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AcademiWales

Self-Awareness A core skill for successful leaders

#PublicServiceWales

sowing seeds

Pages

3 Introduction to Self-Awareness

4 What is Self-Awareness? Why is Self-Awareness important?

7 Why we might not be as self-aware as we could be

9 Steps to Self-Awareness success

10 What Next? Developing your self-awareness

14 Conclusion

15 References

Contents

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Introduction to Self-AwarenessPublic services in Wales employ thousands of people. Each person is unique and works with other unique individuals to deliver our services. How we think, feel and behave, have a major impact on how we experience the workplace, how good we feel about being there and how we contribute to it. It is therefore not surprising that the quality of our working relationships has a direct impact on the quality of the services on offer. The better we work together, the better and safer the services delivered.

What can we do to make the workplace experience a really positive one for ourselves and others? What will help us to perform at our best, stay well under challenging conditions and enable others to do the same? To find some of the answers to these questions, we must first know ourselves and understand the impact we have.

This edition of Sowing Seeds provides an overview of what self-awareness means, why it is important, why we might not be as self-aware as we need to be and what can be done to develop our self-awareness as leaders.

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What is Self-Awareness? Psychologists Shelley Duval and Robert Wicklund started writing about self-awareness in their positive psychology programme Self-Awareness Matters (1972), and proposed the following:

When we focus our attention on ourselves, we evaluate and compare our current behaviour to our internal standards and values. We become self-conscious as objective evaluators of ourselves.

It is important to notice that they used the words ‘objective evaluators’. Self-awareness is not about remonstrating with ourselves that we could have done better, or that by thinking or behaving in a certain way that we have let ourselves down. It is about being able to identify our emotions when we feel them, to know what is causing that emotion and how we would normally respond or behave as a result of feeling that way.

Why is Self-Awareness important? If we are self-aware, we can use our knowledge of ourselves to develop a minute pause in our behaviour at the moment we feel a particular emotion. This pause allows us to rapidly process information and to choose the most appropriate response for the situation. This might depend on what we want to achieve in that particular moment or in the longer term. If we can’t pause, we can’t choose, we can only react. We don’t, however, have to be at the effect of our emotions, for example, if we feel threatened, we don’t have to react as the primitive part of our brain is hard-wired to do, we don’t actually have to go on the offensive, freeze or back away even though our brain has prepared us to do just that. Rather, even though our heart might be racing and we feel tense, we can pause and use the knowledge that we are feeling threatened as valuable information and stay alert to make a good decision about what happens next. This takes us into the realm of self-management which can enhance our performance in a wide range of situations e.g. negotiation, influencing, decision making, in fact, any situation in which we have contact with other people.

A number of researchers have shown self-awareness to be a crucial trait of successful leaders. One such study called What Predicts Executive Success? was carried out by Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations and Green Peak Partners. They examined 72 executives at public and private companies with revenues from $50 million to $5 billion, it was found that:

A high self-awareness score was the strongest predictor of overall success.

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Being able to reflect on our interactions, on the thoughts, feelings and behaviours they invoked in ourselves and others, and being able to learn from this experience and adapt, is what separates good leaders from great leaders.

In 1990, Solovey and Mayer described emotional intelligence as,

The ability to monitor one’s own and other’s feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and action.

Our self-awareness combined with self-management enables us to play to our strengths and to acknowledge our weaknesses, not in a judgmental way, but in a way that helps us to take the next positive step.

However, the importance of self-awareness was really brought into the public domain in 1995 when Daniel Goleman wrote Emotional Intelligence. One of the key aspects is that when our self-awareness is well developed, we can be honest about ourselves with ourselves and others. We are more likely to practice self-reflection and thoughtfulness which enable us to act with conviction and authenticity.

In his book Leadership Plain and Simple (2012), Steve Radcliffe emphasises the importance of having relationships that are strong enough or good enough to get the job done. He emphasises the difference between being personally engaging and actually being engaged with those around you on whom you depend to deliver results. It is one thing to be good company, it is another to be able to work well with others. Self-awareness is key to being able to engage effectively with people to achieve the desired outcome.

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Tania Singer, the director of the social neuroscience department at the Max Tania Singer, the director of the social neuroscience department at the Max Planck Society for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, said:

You need to understand your own feelings to understand the feelings of others.

(Harvard Business Review 2017)

She goes on to explain that when we understand others we can choose to behave more compassionately towards them which research shows increases employee trust and loyalty. The opposite is also true, a lack of compassion will erode trust and loyalty and make it much more difficult to develop good performance. To maintain the trust of others, our behaviour needs to be congruent with our expressed values and motives, which means we must first be aware of what they are (Goleman D, Boyatzis R and McKee A (2002).

