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Self-Awareness

Understand Yourself Better to Understand Your Impact on Others

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WHEN 109 EMERGENCY room doctors at four different hospitals were asked to estimate how often they prescribe opioids compared with their peers, 65 percent of them underestimated their prescribing rates, according to a yearlong study by the University of Colorado School of Medicine and the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Considering that prescription opioids contributed to 64,000 drug-overdose deaths in 2016 alone, better self-awareness by doctors writing these prescriptions may literally save lives. Indeed, once the surveyed ER physicians saw their actual data, opioid prescription rates dropped over the following 12 months. The study’s authors deduced that the doctors were jolted into changing their behavior after seeing the difference between their self-awareness and the reality of their actions.

Of course, doctors are not the only people with a skewed perception of their traits and behaviors. Ninety-four percent of college professors believe they have above-average teaching skills, according to David Brooks, conservative political and cultural commentator for the New York Times. And as far as the rest of us go, well, just ask your friends how good a driver they think they are.

Blind spots. We all have them.

And while ours may not contribute to a national health crisis, they may be doing us harm in the way we manage our careers and perceive the impact we have on others. That’s why honing accurate self-awareness is critical in developing an executive presence that is credible with all audiences.

In this chapter I explore what I call “dynamic self-awareness,” a multilayered approach that involves both getting to know yourself and making sense, via good feedback, of how well you do in constantly changing environments.

Just as we can learn the intricacies of, say, project management for the implementation of a new software system—set schedules, hold meetings with stakeholders, get requirements from all impacted business units, keep everyone working toward a deadline—we can also learn how to examine our own preferences, biases, values, beliefs, and behaviors in order to see the links between how we feel, how we think, how we act, and, most important, how our behaviors affect others. Dynamic self-awareness is about uncovering and recognizing blind spots and unhelpful behaviors that can limit executive presence.

A Closer Look at Self-Awareness and Why It Matters

Enter the term “self-awareness” into Google, and you’ll get somewhere around 340 million (yes, that’s million!) results. Look for it in the standard business school curriculum, however, and you may have to do some digging. Columbia Business School offers some material on self-awareness development as part of its Leadership Lab, which is a series of extracurricular activities that span the entire MBA experience, and also includes assessments and one-on-one coaching. Chicago Booth School of Business offers LEAD (leadership effectiveness and development), a program that, according to the university, is designed to enhance participants’ self-awareness and interpersonal effectiveness. And the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business offers a three-hour elective leadership development program “with an emphasis on self-understanding and learning,” according to the school website. Most often, we found that the concept of self-awareness is buried somewhere in the copy of various MBA program descriptions as opposed to being presented as a stand-alone module that’s worthy of study or even mastery.

However, this scarcity of self-awareness in the business school curriculum doesn’t mean the topic is not getting any attention from the academic community.

Harvard Business School professor Bill George, for instance, defines self-awareness as “the skill of being aware of our thoughts, emotions, and values from moment to moment.” Organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich breaks the concept down a bit further, distinguishing between internal and external self-awareness, that is, between an awareness of our own state of being and that of how others view us. Beyond this is what Robert Hogan, a psychologist and cofounder of Hogan Assessments, calls strategic self-awareness, which is the kind of self-awareness you need to compete successfully in your business. Combining and tending to these different forms of self-awareness creates a dynamic self-awareness that is both useful on its own merits and, again, key to developing your executive presence.

So why does self-awareness matter? Because a lack of it can lead us to misjudge our own behavior, or at least the effect it has on others’ evaluations of us. For example, I worked with one client, Carlos, a high-potential leader at a U.S.-based global consumer goods company, whose collaborative style and interpersonal sensitivity were prized by his colleagues. However, his reluctance to speak up in meetings, especially with more senior leaders present, made him appear disengaged. He also seemed unwilling or unable to “clearly articulate a point of view and then defend it,” according to his boss. Carlos was surprised by this assessment. The way he tells it, he just didn’t want to add to what he considered “the noise” in these meetings, where, according to him, “people talk a lot but don’t really say anything.” In fact, as a native Spanish speaker with limited conversational fluency in English, Carlos had some difficulty participating in the lively verbal back-and-forth that is common to many American and European business meetings, but he had convinced himself that his reticence was the appropriate response to others’ verbosity. And while you may have found yourself nodding at Carlos’s sentiment about people’s tendency to often talk much but say little, you may also agree that Carlos’s lack of self-awareness of how his behavior was actually perceived by his colleagues prevented him from conveying the executive presence his bosses expect in a future senior leader.

