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Self-awareness

What your 360 review will tell you that nobody says to your face

About 95 percent of people believe they are self-aware. Ten to fifteen percent actually are. I was in the wrong group while teaching leadership for a living.

After six years leading a leadership development organization, I went through a formal 360 review expecting good news. I heard plenty of it about my work with external clients. What I did not expect was what my own team said.

That I was impatient and insensitive when mistakes were made. That my tone was condescending and intimidating. That I should put relationships before results. I read the whole packet in one sitting behind a closed door, and I was ashamed of it.

I knew I had high standards. I knew I could be demanding. What I did not know was the effect I was having on colleagues I genuinely valued.

Why you cannot see this on your own

Tasha Eurich's research delivers a sobering finding. About 95 percent of people believe they are self-aware, and only 10 to 15 percent actually are. Korn Ferry, drawing on the 110 million assessments the firm has conducted, reports that 80 percent of leaders fail to see their own skills and deficiencies clearly.

Quite frankly, that last figure is the one I would sit with. It says the odds are against you seeing this on your own. I had been part of the 85 to 90 percent who lack self-awareness, while teaching leadership to other leaders.

I would not call that a character flaw. It is a measurement problem, and it is why honest feedback and a formal 360 are the fastest way through it.

The two moves that closed the gap

Reading the packet did not transform me. Two things after it did.

Nothing about that was comfortable. All of it was necessary, and none of it would have happened without data I did not want.

Change is a process, not a decision

Researchers who study how people actually change, going back to Prochaska and DiClemente, found it is a process we move through in stages, often circling back more than once before it holds. So if you do this honest work and still find yourself slipping into old patterns, hear this clearly. That is not failure. That is what change looks like.

What it is worth

Eurich's work finds that leaders in the top quartile for self-awareness are about 10 percent more effective in their roles than their peers. Daniel Goleman attributes roughly 90 percent of the performance differences among top leaders to emotional intelligence factors, with self-awareness underneath all of them.

At this altitude the gap gets expensive, because so much of the assessment of you happens when you are not in the room. If the self you project and the self others experience have drifted apart, people feel it immediately. That is not a branding problem. It is a self-awareness problem.

If you are considering one