Lolly Daskal, an executive coach with Fortune 500 boards and CEOs, uses this knowledge of people in her approach to leadership coaching:

We think leadership is an external quality, but it is and always has been an internal quality. Leaders aren’t great because they have power, but because they can empower others.

She talks about developing and being aware of your ‘internal compass’. She poses the questions: Who am I? This is the start of understanding yourself. It will become your own personal GPS that will always direct you. What do I stand for? In this context it is your solid set of values that will help you to navigate through tough situations rather than meeting everything head on as though for the first time. What am I willing to make sacrifices for? If we know who we are, and we persevere, we can use our experience of perseverance to help others to face their own challenges. It is not about being perfect, it is about following your inner compass to do what is right, not what is easy.

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Why we might not be as self-aware as we could be

• Communication – If we have grown up having conversations about emotions, their causes and effects, we have an advantage because we are learning to reflect at an earlier stage, but for many, this learning comes later. Such conversations are especially valuable if they include how our behaviour is affecting others, as this develops our empathy and our ability to relate to another person’s perspective. This type of learning takes place in the frontal lobe of our brain. In the elderly, this area starts to shrink and therefore we might see older people speaking and behaving in a way they would not have done when they were younger. They are still aware of the social rules, but their understanding and appreciation of the impact of their own behaviour is reducing which affects their self-management.

• The Experiencing Self and the Remembering Self – Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, identified that we have the experiencing self and the remembering self. The experiencing self is how we feel as things happen and the remembering self is how we feel when we remember what happened. They only share a 50% correlation. This difference can have a significant impact on the stories we tell ourselves and others and the decisions we make individually and jointly. Most of the time we might not even notice this is happening. This is why being able to reflect on our emotions as close to the point in time when we are experiencing them is so helpful. It gives us less time for the memory to change and therefore a better chance to more accurately assess how we were impacted by whatever took place and how and why we responded as we did. Ideally, it would take place in the pause before we react. This ability is something we can develop alongside our growing self-awareness.

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• Confirmation Bias – The idea that in order to develop our self-awareness we simply need to look back on our behaviour, analyse what happened and learn from it might sound easy. However, given what we know about the experiencing self and the remembering self, it is not so simple. In addition, most of us are prone to seeking evidence that substantiates our beliefs about ourselves and how we act on the values we hold. The longer the interval between the event and the reflection, the more evidence we can find. This confirmation bias can get in the way of our self-awareness, as can our unwillingness to seek candid feedback from others. After all, what might be said that we might not want to hear? The information provided might challenge our view of ourselves that we have so much invested in. However, seeking just this type of feedback, which might prove us wrong, is exactly what we need to do to overcome confirmation bias (Sharam Hesmat, 2015).

• Conscious and Unconscious Competence – Even if we are fortunate to be fairly competent at reading ourselves and others and we manage most situations reasonably well, we still might not be aware of why things work out the way they do. This lack of conscious competence limits our ability to develop further and to help others to develop their self-awareness and emotional intelligence. This is a significant opportunity loss to ourselves, our colleagues and our organisations. The Conscious Competence Learning Model has been claimed by many with seminal contributions as far back as Socrates and Confucius. It helps us to understand the stages of learning a skill and the emotions that can accompany the different stages. It focuses on two factors our consciousness (awareness) and our competence (skill level).

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Steps to Self-Awareness successStep 1 – Unconsciously incompetent – we don’t know that we don’t have this skill, or what its benefits are, or that we need to learn it. We are blissfully unaware and our confidence might be exceeding our ability.

Step 2 – Consciously incompetent – we know that we don’t have this skill. We can feel demoralised and lose confidence because we are motivated to have it. We might feel like giving up, so it is important to stay positive and persist with the learning.

Step 3 – Consciously competent – we know that we have this skill. The more we practice it, the more skilled and confident we become. We still need to concentrate but it is becoming more automatic.

Step 4 – Unconsciously competent – we don’t know that we have this skill. We don’t have to think about it and we feel confident of success, it is effortless. Step 4 comes with a health warning. Having spent time and effort progressing to step 4, we can become complacent and fail to pay attention to new standards, approaches or opportunities thereby becoming out of date, stale or developing bad habits. We can fall back to earlier stages, even to being unconsciously incompetent. After many years of use and discussion by a broad range of people across a number of disciplines, there is a growing consensus around a 5th step.

Step 5 – Conscious Mastery – we have a high level of competence that we choose to remain aware of, to keep current and to hone further. It requires us to be self-critical and humble and we do this for the greater good rather than for our own individual success. We can explain to others what it is, why it matters and how we do it. We are consciously aware at all times of what unconscious or sub-conscious abilities we are using, and we are able to analyse, adapt and augment our activity in other ways.