Lack of self-awareness can also mean that we think we’re more skillful than we are. Professors Justin Kruger and David Dunning, authors of the famous study “Unskilled and Unaware of It,” point out that many people are unable to figure out where their knowledge ends: “Indeed, in many social and intellectual domains, people are unaware of their incompetence, innocent of their ignorance.” In other words, they don’t know what they don’t know. The “Dunning-Kruger effect” is a term often used to ridicule the happily clueless, but there is hope. Dunning himself has observed that there are ways to overcome the ignorance of one’s ignorance.

In the following sections I’ll give examples from my own executive-coaching experiences of how a lack of self-awareness can hinder advancement and how getting feedback can increase self-awareness. Feedback is crucial to all forms of self-awareness, be it from self-reflection to informal observations from colleagues to formal assessments. I’ll also provide the concrete steps you can take to obtain the feedback you need to enhance your own self-awareness and build your executive presence.

A Look Inside Yourself

Being curious about yourself is the first step in developing the skills for a dynamic self-awareness. This is not simply a matter of filling out an online assessment of your preferences and tendencies and discovering that you “work constructively and calmly under stress and pressure” or “are hesitant to take on new challenges.” Self-awareness is about more than recognition of your preferences: It is a complex interaction of reflection, keen observation, and experience.

Tasha Eurich and her team of researchers observe that internal self-awareness “represents how clearly we see our own values, passions, aspirations, fit with our environment, reactions (including thoughts, feelings, behaviors, strengths, and weaknesses), and impact on others.” It’s the ability to recognize what we believe in, what we want, and how we behave.

McKinsey principal Nate Boaz and consultant Erica Ariel Fox divide the results of such inward examination into “profile awareness” and “state awareness.” Profile awareness involves a recognition of your own thoughts and behaviors, while state awareness “is the recognition of what’s driving you at the moment you take action.” Boaz and Fox note that the latter is different from “state of mind”: “State awareness involves the real-time perception of a wide range of inner experiences and their impact on your behavior.”

As such, state awareness is harder to master than profile awareness. Astute senior executives may be fully aware that their dark side comes out under pressure—whether that is yelling at people or making impulsive decisions—but then catch themselves too late in the act to do anything about it, other than eat crow or issue mea culpas.

In a nutshell, profile awareness is awareness of your general tendencies, while state awareness requires specific, on-the-spot awareness.

Consider my coaching client Jim, a senior executive at a global automotive manufacturer. Jim was generally held in high esteem by his colleagues and considered a likely successor to the CEO, who was scheduled to retire within a couple of years. Jim’s development opportunities in preparation for the CEO role were to improve his emotional resilience—in particular, his ability to demonstrate empathy and manage conflict productively.

While Jim’s self-assessment in a 360-degree feedback survey showed that he was mostly aware of his tendencies (profile awareness) to respond emotionally in certain situations, his ability to recognize this behavior in the moment it occurred (state awareness) was much lower and led to 360-degree feedback comments such as:

•   “His forcefulness tends to seem like intimidation and makes him appear not to welcome dispute.”

•   “Listen more and don’t be so defensive when someone has a different view.”

•   “Practice a relaxed face when listening. His natural face is intense when listening because he is engaged and is thinking, but for those who do not know him he may appear angry.”

The CEO summarized the view of many of Jim’s colleagues when he observed: “Jim is emotionally transparent, which I generally believe to be a good thing. However, when he is unhappy or displeased with an individual or situation, he can be emotional [and] thereby intimidate an individual or group, which tends to truncate discussion. This behavior is not intended to intimidate, but given his position and organizational credibility, it can stifle open and honest communication by the team.”

Jim was aware that conflict management, emotional awareness, and behavioral self-control were challenges for him—he scored himself low in these areas in a self-assessment—but he lost track of his emotions and behaviors in critical situations: a clear case of lacking state self-awareness. Jim rose to the top levels of his organization because he was smart, dedicated, hardworking, and extremely knowledgeable about his industry, but as with so many otherwise highly capable leaders, his upward mobility was stymied simply because he lacked critical self-awareness in the moments when it counted most.

As his boss had noted, Jim’s behavior “can stifle open and honest communication by the team,” which is the opposite of what a leader should do. Diverse viewpoints and innovative ideas, freely expressed, are what leaders need to encourage in order to operate effectively and make informed decisions. In our coaching sessions, Jim learned about and better appreciated the effect his behaviors had on his peers and direct reports, and he used that knowledge to put people in more productive mental states.

