Self-awareness can seem squishy or even a little woo woo. But there’s plenty of research that points to the benefits of self-awareness and its importance for leadership effectiveness.
Simply put, self-awareness is the degree of similarity between how you see yourself and how others see you. Having congruence between these two perspectives allows you to build deeper trust, improves communication and clarity, can align you and your team for better decisions, and helps manage your stress levels.
The Johari Window is a power framework for visualizing this inner and outer congruence.
The OPEN quadrant (where you have inner and outer congruence) represents the area where your leadership is most effective. It can increase or decrease depending on the extent of feedback you’re getting from others, what you’re willing to reveal about yourself, and the extent you’re willing to reflect on and integrate lessons learned.
At a deeper level, self-awareness is your ability to observe your own patterns: thoughts, feelings, behaviors, beliefs, values, assumptions as well as how others perceive you – and then be able to adjust those in service of whatever mission might be guiding you. (For a fuller explanation of this and how coaches can help, read here.)
So that’s a bit about what self-awareness is. Why it’s important is a different story.
Lessons from Complexity
The human interactions in an organization (let’s just call it culture) – be it with teams, colleagues, with customers, vendors, team meetings, 1:1s and even water cooler chatter– are all part of a complex system. A system is complex if it has many interacting parts that produce an order that’s much more sophisticated than what you’d guess from looking at any of the individual parts themselves – a system in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A few of the characteristics of these systems include, emergence, non-linearity, interdependence, feedback, dynamism, and decentralization. Traffic, cities, schools of fish, the brain, the economy, ant colonies, the weather, the internet and of course organizations are all examples of complex systems.
In the case of organizational culture, individuals can make choices but they are in interdependent relationships, which are loosely governed by implicit and explicit norms. People mutually adapt to each other's moods, styles, and behaviors as well as to new information, structures, and processes. Moreover, this lattice of interactions – while having some coherence and order to it in the macro view – is unpredictable. New patterns are constantly emerging. These same dynamics show up in other complex systems too.
In a flock of starlings (one example of a complex system) a single starling is influenced by (and influences) the behavior of its seven closest neighbors and adapts accordingly. This dance between interdependent individuals within the flock gives rise to the dynamic evolving shapes of the murmuration. The powerful insight here is that a single starling’s movements can impact the entirety of the flock in entirely unpredictable ways even if that starling isn’t aware of the fullness of the murmuration! (See my short story “The Story of a Waking Starling” for a more literary take).
Similarly, an organizational leader influences and is influenced by his or her team. Whether you’re aware of it or not; or whether you like it or not; the reality is that how others experience you has a wide ranging impact on those around you and the broader org culture, all of which ultimately feeds back and influences you in ways you can’t predict. Science fiction author Octavia Butler summed it up best: “all that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you.”
Growing in self-awareness allows you to consciously engage in an evolving conversation with your team for creative ends. Without that awareness, you may influence others in ways you don’t mean to or you may end up sabotaging yourself. Simultaneously, you may succumb to unhealthy or unproductive aspects of culture that need to change. Becoming aware of these interdependent relationships and taking more responsibility for how others experience you (and vice versa) can give you more choice over your own responses and help you to build deeper trust – all of which can better serve your company’s mission.
Practically, here are some common examples I see of self-awareness incongruences (including some of my own), the realizations that go along with them, and a shift that can help untangle the knot.
How do I know where to focus?
In a complex environment, there are so many factors and inputs that your attention can get easily overwhelmed. A few ways to discern growth opportunities for self-awareness may include:
Regularly ask for feedback from others on how they experience you and to what extent that experience aligns with your intentions.
Conduct a 360 degree feedback review to help identify blindspots.
Learn to mindfully self observe, especially your emotional experience. Your emotions can give you useful data that you can use to decide on what’s working and what’s not in the complex system you’re in.
Personality models can help you reflect on your preferences, styles, strengths, tendencies, etc.Take these lightly - YOU are more complex than any model can describe.
Get someone who is willing to tell you the hard truth about yourself with grace. One of the more dangerous knots senior leaders can end up in is insulating themselves from truth . . . the more you grow in influence, the less likely people are to tell you the truth, but that’s when you need it the most.
So why is self-awareness important? It’s important because you are a complex individual who is always changing, and because you belong to a complex place, and because you’re heading somewhere that matters with others.