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Conscious Mastery

Unconsciously competent

Consciously competent

Consciously incompetent

Unconsciously incompetent

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What Next? Developing your self-awarenessGiven how important self-awareness is and how difficult it can be to accurately assess how good we are at it, these are some things that might help.

• Academi Wales’ ‘Leading in the Welsh Public Service – a leadership behaviours framework for senior leaders’, (https://academiwales.gov.wales/go/f1beot). Learning and Self-Awareness are at the core of this framework, along with Drive and Resilience. These core behaviours enable leaders to maintain a high level of performance over time and support their well-being. All of the behaviours in the framework are shown at three levels of development: Efficient, Effective and Exemplary. You may like to reflect on the enclosed self-awareness section and see where you have strengths or areas for development.

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• Adopt a Growth Mind-Set – we can choose to adopt what Dweck (2008) calls a ‘growth mind-set’ and hold the belief that with effort, determination and experience we can grow and develop. However, Dweck describes a ‘fixed mind-set’, where a person believes that who and what they are is already determined and that they have to strive for success and happiness with what they have. Fortunately, this does not have to be the case.

Dweck describes how studies consistently show that people find it very difficult to estimate their performance and their abilities:

But it was those with the fixed mind-set who accounted for almost all the inaccuracy. The people with the growth mind-set were amazingly accurate.

To be able to own our strengths and weaknesses is incredibly enabling, we can make better choices about what development opportunities will actually benefit our growth and we can choose to see setbacks as opportunities to learn how to do things differently in the future. To find out if you have a growth mind-set or fixed mind-set, take the test at https://prezi.com/bnytjmcwo44w/httpmindsetonlinecomtestyourmindsetstep1php/.

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This view is supported by Lolly Daskal in her book The Leadership Gap: What Gets between You and Your Greatness (2017). She identified the leadership gap as being:

This is what separates the best from the rest: Great leaders have the ability to rethink who they are – they are open to learning, changing and growing as leaders.

Thus emphasising the importance of adopting Dweck’s growth mind-set. Being self-aware enough to identify our strengths and preferences is invaluable when aiming for a high performance for ourselves and others. Knowing how our strengths and preferences play out and what happens when we overplay them, or knowing that we don’t have the tools in our toolbox to meet the challenges we face, means we can take focused action to improve.

• Know your Strengths – Tom Rath, in his book Strengths Finder 2.0 (2007) demonstrates how important knowing our strengths is. Over a period of 10 years, Gallup surveyed more than 10 million people about employee engagement. Only one third strongly agreed with the statement – “At work I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.” The cost of not being able to use their strengths was made evident in a later survey of 1000 people who “strongly disagreed” or “disagreed” with the statement. Not a single person reported themselves to be emotionally engaged on the job.

In contrast, those who did have the “opportunity to focus on their strengths everyday are six times as likely to be engaged in their jobs and more than three times as likely to report having an excellent quality of life in general.”

How good are we at recognising our strengths and our own level of engagement? How aware are we of the strengths of the people we lead? Are we using them effectively?

As self-awareness is a building block for empathy, how good are we at recognising disengagement in others? The table below shows the impact of how we focus our attention on the strengths and weaknesses of the people we lead.

If your manager primarily: The chances of you being actively disengaged are:

Ignores you 40%Focuses on your weaknesses 22%

Focuses on your strengths 1%

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• Seek Feedback – consider a range of people’s perspectives bearing in mind that what you receive is their perception and interpretation of your behaviour. This is very useful to know because that is what you have to work with. You can’t change people but you can choose to give them a different experience of you, which gives them the option to respond in a different way (Connors and Smith, 1999). As you understand more about yourself and others, you will become better at recognising authentic and balanced feedback and be able to provide it for others. It will also help you to identify your strengths and blind spots. The latter being what others know about how you behave but that you are unaware of, or believe yourself to be, doing something different. Sometimes the positive impact we are intending to have, is experienced differently by those affected.

• 360 degree feedback has been shown to improve the self-awareness of leaders. It can strengthen the commitment to make any behaviour changes that a leader may have only been thinking about until receiving the feedback. Feedback is typically from their line manager, peers, direct reports and others.

• Self-Reflection – some diagnostics only require you to fill them in but they can be useful. They can help you to gain insight as to why some things feel more natural and easy whilst others might require greater effort or might not feel so comfortable to do. If the latter, you might avoid them or do them less often than is possibly needed. Diagnostics such as MBTI steps 1 and 2 and Facet 5 identify your preferences for operating in the world, whilst personality profiles such as 16pf identify personality traits. The Strengths Finder questionnaire by Tom Rath and similar diagnostics will help you to identify how your preferences are showing up too. Speak to your workforce / organisation development / learning and development colleagues to see what they can offer you. We can change the way we behave quite quickly if we choose to put the effort in even though our preferences and traits will remain relatively stable over time.