Neuroscientist Evian Gordon’s work on the “threat and reward response” sheds light on the neurological reactions that are triggered in social situations. A person who is made socially anxious, for example, may freeze up as his or her brain switches into survival mode.

“This impairs analytic thinking, creative insight, and problem solving,” Gordon reasoned. “In other words, just when people most need their sophisticated mental capabilities, the brain’s internal resources are taken away from them.”

I’ll talk more about the brain’s role in emotion regulation in the next chapter, but note the role that neurological processes play in state awareness—and how easy it is for our minds to get away from us.

There are ways to prevent ourselves from “losing our minds” in this way, and these strategies begin with a basic understanding of ourselves and how we respond to our environment—that is, with internal self-awareness.

Most of us think of ourselves as reasonably self-aware—we’re great husbands and fathers, standout wives and mothers, excellent drivers, and benevolent leaders, if you just ask us. But as we’ve seen from the example of the ER doctors and college professors at the beginning of this chapter, we may be just a tad delusional. Underlying this delusion may be the natural discomfort we feel at the unwelcome possibilities emerging from an honest assessment of those personal traits that we perceive as embarrassing or less than admirable. If you want to become more self-aware, however, feedback—that which you give yourself, and that which you get from others—is crucial to that awareness.

So how do you check your inner profile? Be mindful, reflect and identify, and integrate.

Be Mindful

The first step of mindfulness, is, paradoxically, to deliberately empty your mind by dismissing distracting thoughts and feelings, while the second requires you to pay attention to what is happening in the moment. David Rock, founder of the NeuroLeadership Institute, notes that the ability both to pay attention to what you’re thinking and to observe what’s going on around you “requires both serenity and concentration; in a threatened state, people are much more likely to be ‘mindless.’” It’s when you’re most caught up in the moment that you’re likely to be least aware of what’s happening.

I’ll talk more about mindfulness and training your brain in the next chapter. Until then, note that some people engage in regular mindfulness training, which involves specific kinds of exercises to focus your attention, while others find meditation a good way to disentangle themselves from daily aggravations. The point is to clear from your mind the distractions that can obscure your view of yourself and your situation.

Reflect and Identify

If mindfulness is the process of clearing away the clutter, reflection leads you to consider your values and characteristics. Posing a few questions may help, such as:

•   Values. What do you value in yourself, your family and friends, and your colleagues? Do you live by a particular ethical or religious code? How do you live out your values in practice? How do you respond when someone violates your code? What if you violate your own code? Have your values changed over the years? How?

•   Decision making. How do you make decisions? Do you listen to your intuition? Or do you need all the facts before making the call? Do you weigh available options and decide on your own, or do you let others decide on a course of action? Do you tend to strive for consensus, or are you comfortable deciding even in light of dissenting views?

•   Emotions. Are you able to identify your emotions while you’re experiencing them? What emotions are you most comfortable expressing? Least? What information do you get from your emotions? Are you able to manage them when in difficult circumstances? Do your emotions affect how you approach certain situations?

•   Goals. What are your personal and professional goals? Are they in sync with each other? What progress have you made in achieving those goals? Are you prevention focused or promotion focused in your approach to your goals and desires? That is, are you more likely to protect what you already have or to take risks to gain something more?

•   Social behavior. How do you behave around others? Are you comfortable meeting new people? Are there clear differences in how you act in different areas of your life? Do you have to like someone to work well with the person? What is your approach to working with subordinates? Peers? Superiors?

This is not an exhaustive list of questions, of course, but these and questions like them can help you identify what makes you tick.

This is important, because the questions you ask, as well as how you ask them, matter. Eurich argues that introspection done wrong can actually hinder self-awareness. Too often we ask ourselves “why” questions about our emotions, attitudes, and behavior, she writes, but research has shown “that we simply do not have access to many of the unconscious thoughts, feelings, and motives we’re searching for. And because so much is trapped outside of our conscious awareness, we tend to invent answers that feel true but are often wrong.” We want answers and so jump to a conclusion that makes sense on the surface but doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.

Instead, Eurich counsels that “we should ask what, not why. ‘What’ questions help us stay objective, future-focused, and empowered to act on our new insights.” Questions of “why” trap us, but “what” questions can get us the information we need to move on.

While these questions can help you to identify your values, characteristics, and automatic behaviors, it can also be valuable to take psychometric tests to sort out your personality traits. Finally, organize this information: write down and prioritize your goals, say, or note if your values are compatible or in conflict with one another. The point is to gather as much productive information as you can and shape it into self-knowledge.

