Self-awareness in leadership
Organisational psychologist Tasha Eurich describes self-awareness as “the meta-skill of the 21st century”. I wholeheartedly agree and would say that in leadership, it is an absolute non-negotiable.
“A leader who has not taken the time to unpack personal baggage and examine their own life cannot lead clearly. [...] A leader who is unwilling to unmask themselves will often warp and twist the culture of their organisation, unconsciously turning those over whom they have structural power into two-dimensional players in their private little theatres.” Jerry Colonna.
OUCH!
Did you know? 95% of us believe we are self-aware, only 10-15% are. So, on an average day, up to 90% of us are lying to ourselves - about ourselves.
So, if that’s the case and we are blind to our self-awareness, we’re unlikely to go out and seek to grow it. The problem is…
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.” Carl Jung
This blog is my attempt to unpack the kind of self-awareness that I believe helps leaders lead effectively with courage and compassion.
As you read through this, I invite you to pause and reflect on the questions and see what comes up!
Triggers
BetterUp defines a trigger as “a person, place, thing or situation that elicits an intense or unexpected emotional response.”
For example, a person who consciously or unconsciously reminds me of someone or a group of people who scared or upset me in the past, such as a punitive parent or leader or an untrustworthy friend, may trigger me.
Something not going to plan (and having to change the plan), my team members making mistakes, hearing third-party feedback, forgetting to do something, being late for a meeting or missing a deadline may also trigger me.
Triggers are personal and unique to each individual, and all have a backstory. Their purpose is to alert us to a real and potential danger so that we wake up and protect ourselves.
Because of the consequential impacts of triggers on the human psyche, much research has been done on triggers.
Brene Brown’s research tells us that fear or shame is the root of most triggers.
Susan Jeffers’ research tells us that the root of all surface-level fear is the fear of not being able to ‘handle IT’ - whatever IT is… public speaking, standing up for yourself, being alone, changing jobs, interviews, ageing, ill health, loving a loved one, failure, death, etc.
What people, places, things or situations trigger intense emotions for you? What patterns do you see emerging?
Armour
Our armour represents the combination of behaviours, thoughts, feelings and emotions we fall into and experience when triggered.
Some of the most common forms of armour I’ve witnessed in myself and my clients include:
Being a knower and being right - over preparing for a meeting or refusing to consider someone else’s perspective.
Needing to be seen as ‘important’ at work - taking credit for other people’s ideas, overvaluing hierarchy or volunteering for more work, even when you have limited time and are already overwhelmed.
Perfectionism - setting your own impossibly high standards, beating yourself up when you don’t live up to them and limited/no self-compassion.
Being critical and judgemental of self and others - nothing and no one is ever good enough.
Blaming and shaming of self and others.
Being cynical - a belief that however hard you try, things aren’t going to improve any time soon.
Discriminating (excluding others), particularly those who think differently to you - creating a culture of ‘fitting in’ where you surround yourself with people who are ‘like you’, over-listening to those who agree with you, and under-listening to those who think differently.
Controlling (self and others) - through micromanaging, taking over, avoiding risk.
Distractions – being only partially present, keeping ‘busy busy busy’, avoiding reflection time, caught up in the relentlessness of the 'to do' list as a way of feeling valued.
Rescuing others - giving advice when it is not asked for, jumping in and helping rather than empowering.
Ignoring our needs for rest, renewal and recuperation - 'ploughing on' driven by 'so much to do'.
The point about armour is that we put it on unconsciously. We create stories in our rational mind that justify why we feel and behave the way that we do (it’s called ‘cognitive bias’) - in other words, we see things as we are not as they are.
What does this look like in practice? Here are a few examples, where we may not see things as they are:
We view a team member who doesn’t take on board our feedback as disrespectful, lazy or incapable of doing the work to our standards.
We see a boss who doesn’t return our email as rude and inconsiderate.
We think that the driver who cuts us off on the motorway is an idiot.
The knock-on effects are considerable as each person’s armour is another person’s trigger. So, whatever you do as a leader ripples right through the entire organisation before you know it. (See this post for more on this topic).
What does your armour look like? How does your armour impact the people around you?
Stories
Human beings are meaning-making machines. We make sense of the world through the stories we tell ourselves - all products of our unique, individual experiences and perspectives.
For example, we experience cognitive dissonance when:
Something does not align with our world view
We are holding two contradictory or opposing pieces of information
In such circumstances, we do all that we can to resolve it. We either dismiss the information that doesn’t fit our world view or we rationalise why the two things can coexist.
Consider the following situation:
I might see myself as an honest person. Though, if a team member is underperforming, I might avoid having an honest conversation with them.
Having those hard conversations can be difficult. To resolve this contradiction, I may internally justify my actions by telling myself a story that I am avoiding the conversation because I don’t want to upset them - after all they work so hard! Suddenly, I am back in congruence and the world feels right again.
Stories also sit under our triggers - the ones that tell our brains that there is danger and we must react. For example, if I believe that, as a leader, my job is to serve and always be available for my team, I will be triggered by the idea of turning my phone off or going on holiday. Chances are, an even deeper script says something like: “If you’re not needed, you have no worth.”
Most of the stories we tell ourselves are incomplete or inaccurate at best and works of absolute fiction at worst.
Unpacking the stories under our triggers and armour is hard to do alone. But we can try.
Thinking about your triggers and the armour you put on - what assumptions are you making? What beliefs are driving your thoughts and behaviour?
Needs
At the end of the day, we are all striving to meet unmet human needs. Researcher Manfred Max-Neef helpfully classifies the fundamental human needs into nine categories:
Subsistence
Protection
Affection
Understanding
Participation
Recreation (leisure, time to reflect or idleness)
Creation
Identity
Freedom
It can be beneficial and revealing to consider what might be the unmet need sitting underneath our unwanted behaviours and thoughts.
The need for recreation, for example, is at the root of many of the burnout, apathy and disconnection we see across organisations.
And, there’s a reason the term HANGRY came to be…
Thinking about the last time you were triggered, what was the unmet need?
Where do we go from here?
In leadership, it’s not enough to know that we overwork, have high standards, worry about upsetting people, experience imposter thoughts, and have a strong inner critic.
The work of a leader is just as much about what you do as it is about how you do it. And it all starts with self-awareness.
With greater self-awareness, we have more agency and choice over how we show up, where we place our attention (what we prioritise), how we impact those around us, what we hold onto and what we let go of.
Greater self-awareness is one of the most impactful and durable outcomes of coaching.
If this has piqued your curiosity and you want to explore yourself in depth through coaching, send me a message and let’s chat.
If you’re not ready for coaching, you can try this simple tool included in Carol Kauffman and David Noble’s book: Real-Time Leadership.
At any moment during the day, before a meeting, shooting off an email, or interacting with someone, ask yourself five questions.
On a scale of 1-10…
- How calm am I?
- How clear am I?
- How curious am I?
- How courageous am I?
- How compassionate am I?
See what happens as a result of the simple action of stopping and checking in with yourself.