I recently wrote about the different leadership patterns I was hearing about as I eased back into work - a volatile mood that sets the (not so positive) tone for a whole team, the leader who can't find the empathy button, the one who's certain they're right and the one running what looks very much like a power trip.
I said then that I had some thoughts on what's really going on underneath all this; I’m sharing the first of those thoughts and this is much more uncomfortable than I expected it to be - it’s all about self-awareness. As I’ve been thinking about this whole topic, it’s become clearer that self-awareness definitely gets harder to access exactly at the point we need it most (and especially when things shift rapidly or are uncertain).
Image: Markus Spiske, unsplash
In all the reading I’ve done around self-awareness, it’s often positioned as a trait that’s pretty fixed - it’s something you either have or you don't. But research cited by Harvard Business Review suggests that only around 15% of people are genuinely self-aware, with very little correlation between how competent people believe themselves to be and how competent they actually are. That gap doesn't sound like it’s fixed to me.
Instead, it sounds like something that shifts and I suspect it moves most under pressure, when our older, faster, embedded patterns of behaviour take over and there's just less spare capacity, time or opportunity to notice ourselves doing ‘the thing’.
I'm testing this theory on myself in real time. My personal circumstances over the past few months have been shifting rapidly and have been more demanding than usual. I’ve noticed that my own self-awareness hasn’t shown up when I needed it - I've had to go looking for it. That’s led to a few things I've been noticing on the way:
Time matters more than I expected. It’s not just time in an abstract sense, but it’s the time gap between something happening and me actually being able to name what just happened. Under pressure, that gap used to close to nothing. But just lately I'd find myself reacting, and only much later - sometimes days later – I’d realise what had actually been going on for me in that moment.
Self-compassion seems to be doing more work than I would have guessed. If I use every mistake as evidence that I’m failing, I stop looking at my own behaviour - it's too uncomfortable. Slowing down and thinking about failure as ‘First Attempt In Learning’ is helping me to stop and examine what’s happening and what I’m learning.
Pausing when my own behaviour surprises me, has become really useful. If I catch myself reacting in a way that doesn't feel right for me – if I’m sharper, flatter or more withdrawn than I’m used to in myself for example (this has happened more often recently) – I’m catching myself and stopping. That ‘out of the ordinary’ feeling is telling me something.
It’s made me wonder if some of what gets labelled a leadership ‘problem’- the volatility, the certainty, the power trip that creates disruption in the workplace - sometimes starts here; with someone who's lost sight of what they're doing in the moment, especially when they’re grappling with a heck of a lot of change or uncertainty. And, they’re just working too fast to pick it up.
I'm still working out what comes after all this noticing, so that’s the subject for my next post.
Where have you noticed the gap between who you mean to be and how you're actually showing up?