• Identify a trusted colleague whose opinion you value and ask them to feedback on your performance in meetings you both attend. How did you come across? How well did you listen to others? Did you behave in a way that was congruent with what they know of you as a person? How did you handle X, Y, Z? What did you do to help / hinder the progress of a discussion or a decision?

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Work with Others• A coach – Coaching provides you with protected time to share your reflections with

another person in a safe environment. The support and challenge provided by the coach helps you to understand yourself and others more clearly so that you can make better decisions about how you would like to move forward in your thinking, feeling and actions.

• A mentor – a mentor brings expertise and personal experience of working in a similar context to yourself. They are likely to have negotiated their journey to a position more senior than your own. This can provide you with a backdrop against which to explore your current challenges and to receive an alternative or supporting view about why things are as they are and to help you navigate your own way forward. A mentor might be able to introduce you to new learning experiences and networks.

Conclusion In public services as in all realms of society, the level of self-awareness amongst people varies greatly and those who are prepared to be open, practice and learn, will be able to develop this crucial skill. In seeking to know ourselves better we can better empathise with others and lead in a more compassionate way. This in turn can make it easier to build positive relationships with people and enable everyone to achieve a higher level of performance. With more being asked of us all the time, it is even more important than ever that we understand ourselves and each other and the impact we’re having.

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References The following sources were reviewed in the preparation of this edition and some have been cited directly.

Connors, R. and Smith, T. (1999) Journey to the Emerald City: Achieve a Competitive Edge by Creating a Culture of Accountability. Prentice Hall Press

West, M et al, (2017) Caring to change: How compassionate leadership can stimulate innovation in health care. The King’s Fund

Mayer, J., Salovey, P. and Caruso, D. (2002). The Mayor, Salovey Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT). Toronto: MHS

Antonio Damasio, (1994) Emotions and decision making. Putnam New York

Caruso, D. R. and Rees, L. T. (2018) A Leader’s Guide to Solving Challenges with Emotional Intelligence. EI Skills Group

Daskal Lolly, 2017, The Leadership Gap: What Gets Between You and Your Greatness, Portfolio/Penguin, New York

Duval, S and Wicklund R. A., (1972) A Theory of Objective Self Awareness, Academic Press, New York

Dweck, Carol. S. (2008) Mindset, the new psychology of success – how we can learn to fulfil our potential, Ballantine Books, Random House, New York

Goleman D, Boyatzis R and McKee A (2002) The New Leaders: transforming the art of leadership into the science of results, Little, Brown

Goleman D (1995) Emotional Intelligence, Bantam Books, New York

Goleman, Daniel (2006) Social Intelligence, the new science of human relationships. Hutchinson, London

2017 Harvard Business Review Emotional Intelligence Series: Resilience, Harvard Business Review Press

2017 Harvard Business Review Emotional Intelligence Series: Empathy, Harvard Business Review Press

Green Peak Partners, Nice Guys Finish First https://www.amanet.org/articles/new-study-shows-nice-guys-finish-first/

Daniel H. Pink (2009) Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us, Riverhead Books New York

Radcliffe Steve (2nd Edn 2012) Leadership Plain and Simple, Pearson, Harlow, England

Tom Rath (2007) Strengths Finder 2.0, Gallup Press, New York

Tom Rath and Barry Conchie (2008) Strengths Based Leadership: Great People, Teams and Why People Follow, Washington, DC: Gallup Press

23-24 in Sarah Robb O’Hagan, with Greg Lichtenberg (2017) Extreme You: Step Up. Stand Out. Kiss Ass. Repeat, Harper Business, Harper Collins

https://knowingselfknowingothers.co.uk/?utm_source=Opportunities%20Bulletin&utm_campaign=ed294a732b-BULLETIN_OCT18_ENG&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_463c8d8eae-ed294a732b-246870789 Website written by Sharam Hesmat (2015) Addiction – a behavioural economic perspective, Routledge, New York

Shahram Heshmat Ph.D. (2015) What is confirmation bias? https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/science-choice/201504/what-is-confirmation-bias, Psychology Today

Daniel Kahneman (2010) https://www.ted.com/ The riddle of experience vs. memory, TED

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to those who contributed to the research in such an open and candid way.

Sowing Seeds: Self-Awareness – a core skill for successful leaders

Written by: Glynis Hudson, Leadership Development

Edited by: Paul Schanzer, Interim Director, Academi Wales, 2020

© Crown copyright 2020 WG39628 Digital ISBN 978-1-80038-321-0 Print ISBN 978-1-80038-320-3

Mae’r ddogfen yma hefyd ar gael yn Gymraeg / This document is also available in Welsh.