There Is No Real Leadership Growth Without Self-Awareness
9 hours ago
8 min read
But Who Tells Leaders the Truth?
In executive interviews, I often hear leaders describe themselves as strategic thinkers who are well liked by their teams and enjoy excellent working relationships with their colleagues. It always makes me wonder: Would their team members describe them in the same way?
Leaders do not necessarily struggle to see themselves clearly because they lack an interest in self-awareness. Often, they simply do not receive the honest feedback they need to recognize their blind spots. Employees may hesitate to speak up about what bothers them, while colleagues often prefer to avoid uncomfortable situations. As a result, we can develop a perception of ourselves that only partially reflects how others actually experience us.
Yet leadership development does not begin with acquiring more tools, methods, or techniques. It begins when we are willing to question the image we have of ourselves.
But how do we move from superficial self-reflection to genuine self-awareness? When is feedback helpful, when should we consider working with a coach, and when might deeper, potentially therapeutic work be necessary? Above all, how can the insights we gain about ourselves translate into meaningful changes in the way we lead?
Why Don’t We Always See Our Own Behaviour Clearly?
Leaders do not deliberately mislead the people around them. Rather, we tend to interpret our own behaviour primarily from our own perspective. And in leadership positions, it is particularly easy to find ourselves in situations where we receive less and less honest feedback about the impact we have on others.
Employees may not feel comfortable expressing a different point of view. Colleagues often choose their words diplomatically, while senior leaders tend to focus primarily on business results and the achievement of strategic objectives. Moreover, a leader may present a very different version of themselves to senior management, their own team, and their peers.
This can easily create a distorted mirror. A leader may genuinely believe they are open to feedback, while their team feels the need to choose their words carefully. They may see themselves as an empowering leader, while their employees experience constant supervision. They may believe they handle conflict exceptionally well, while others would rather avoid difficult conversations with them altogether.
One of the greatest challenges of leadership self-awareness is that we can easily confuse our intentions with the actual impact we have on others.
Even when our intention is to help, others may feel that we do not trust them. While we may see ourselves as decisive and consistent, others may experience our behaviour as rigid or dismissive.
That is why leadership development requires more than reflecting on how we see ourselves. We also need to understand the experiences of those around us — especially when their perspectives are uncomfortable or contradict the image we have built of ourselves.
And that is where the real work begins.
1. Self-Awareness Is Not the Same as Thinking About Yourself a Lot
Organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich distinguishes between two important dimensions of self-awareness: internal and external self-awareness.
Internal self-awareness refers to how well we understand our own values, motivations, emotions, strengths, and weaknesses.
External self-awareness, on the other hand, is about how well we understand how other people perceive us.
The two do not necessarily go hand in hand. Even if we have a clear picture of how we see ourselves, we may not fully understand the impact we have on those around us.
Eurich’s research also highlights that spending a great deal of time thinking about ourselves does not necessarily make our self-perception more accurate. Self-reflection is valuable when it leads to genuine new insights, rather than simply reinforcing our existing beliefs about ourselves.
Self-awareness, therefore, is not just about looking inward. It also takes courage to be curious about how others experience us — and to take their perspectives seriously, even when they differ from our own self-image.
2. Ask for Feedback — But Not Just the Kind You Want to Hear
Leaders often have few opportunities to receive honest feedback in an environment where the other person genuinely feels safe enough to speak openly. The higher we rise in an organization, the more important it becomes to create these opportunities deliberately.
Instead of simply asking your team whether they are happy with your leadership, ask specific questions focused on your behaviour:
In what situations do I make your work more difficult?
When do you feel that I do not trust you enough?
How do I react when I disagree with you?
What should I do differently to help us work together more effectively?
Is there a recurring reaction or behaviour of mine that you think I may not be aware of?
It is important not to immediately justify or challenge the answers you receive. If you respond defensively to every piece of feedback, you will probably hear less the next time you ask.
Feedback from multiple sources, such as a 360-degree assessment, can help reveal the gaps between our self-perception and how others experience our behaviour. However, an assessment alone will not change the way we lead. Development also requires reflecting on the feedback, setting specific goals, and consciously practising new behaviours.
A 2005 meta-analysis by Smither, London, and Reilly, published in Personnel Psychology, examined changes in performance following multisource feedback. The findings suggest that improvement is not automatic. It depends on how leaders interpret the feedback, how motivated they are to change, and whether they take concrete steps to improve.
3. Work with a Coach on Your Leadership Patterns
Coaching is not simply about giving advice, nor is it about someone telling you how you should lead.
A well-structured executive coaching process gives you the opportunity to step back and look at your own behaviour from a different perspective, question your habitual interpretations, and recognize patterns that repeatedly lead to similar situations.
For example:
Why do I feel that I have to keep everything under control?
