We often spend time trying to cover up our weaknesses. We try hard to address them at the expense of our strengths. For example, you are a great driver but a poor cyclist because cycling does not come naturally to you. Your boss wants you to improve your cycling, so over the next year you practise hard every day. However, because you are not a natural cyclist, after one year, you become an average cyclist. Since you have been focusing on cycling and not on driving, which was your original strength, you become an average driver due to lack of practice and only an average cyclist. I am of the view that we need to focus primarily on fine-tuning our strengths. We can improve our weaknesses but never at the expense of our strengths. As I mentioned in step 1, you are who you are as person and some things are not second nature to you. That’s ok. What is important is knowing what they are.

9.      Why do you exist?

Understanding your purpose: Many of us drift along, letting our careers and life just happen. As we get older, we tend to go through a period of self-reflection and question what we are here to do. You may start feeling increasingly regretful and self-conscious and may feel a strong urge to live with more purpose without knowing what it is. It is almost like being stuck in an endless traffic jam just trying to get from point A to point B. This is a normal human phenomenon as we strive for constant happiness and success. We need a blueprint to guide our work, a space to carry out our work and the necessary tools to help us accomplish that work. So, discovering your purpose is key to forming a clearer picture of your desired reality. Without a purpose it can become quite difficult to complete your goals. While creating your purpose, ask yourself if you are living the life you want or are you trying to gain the approval of others? Do you understand and cherish your values? Are these values your own or influenced by others? Rather than spending energy on smaller battles today, focus instead on doing work which aligns to your values and your long-term goals.

10. Meditation: Meditation is a practice where an individual allows his/her mind to focus on an object, thought or activity to train attention and awareness, and achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm state. Bringing meditation into your daily life will not only improve your self-awareness but also your overall health and well-being. Self-awareness is more about asking “what” and not “why”. What sets me off?  What did I do in this situation and how can I do it better? If you ask “why”, you end up cross-examining yourself in a harsh way and are metaphorically picking up a hammer and hitting yourself on the head. Self-awareness should lead you to solutions, not self-criticism. Approach it positively. If you are always beating yourself up, you are wasting your time and energy and hurting your own self-confidence, making it even harder to achieve what you want. Knowing yourself is critical to be an effective leader. Building self-awareness and understanding your tendencies and motivational drivers can enable you to unlock your inner potential and that of your team.

 “Self-awareness is about developing your capacity to know how you come across to others, to have undistorted visibility into your own strengths and weaknesses, and to be able to gauge the emotions you’re personally experiencing,” says Harvard Business School Professor Joshua Margolis. In my view self-awareness is the biggest tool in the armoury of a leader today.