In the first article of this two-part series, we covered what self-awareness is and offered tips on how to build it. Here, we will continue to explore how self-awareness can transform your leadership style for the better.
Creating Space To Be Mindful
Meditation, although practiced for centuries in the Eastern world, has auspiciously grown in popularity in Western society and is proving a powerful instrument to nurture self-awareness. The practice is increasingly used to help adopt a healthier lifestyle, regulate emotions to counter stress and anxiety, enhance sleep and rest, and manage pain.
It is beneficial for people to experiment with meditation and alternative practices to see what works for them. However, people get caught up in a rapid rhythm of life powered by human-made expectations focused on producing outcomes. We live in a world that values what gets done and misses the richness and benefit of creating space to decompress, assimilate, clarify and question. Without this mindfulness, your leadership abilities can suffer.
How Multifaceted Self-awareness Translates To Better Leadership
A deeper and more broad sense of self-awareness, and therefore a better understanding about how every person operates, can help any individual lead better. This might look like:
- A better understanding of what underpins human connection. Through our intuition, we determine what helps us to connect — to interact and achieve coherence, harmony and manage tensions in our relationships. Understanding other’s life influences, values, mindsets and behaviors can help leaders deliberately create psychologically safe settings and facilitate nuanced human dynamics in a purposeful way. This often makes it easier for teamwork to occur and to help individuals feel they belong. An incomplete picture is a significant limiting factor on generating, managing and nurturing relationships.
- Being able to identify defense mechanisms. Increased self-awareness and understanding of how humans respond to certain circumstances can also help leaders spot the defense mechanisms that enable individuals to conceal methods they use to feel safe. These mechanisms might include denial, projecting unwanted feelings onto others, avoidance of other people or certain situations, changes in behavior, deflective humor or even dissociation. In a team context, these subtle and, in some cases, deeply entrenched mechanisms can interfere with and inhibit purposeful connection, particularly where people are unaware of these phenomena and their implications.
- Knowing to diversify performance measures. An individualistic paradigm still pervades how businesses introduce, onboard, evaluate, assess and manage employees. This often extends toward rewards and pay and, in many functional areas, is responsible for revenue-generating activity. This leads to direct incentivization of individuals’ contributions or performance. Attributing individual performance can be detrimental to encouraging the more realistic social construct required for people to be productive in the workplace. There can be a brilliant shift within leaders after a day of high-quality conversations with their teams — making meaningful connections and doing deep, constructive thinking together. The change manifests in how they operate, behave, think and interact, leading to impactful progress.
- Investing in collective visibility and shared focus. Paradoxically, when leaders allow the time to stop and envision their journey, determine the best route and check they are clear on as many variables as possible before tacking action or making a decision, it becomes much easier to focus on the few things that maximize their chances of achieving their intended outcome.
Working in individual functions, silos and even at a cross-functional level but with individual motivations drives local optimization, meaning that progress and performance in one part of the business can have a detrimental effect on another part if they are not synchronized or timed appropriately.
Conclusion
Developing a deeper and more granular version of self-awareness as a leader will not only help people better understand the undesirable effects of their own high-stress triggers and self-sabotaging tendencies, it can also help them to recognize the implications for their ability to connect with others and their wider context.
Multifaceted self-awareness can help inform new processes for productivity, identify unhelpful patterns in the workplace and help leaders better support and harness the power of their team members.
