Imagine leaving a senior leadership meeting feeling you were decisive and kept the conversation moving. Someone else might leave feeling rushed, unheard or unable to challenge your thinking.
Your intention was to create clarity and momentum, but your impact was something quite different.
This distinction came up during a recent episode of The Strategic Leader Podcast, where Fi Craig and I explored why self-awareness belongs in every strategic leader’s toolkit. We often judge ourselves by our intentions, while other people experience us through our impact.
Understanding that difference can fundamentally change how we lead.
Self-awareness becomes more important as you become more senior
Early in our careers, much of our value comes from what we know and what we can personally deliver. As we move into leadership, that balance starts to change.
We increasingly achieve results through other people.
You could be an exceptional strategic thinker with a compelling vision for the future, but if people don’t feel able to challenge your thinking or struggle to understand your direction, your ability to turn that strategy into reality becomes significantly limited.
This is why self-awareness isn’t simply an exercise in introspection. We need to understand ourselves in the context of the people and environment around us.
- How do people experience me when I’m under pressure?
- Do I create space for different perspectives?
- What happens to my communication style when I strongly believe I’m right?
- What behaviours do I default to when I need a decision quickly?
Are you leading intentionally or on autopilot?
We all have what Fi described during our conversation as our “factory settings”: preferences, habits, beliefs and behaviours that feel natural to us.
For example, I know that I have a strong action driver. I like progress, decisions and getting things done.
That can be enormously useful. In a situation that needs momentum, it can help a team move forward. But overplayed or in a different situation, that same strength could mean moving too quickly, becoming impatient with discussion or not giving someone else enough time to work through their thinking.
The same can happen with many of our strengths. Attention to detail can become perfectionism, collaboration can make difficult decisions harder, confidence can inadvertently close down other perspectives.
Turning self-awareness into leadership effectiveness
Awareness on its own doesn’t necessarily change anything. We need to decide what we’re going to do with what we discover.
One way of thinking about this is through five connected stages:
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Awareness: what do I know about myself?
Awareness is the starting point because we cannot change what we cannot see.
This involves asking questions such as:
- What do I do well?
- What do I do too much or too little of?
- Where do I strike the right balance?
- What are my strengths?
- What tends to get in my way?
Importantly, we also need to ask: How do other people experience me?
Reflection helps us build this awareness, but so does feedback. Other people hold information about our leadership that we simply cannot access by looking inward.
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Understanding: what does this information mean?
Once you have gathered the data, the next step is making sense of it.
- Why do I operate this way?
- Why do I respond like this?
- What preferences, beliefs or drivers might be behind my behaviour?
- Why might others experience my behaviour differently?
Understanding helps us move from simply observing a behaviour to recognising what may sit behind it, when it is useful and when it might limit our effectiveness.
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Acceptance: this is where I am now
Acceptance can be harder. It requires us to acknowledge our strengths, limitations and default approaches without either becoming defensive or giving ourselves a hard time about them.
But acceptance does not mean saying, “That’s just who I am.”
As Fi put it in our conversation, we all have our own “factory settings”. Acceptance means recognising those settings while also accepting that they may not always be right for the context, role or outcome we are trying to achieve.
There is usually more than one way of approaching a situation. Our preferred way may not automatically be the right way.
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Appreciation: what else could I welcome in?
Appreciation takes us beyond passively accepting what we have discovered, to actively seeking what else might work well.
It means recognising the value of different strengths, approaches and perspectives, including those that do not come naturally to us.
Leadership teams work precisely because people bring different things. We all have strengths and gaps. Appreciation allows us to actively welcome those differences and consider what we might learn, experiment with or adapt.
It is not about losing who you are. It is about adding more choices to your leadership toolkit.
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Effectiveness: what will I do differently?
This is the ultimate purpose of the process.
Once you have greater self-awareness, you have more choices about how you show up. You can decide which strengths to deploy, which strengths you might be overplaying, and which behaviours you want to adapt.
Rather than simply defaulting to autopilot, you can ask: What does this situation need from me?
That ability to adapt intentionally is where self-awareness starts translating into greater leadership effectiveness.
In this episode of The Strategic Leader Podcast, Fi Craig and I explore self-awareness, leadership impact, feedback and practical ways to uncover the blind spots that could be influencing how you lead.
How can leaders improve self-awareness?
One of the models we refer to in the podcast is the Johari Window, which provides a useful way of thinking about what we know and don’t know about ourselves, and what other people know about us.
The four areas look at what is known or unknown to you and what is known or unknown to others.
Your open arena contains the things you know about yourself and other people know too.
Your blind spot contains things that other people see or experience in you that you don’t currently recognise yourself.
Your mask contains things you know about yourself but choose not to reveal
The unknown area contains things that neither you nor others currently know.
From a leadership perspective, the blind spot is particularly interesting. Using the Johari Window, the aim is to expand your awareness by bringing your blind spots into the open arena – become aware of things you weren’t previously aware of.