Why do I find it difficult to accept that someone else might approach a task differently — or even do it better than I do?
Why do I avoid conflict, or conversely, why do I sometimes react too strongly to it?
Why do I tie my sense of self-worth to my performance?
Why do I find it difficult to ask for help or admit that I feel uncertain about something?
These patterns may be rooted in underlying assumptions such as: “A good leader should always know the answer,” “If I don’t check everything, I’ll lose control,” or “Making mistakes is a sign of incompetence.”
Coaching can help you identify these assumptions, examine whether they serve you, and experiment with new ways of responding.
Research findings are encouraging, too. A 2023 meta-analysis by Nicolau and colleagues examined 20 studies based on randomized controlled trials. The researchers found positive effects of coaching across the outcomes studied, with particularly encouraging results for behavioural change. However, this does not mean that every coaching process will have the same impact on every individual.
When should you consider working with a coach? If you want to work towards a specific leadership goal — such as delegating more effectively, managing conflict better, or communicating more consciously with your team — executive coaching can be a valuable starting point.
4. Sometimes, What You Need Is Not a New Leadership Tool, but Therapeutic Self-Exploration
Some recurring challenges cannot necessarily be resolved in a lasting way through leadership techniques alone.
If, for example, you regularly react disproportionately strongly to criticism, find uncertainty extremely difficult to tolerate, feel a constant need to prove your worth, or repeatedly fall into the same destructive patterns in conflict situations, it may be worth exploring the underlying causes more deeply.
Psychotherapy is not exclusively intended to treat mental health disorders. With the support of a suitably qualified professional, it can also be a way to develop self-awareness, improve emotional regulation, understand relationship patterns, and address recurring difficulties.
Psychodynamic approaches, for example, explore how emotional and relational patterns that are not always conscious can influence our decisions, behaviour, and relationships with others. This perspective is also discussed in the executive coaching literature.
In practice, this might mean not only learning how to delegate more effectively, but also understanding why it feels threatening when you are not in control. Rather than simply learning a conflict management model, you explore why certain behaviours trigger disproportionately strong emotional reactions in you.
It is important to recognize that coaching and psychotherapy are not the same. Coaching primarily focuses on professional goals, development, and behavioural change. Psychotherapy, guided by an appropriately qualified professional, can also help people work through deeper psychological or relational difficulties. If your challenges cause significant emotional distress or extend beyond the scope of professional development, it is worth consulting a psychologist or psychotherapist.
Seeking help is not a sign that you are unsuited to leadership. It is a sign of recognizing that, in some areas, working with an external professional may offer the greatest opportunity for growth.
5. Learn to Pause Between Reaction and Response
Conscious leadership is not just about recognizing your emotions. It is also about learning that you do not have to react to every emotion immediately.
Under pressure, we can easily fall back on familiar behavioural patterns: micromanaging, attacking, withdrawing, procrastinating, or rushing to resolve a situation simply to escape the discomfort of uncertainty.
Practising mindfulness can help us recognize these reactions sooner and create more space for a conscious response.
This does not necessarily require lengthy meditation sessions. You can start with a few simple practices:
Before a difficult meeting, pause for a minute and notice how you are feeling.
During a conflict, recognize when tension is building and resist the urge to respond automatically.
Before making an important decision, separate facts from assumptions and emotional reactions.
At the end of the day, reflect on a situation in which you could have responded differently.
Research on mindfulness and leadership has shown promising results in areas such as stress management, emotional regulation, and more supportive leadership behaviours. However, these findings do not mean that mindfulness works in the same way for every leader or in every situation.
6. Don’t Just Seek to Understand Yourself — Change Your Behaviour
Self-reflection can easily become an end in itself if insight is not followed by action.
Knowing that you tend to micromanage will not automatically make you better at delegating. Recognizing that you avoid conflict will not necessarily make it easier to speak up in a difficult conversation.
That is why insights need to be followed by concrete behavioural experiments.
For example, if you realize that your need for control leads you to hold on to too many decisions, try delegating a task the following week, setting clear objectives and decision-making boundaries without automatically intervening in how the work gets done.
If you tend to become defensive when receiving criticism, ask two clarifying questions before responding to the next piece of feedback.
If you habitually solve every problem for your team, ask, “What options do you see?” — and give them time to answer.
Then ask for feedback to find out whether others have noticed the change.
Self-awareness becomes a genuine leadership competency when it not only helps you understand yourself better, but also translates into a change in your behaviour.
Leadership Development Begins When You Are Willing to Question Your Own Behaviour
Leadership self-awareness is not a one-off task, nor is it a state we achieve once and then tick off a list.
It is an ongoing process: seeking feedback, recognizing recurring patterns, understanding our reactions, seeking professional support when needed, and consciously practising new behaviours.
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