Dr Rob Yeung
Effective leadership means understanding your strengths, your values and your flaws.
Self-awareness is fundamentally important for effective leadership.
However, research, as well as my own experience of working with leaders in leadership development programmes, confirms that self-awareness is actually quite rare.
For a start, self-awareness has multiple components. One crucial aspect is external self-awareness – an accurate understanding of your strengths and weaknesses.
Studies have found that people’s estimates of their intelligence typically correlate no higher than 0.3 with their performance on objective intelligence tests.
As another example, people’s self-judged ability to detect lying and deception correlates at a pitiful 0.04 with their actual performance.
In the workplace, a major statistical analysis of 114 previous studies by academics Alexander Stajkovic and Fred Luthans found that people’s estimates correlated at less than 0.5 with their actual job performance for straightforward, uncomplex work. And the correlation between self-estimated and actual performance fell to around only 0.2 for complex work.
In other words, many of us have some insight into our performance for simple work, such as our typing accuracy or ability with spreadsheets.
However, we are much more likely to misunderstand the true extent of skills such as teamwork, conflict management and coaching others.
Trust your feedback
Perhaps unexpectedly, other people’s judgements about us are usually better predictors of our behaviour than our own judgements.
The data comes from a meta-analysis by scientists Brian Connelly and Deniz Ones. Reviewing 263 independent samples totalling 44,178 individuals, they found that "other-ratings yielded predictive validities substantially greater than and incremental to self-ratings."
Many leaders dismiss feedback from colleagues and other onlookers, but this substantial body of evidence suggests that such feedback is often more powerful than our own flawed self-judgements. Gratifyingly, other data suggests that individuals who engage in more feedback-seeking tend to achieve higher job performance.
External self-awareness also requires that leaders understand their emotions and the effects of their emotions on others. For example, some leaders believe they display their anger because it is a conscious choice aimed at motivating others.
However, the reality is that most anger results not from conscious control but loss of self-control; data also confirms that anger usually demotivates colleagues, inhibits innovation and stifles collaboration rather than having positive effects.
What you really want
Another important component of self-awareness is internal self-awareness – understanding your true values, motives and goals. For instance, many leaders believe they both enjoy thinking creatively and value creativity in others. However, in my experience, around eight in ten leaders believe themselves to be above average in terms of their creativity and the extent