You can then work through the five steps to effectiveness outlined earlier to choose what you want to do about what you discover.
So how do we expand our blind spots?
Self-reflection is a great starting point, and something we should actively and regularly practice. But often self-reflection doesn’t give us the answers we need. We can reflect deeply on our own leadership and still not see everything. Other people have data that we don’t have.
This is why feedback matters so much.
But sometimes, seeking feedback from others can feel confronting. A helpful psychological shift is to start thinking about feedback as data.
Depersonalise – Someone telling you that you appeared impatient doesn’t mean you are an impatient person. It tells you that, in a particular situation, they experienced your behaviour as impatient.
Discern – You don’t have to agree with every piece of feedback you receive, and you certainly don’t have to absorb it into your identity. Instead, stay curious. Look for patterns, consider the context and ask yourself what might be useful in what you’ve heard.
The aim isn’t to believe every piece of feedback you receive. Feedback is someone else’s experience of you, not necessarily an objective fact about your identity. But it gives you another data point to consider.
And when several data points start saying similar things, there may be a pattern worth paying attention to.
Improving self-awareness often starts with becoming more intentional about noticing your own behaviour and creating opportunities to understand how other people experience you.
A few simple habits can make a difference:
- Pause before reacting. Notice the situations that trigger your default behaviours, particularly when you’re under pressure. What are you thinking or feeling, and how might that influence your response?
- Reflect on impact, not just intention. After an important meeting, decision or difficult conversation, consider what you wanted to achieve and what other people may actually have experienced.
- Ask for feedback regularly. Don’t wait for an annual review or formal 360. Small questions such as “What worked well?” and “What could I do differently next time?” make feedback part of everyday leadership.
- Look for patterns. One person’s perspective is useful data, but repeated observations can help reveal strengths, habits or blind spots you haven’t recognised yourself.
- Experiment with a different response. If you recognise that your usual approach isn’t serving the situation, try something different and notice what happens.
The important part is what happens after the insight. Self-awareness becomes valuable when it gives us the ability to make a different choice.
Practical ways to build leadership self-awareness
Self-awareness can feel like a substantial piece of personal development work, but there are simple ways to start gathering useful information.
Tip #1 – Microfeedback: “What went well? Even better if…”
Try this simple microfeedback tool so it becomes part of everyday conversations.
After a meeting, presentation, project or other interaction, ask someone for one thing that went well and one thing that would make it even better next time.
Because the question is small and specific, it can take some of the perceived threat out of feedback.
It also helps normalise feedback. Rather than something that only happens during performance reviews or when there is a problem, feedback becomes useful information that we routinely exchange.
Tip #2 – Ask 5: Five questions to build self-awareness
If you want to go a little deeper, one exercise I often use with coaching clients is Ask 5, a much lighter way of gathering useful feedback than a formal 360-degree process.
Choose five people who know you in different contexts and ask them the same five questions.
- What three words or phrases describe me best?
- What do you see as one of my greatest strengths?
- When do you see me at my best?
- What do I sometimes do that gets in my own way?
- What is one thing I’d benefit from doing differently?
Remember to treat the feedback you receive as data. It might be that there are several people telling you something that you hadn’t recognised yourself. People might be identifying strengths you weren’t aware of. Look out surprises – these are the biggest clues to a blind spot to uncover.
Try to resist the temptation to immediately explain, defend or dismiss what you hear. Treat it as another piece of data and stay curious about what it might tell you.
Self-awareness is never finished
Perhaps one of the biggest traps with self-awareness is believing we’ve already done it.
We change, our roles change, the people around us change, and behaviours that helped us succeed at one stage of our career may not be what we need at the next.
Effective leaders understand their default behaviours, recognise when they need to adapt and make intentional choices about how they communicate, influence and lead. Self-awareness creates the choice; action determines the impact.
Common Questions About Self-Awareness in Leadership
Why is self-awareness important in leadership?
Self-awareness helps leaders understand how their behaviours, preferences and communication affect other people. This creates greater choice over how they respond and allows them to adapt their leadership approach to different people, situations and business challenges.
What are examples of self-awareness in leadership?
It could be recognising that your decisiveness can sometimes feel like impatience, noticing that you avoid challenge because you value harmony, or understanding that your attention to detail can slow a team down. The important step is recognising when a natural strength or preference is helping you and when the situation requires something different.
Can feedback improve leadership self-awareness?
Yes. Reflection can help us understand our own intentions, but feedback gives us information about how other people actually experience our behaviour. Regularly seeking feedback can reveal strengths and blind spots that are difficult to identify alone.
Turn self-awareness into stronger leadership
Recognising your patterns is only the beginning. Through leadership coaching, I help senior leaders uncover blind spots, understand how they’re experienced by others and turn greater self-awareness into practical changes in how they communicate, influence and lead.
