Self-awareness is a key driver of successful leadership, benefiting both the individual and the wider organization. Research from the Stanford Graduate School of Business identified it as the most important skill for leaders to develop, while a study by the Korn Ferry Institute found that “leaders who are self-aware are more likely to be high-performing, to meet their business goals, and save on turnover costs.”
What is self-awareness and how can leaders develop it?
Self-awareness is the ability to examine and understand your own emotions and reactions. Mastering self-awareness gives you better situational awareness, enables you to know your strengths and weaknesses, what motivates you, and ensures you evaluate your actions objectively. Self-aware leaders develop skills to ensure they are active listeners, have a drive for continual improvement, have greater empathy, and have high levels of emotional intelligence.
Feedback is central to unlocking the benefits of self-awareness and becoming a good leader. However, honest and open feedback is not often given, and the higher leaders get in an organization the more likely it is to be in short supply. Studies show that as executives become more senior, they become more confident – but are less likely to consider the perspectives of others. Essentially, they over-value their skills and are blind to areas for improvement.
Requesting 360-degree feedback about your performance overcomes these issues. Collecting feedback from a variety of different viewpoints instead of just one (e.g., colleagues, manager/supervisor, direct reports, customers, etc.) provides richer and more balanced insights.
Accepting this feedback, however unexpected or even critical, helps build higher levels of self-awareness, identifies strengths, and areas for development and actions, improves performance, and ensures you become a better leader. Backing this up, research finds that 83% of people with high self-awareness are top performers.
The importance of self-awareness to transformational leadership
Experts identify two key leadership models – transactional and transformational leadership:
– Transactional leadership, where leaders use rewards and their position of power to achieve results
– Transformational leadership, where leaders work with their teams, inspiring them to grow, develop new skills and perform at their best. Transformational leadership is increasingly key in today’s people-oriented world of work.
Self-awareness is a key trait of the transformational leadership style, making it a critical skill to build. Gartner lists developing current and future leadership as one of its top 5 priorities for HR in 2022 and highlights a need to equip mid-level managers to lead with empathy. This is essential in leading transformational change.
Areas to focus on for developing self-awareness
As with every other form of feedback, it is essential to ask the right questions – focusing on these topic areas ensures that the right behaviors are being evaluated in order to develop transformational leadership skills:
- Communicating vision (Do you demonstrate a compelling vision for the future?)
- Fostering innovative thinking (Do you challenge others to think in new ways?)
- Inspirational leadership (Do you inspire others to deliver their best performance?)
- Leading by example (Do you provide a model for others?)
- Support and development (Do you support and show respect for your team and and individual aspirations through individualized consideration?)
- Fostering collaboration (Do you develop a team spirit?)
- Reward and recognition (Do you give encouragement and recognition?)
- Verbatim / open text questions (such as What should you stop doing?/What should you continue doing?)
Interpreting your 360-degree feedback results
It is very typical for the results of a 360-degree feedback exercise to contain some surprises. Sometimes it’s a pleasant one, but equally, it could be an unpleasant surprise which you disagree with.
Try not to see this as negative feedback. It’s common to react emotionally to such results but try to be as objective and self-aware as possible. Almost all people, will find there are differences between their own perception of their leadership capabilities and those of others. Try to avoid the pitfall of “explaining away” results you are uncomfortable with. Be open and really take the time to consider feedback.
View your results in a positive way. They present you with a fantastic opportunity to make better use of your time, identifying what you should do more or less of, or what you should do differently. In fact, many successful leaders with high self-awareness go out of their way to collect feedback from what Harvard Business Review calls “loving critics” – people who have their best interests in mind and are willing to tell them the truth.
Your 360-degree feedback enables you to evaluate your skills and performance and group them into one of four areas:
STRENGTHS
A strength is a competency that both you and your raters feel you demonstrate. Focusing on improving strengths can deliver major benefits, as when we have a belief in our own ability in a specific area, we are likely to dedicate more effort and persistence to improve.
DEVELOPMENT AREAS
A development area is a competency that both you and your raters do not feel you demonstrate adequately. These are not necessarily ‘weaknesses’ – they can just be things that you have not yet built strengths in. They give you areas for development, such as through transformational leadership training.
HIDDEN STRENGTHS
A hidden strength is a competency that your raters feel you demonstrate, but you do not. They are skills or behaviors you have but underestimate. Being aware of your hidden strengths can prevent you from underutilizing key leadership capabilities or wasting time trying to “fix” something that isn’t broken.
BLIND SPOTS
A blind spot is the reverse of a hidden strength. These are competencies that you feel you demonstrate, but your raters do not. Developing self-awareness here will help you to better discover your blind spots and take action to improve in these areas. This could include transformational leadership coaching for example.
Improve self-awareness to become an effective leader
While self-awareness has become an increasingly important part of leadership, the changing world of work now makes it critical to individual and company success. Organizations rely on authentic transformational leadership for success. Understanding yourself and being open and empathetic is crucial to getting the best out of your hybrid teams. Collecting 360 degree feedback provides the best way to get deeper and richer insights into your skills, helping build self-awareness and then delivering all the benefits it brings. It is crucial to unlocking the effectiveness of transformational leadership.
In our next blog on leadership, we’ll explain how you can turn your 360 feedback into tangible goals and actions to become a better leader.
