Self-awareness, like a good GPS device, keeps you centered and on track.
Good self-awareness means you know who you are, and how you relate and impact the people around you. Even if you don’t care what people think, like driving a car fast, you’d like to know how the road maps.
And poor self-awareness?
Research (Center for Creative Leadership) shows it’s one of the key significant competencies that when underdeveloped – along with emotional self control, empathy, and influence skills – is a leading and predictable job derailer for leaders and execs.
If you’re not self-aware, you will bomb during your career.
On the flip side, people who are self-aware can accurately predict how others experience them, make changes as they choose and frequently avoid the carnage.
One piece of bad news is that we are almost all out-of-the box flawed when it comes to self-awareness. We are – like the objects in a car mirror – too close for good self-perception. Research by David Dunning, Chip Heath and Jerry Suls (Flawed Self-Assessment: Implications for Health, Education and the Workplace) based on over 200+ studies reports “In general, people’s self-views hold only a tenuous to modest relationship with their actual behavior and performance.”
The other piece of bad news is the world is filled with easy to find psychometric tests (MBTI, DISC, Birkman, Kolbe, Culture Index, Enneagram, etc.) that make a lot of money for the companies that provide them but range from only modestly insightful to mostly worthless. (Disclosure: I’m certified to interpret and give some of these instruments). Punchline? If your views of yourself don’t map to reality, these assessment tests aren’t worth much.
The good news is that the gold standard of coaching feedback – narrative 360 interview feedback combined with on-site shadowing – provide you with a rich and accurate picture of how people experience you. It’s time intensive for the coach but it proves you with a full picture on what you do and how your leadership behavior is experienced by other people. If you want to get or stay great, it’s the best way to start.
An on-the fly “skinny” way to get good feedback is to ask people (email works) who have worked or work with you what you do when you’re at your best, and what do they wish you would change about the way you work with others. You could do the same thing with an onlinesurvey (one way to keep it anonymous) by somebody like Survey Monkey.
Peer surveys, if done well, are a terrific intermediate ways to get a sense of how people perceive you and there are some instruments (Kouzes and Posner Leadership Practices Inventory is terrific) that are really worthwhile. As someone who spent time designing surveys and survey questions, most of the other peer online surveys are garbage, with poor question design coupled with surveying things that don’t map to researched effective leadership competencies.
Predict in advance what the response themes will be. If you’ve got an accurate picture of yourself you’ll be able to anticipate the responses.
If not, maybe it’s time to get that coaching that you’ve been putting off for too long.
As Dunning, Suls and Heath note, “The views people hold of themselves are often flawed. The correlation between those views and their objective behavior is often meager to modest, and people often claim to have valuable skills and desirable attributes to a degree that they do not.“
Like looking in a mirror that’s much too close, it’s hard to tell the blemishes from the beauty marks.
Life Back West is an occasional set of writings focused on ways people, teams and organizations can be both more effective (doing the right thing) and more efficient (doing the right thing well). More about my 30+ years of work coaching execs, start up and leadership teams can be found at the “About J. Mike Smith and Back West, Inc.” sidebar at the Back West blog. Now welcoming new and known clients.