Integrate

Mindfulness, reflection, and identification all influence different aspects of your internal self-awareness, but to attain full self-awareness requires an integration of those three practices. You have to connect who you are with what you believe and want and how you act in various situations, all of which require regular and pointed self-examination. Cultivating self-awareness is not a one-time event; for it to take hold, you have to make it a habit. Even this is not enough, however. That’s because any integration is incomplete without the kind of feedback that you can only get from others.

External Self-Awareness

As important as awareness of your own thoughts and actions is, if your self-perception is at odds with how others see you, you’re operating in the dark.

Eurich’s definition of external self-awareness is succinct: “understanding how other people view us.” Do others see in us the same values, passions, aspirations, and behaviors that we see in ourselves? If not, why not? This is important, because Eurich notes that those whose self-image lines up with the image others have of them are more likely to get along better with those others and have more productive working relationships with them.

Unlike internal self-awareness, where you can do much of the work on your own, developing external self-awareness requires feedback from others—be it from a mentor, informally from your colleagues or customers, or via a more formal 360-degree assessment.

Unfortunately, while many people like to say “I welcome criticism,” in fact most of us do not welcome it at all. Writer Kristin Wong highlighted a series of experiments in which participants would rather talk to people who had a high opinion of them than talk to those who had an accurate one. As one of the authors of the study noted, “Individuals tend to enjoy their own relationships more with people they believe see them in desirable ways.” In short, we’d rather be inaccurately praised than accurately perceived.

Yet it is also true that most of us don’t want to be “caught out,” cluelessly thinking we’re killing it while our coworkers are shaking their heads at our ill-fated efforts. One colleague of mine admits that she simply “hates being wrong—hates it. But the only thing worse than being wrong is not knowing that I’m wrong.”

And that’s where feedback comes into play. A trusted mentor, a boss who has your best interest at heart and wants to see you succeed, even a colleague whom you may find a bit prickly but whose straightforwardness you value—they can all be great resources in providing you with a different perspective, if not valuable constructive criticism. The point is, you want to turn to people whose feedback you can trust and who you know will be honest in their assessment of you. This can also be a good way of building up your tolerance for such instruction: If you can get good feedback from a trusted source or advisor, then you’re more likely to see the upsides of feedback overall.

One note of caution when asking colleagues for targeted feedback: Unlike a mentor or boss who’s invested in your success, colleagues may be less comfortable giving an overall assessment than they would in offering specifics, so you have to ask questions of limited scope. If you worked on a project with someone whose feedback you’d find valuable, ask the person how he or she thought it went—what specifically worked well and what could have been even better. By asking with humility and without the slightest hint at indignation—that includes wrinkling your nose, furrowing your brow, or squinting your eyes—you stand a much better chance of mining feedback gold as opposed to receiving anodyne observations that help no one, least of all you.

Finally, you should find out if your company offers formal 360-degree evaluations. This usually involves bringing in an outside consultant or executive coach—we do lots of 360-degree surveys for client companies—who specializes in such assessments and provides an in-depth report of how your managers, peers, direct reports, and other colleagues see you. In a 360-degree feedback process, you are asked to select somewhere between 15 and 25 colleagues whom you trust to provide honest feedback on your strengths and development opportunities. The latter used to be called “weaknesses,” but we’ve evolved. To ensure maximum candor, feedback providers enjoy anonymity. Their responses are not identified with the rater’s name in the final report. Otherwise you’d get some watered-down version on your areas for improvement—people know that not everyone takes feedback well—which would render the entire exercise pointless.

In a 360-degree evaluation, you are typically asked to rate yourself as well, which can provide valuable insight into where your self-perceptions match how others see you and where they diverge. In other words, you’ll get a very good idea of the areas in which you lack self-awareness. Usually 360-degree feedback surveys consist of a series of questions. Our own proprietary online survey, developed by my colleague Dr. Laura Belsten, is focused on emotional and social intelligence and features 78 questions in 26 categories, such as stress management, innovation and creativity, organizational and situational awareness, and resilience, to name a few. Also included is a section of open-ended questions, such as “What are this person’s greatest strengths?” and “What is the one recommendation you have for this individual’s improvement?”

The resulting data help clients get a wide panorama of perspectives on their behavior, providing one or more potential areas for development. A 360-degree feedback report is usually what yields the most valuable insight on coaching needs and development opportunities, in addition to the developmental feedback we get directly from the client’s bosses and their talent-development colleagues. For more senior executives we usually conduct interviews in lieu of an online survey, typically involving 7 to 10 colleagues, whom we ask about strengths and development opportunities to help determine how to make the person an even more effective leader and manager. This feedback is gathered verbatim and presented to the client in aggregate, again, to protect the innocent. It often furnishes the jolt that’s needed to provide clients not only with better self-awareness, but with the type of self-awareness that will enhance success in their highly competitive work environments. In other words, strategic self-awareness.

Strategic Self-Awareness

Consider engineer Sylvia Acevedo, who, after graduating from Stanford and working for NASA, ended up at IBM. Once there, she noticed that a less distinguished colleague, who happened to be a former football player, was receiving a constant stream of feedback from multiple mentors about everything from his clothes to making presentations. “No one was doing that for me or the other women who were there. I began saying, ‘I have to innovate.’” She paid careful attention to what was expected and rewarded in the workplace, then built her résumé—including booking trips to Hong Kong on her own dime in order to accumulate international experience. Her ultimate goal, of course, was to demonstrate that she had the skills and the ambition to excel in the workplace.

She also got a key bit of feedback from “one guy who was a good mentor,” who noticed that a lot of people might not understand what she had to offer: “You have to start with how you’re like them,” he urged. “You need to tell them you’re a Stanford engineer and you’ve done this and that. Because they’re not listening to you for the first ten minutes. All they’re thinking is, ‘What is this Hispanic female doing in front of us?’”

In other words, the mentor was saying, it wasn’t enough for Acevedo to do well on her own. She had to let her male colleagues know that she did, indeed, belong among them.

What Acevedo and her mentor were able to devise was an informal kind of what the aforementioned Robert Hogan calls “strategic self-awareness”—the kind of awareness necessary to compete and succeed in a specific environment. “For self-awareness to be truly strategic,” Hogan explains, “strengths and weaknesses can only be fully understood when compared with those of others, particularly those who form a defined reference group.”

Strategic self-awareness, then, is comparative: It’s not enough to understand yourself or even how others see you. You have to know where you stand in relationship to your peers. Hogan offers the example of a soccer player who in high school might be judged the best; in college, average; and at the heights of the premier league, not good enough even to earn a tryout. If that player wants to succeed at the highest levels, then he needs to judge himself by the standards of that level.

Similarly, Acevedo was able to define her reference group and, with the help of her mentor, figure out how to make herself stand out. In fact, years later and after she had left IBM, she was working on a presentation to investors who “look at me and they can’t even pronounce my name.” Recalling the advice of that mentor, she paused her pitch and said, “I went to school down the street. You may have heard of it—Stanford? And I was a rocket scientist. So numbers don’t faze me.” Once that was out of the way, “They were like, Okay.”

Acevedo’s mentor gave her what Hogan calls “informational feedback,” one of the most effective forms of feedback, along with suggestions on how to adjust her behavior. Another type of feedback is motivational feedback, where the coach may point out how far the client has come (positive) or how much further he or she needs to go (negative). Both can work, although Hogan notes that whether positive or negative feedback is more effective will vary from individual to individual. Regardless of what type is used, such feedback should “target improvement areas, and evaluate progress over time.”

To satisfy these criteria, Hogan recommends both structured interviews and multirater assessments (like the aforementioned 360-degree assessment): “The multi-rater assessments indicate what a leader does and how a leader does it. The personality assessment indicates why a leader does something, or, more accurately, indicates what the natural tendencies are that underlie the behaviors demonstrated in the workplace.”

Thus, while Hogan’s focus is on strategic self-awareness, he also recognizes that for it to be most effective, it should build on the other forms of self-awareness.

Dynamic Self-Awareness for Executive Presence

Developing all the different kinds of self-awareness is required to master dynamic, or complete, self-awareness. This can seem exhausting, and yes, it is work: Taking psychometric tests, undergoing 360-degree assessments, and challenging yourself to absorb and truly make use of feedback all require an ongoing commitment, not to mention constant self-monitoring. But remember the purpose of all this work: to create and sustain an authentic executive presence that will equip you with the type of influence that goes beyond any positional authority you may have.

Authenticity is key. Your executive presence will wear thin if it’s not authentic, not rooted in who you are, and if it takes no account of your values and your aspirations. You want a real, not Potemkin, presence.

Dynamic self-awareness will provide you with the clarity and foresight you need to understand how you’re perceived by others, what impact your behaviors have on others, and what you need to work on to lead others effectively and gain their respect and admiration as you move through your career.

In the next chapter you’ll learn various emotion-regulation strategies that will help you stay cool and poised under pressure, to maintain a strong and reassuring executive presence.