Leadership research has transformed over time, shifting from thinking about leadership as a process for controlling and influencing, to recognizing that effective leaders today empower and inspire. A particularly important development and leadership research is the recognition that leaders and their respective followers create unique dyadic relationships that influence the effectiveness of the leader. Leader-member exchange, or LMX theory, is rooted in a social psychological concept of vertical dyad linkage theory, which examines the relationships between leaders and their subordinates. Perhaps most importantly, LMX highlights how leaders will form different relationships with different subordinates. Leader effectiveness cannot be evaluated from a one size fits all perspective. Leadership research recognizes the complexity of leadership relationships and the importance of both parties in considering leader behaviors. Recent theories of leadership that draw on LMX theory include: transformational, authentic, responsible, ethical, humanistic, and conscious leadership for example and they all address the significance of self-awareness as a leadership skill. Duval and Wicklund are credited with developing objective self-awareness theory in the late 20th century. Their primary finding was that people are not just actors in their own lives, but are also thinkers and observers of their own thoughts. They highlighted that we can evaluate ourselves, our thoughts and behaviors and that through these observations, we are seeking to find consistency among them. Self-awareness therefore, is a way to improve our perspective of ourselves, considering how we might be viewed by others. Conceptually, it makes sense that self-awareness matters for leaders. As a part of a relationship between two people, the more self-aware both parties are, the stronger the relationship itself is likely to be, because self-awareness reduces defensiveness and biased decision-making. Let's consider some research that supports this idea. I'm going to examine these through four categories, the effects of self-awareness on: cognition, emotion, behavior, and overall leader effectiveness. Cognition refers to the way our brain makes decisions. Research demonstrates that improvements in metacognitive awareness, defined as being aware of how we are thinking, can improve decision-making performance. Research also shows that improvements in our self-awareness actually makes us more confident, and results in higher self-esteem. These outcomes matter because effective leaders need to be confident in their abilities in order to inspire others. The science of emotion is fascinating. Understanding the effects of our feelings and our moods, can have dramatic implications for our relationships and behaviors at work. Research demonstrates that increases in self-awareness can lead to better self-regulation and self-control, which are important because of the various pressures and high level responsibilities that leaders encounter. Further, the more self-aware we are, the better we are at engaging and perspective-taking and understanding the emotional states of others. Letting others know we understand their perspective, builds more effective and trusting relationships. Research has demonstrated a strong correlation between high levels of self-awareness and behaviors related to creativity and innovation. Leadership is at its core, reliant on effective problem-solving, which requires creative and innovative thinking. Another important outcome from self-awareness relates to ethical decision-making and behavior. There's evidence to suggest that more self-aware people are less likely to engage in unethical behavior. Heightened self-awareness helps us to consider ourselves in relation to others, and this means we are more likely to consider various stakeholders when making decisions, often leading to more ethical outcomes. Finally, research suggests that leaders with increased self-awareness see improvements in their individual potential, career progression and promotions, leadership effectiveness and follower satisfaction. This all demonstrates that self-awareness helps leaders in their leadership roles, as well as in their own career progression. As we can see from this brief review of research, there's substantial evidence that self-awareness matters for leaders. Now let's consider what may get in the way of developing our self-awareness as leaders. It's not sufficient to know how important self-awareness is, nor to understand how it affects leaders in practice. To build our self-awareness skills, we need to understand the things that get in the way of our ability to observe and understand ourselves. Let's review some issues that act as barriers to our own self-awareness development. Power dynamics are present in all organizations. As we acquire power through promotions and advanced titles or responsibilities, we demonstrate a tendency to reduce our levels of empathy and perspective-taking. When we feel powerful, we may be more likely to talk over others and meetings and to fail to observe socio-emotional cues that others exhibit. Additionally, when we earn more power over time, subordinates may be more likely to praise us to our face, reserving their concerns for conversations where we are not present. While power is not inherently bad, we do need to be cautious of the effects that increases in power, can have on our ability to observe ourselves realistically. As we acquire experience, we store all of that information in our brain. The more experience we have, the more we confirm that particular decisions are good or bad in certain circumstances. Consider any element of your role that you've been doing at least a couple of years. At some point, you stop thinking about it reflectively and you react intuitively because of your experience. If we start to rely on our experience at the expense of considering different perspectives, or recognizing that a given situation may have different variables. This can lead to a decrease in our ability to observe how we're interacting with others. Trust, defined as the feeling of being vulnerable and believing that others will have your best interests at heart, is fundamental to successful relationships at work. When we don't trust those we work with, we build up a barrier of defensiveness to protect ourselves from any actions they may take. These barriers can prevent us from making effective decisions. We may be more likely to rationalize certain ways of thinking or get defensive when people disagree with us. The barriers have a direct effect on our self-awareness. Consider all of your time spent in school and work. Have you ever been taught how to be self-reflective and how to use this introspection to learn more about your own thoughts and behaviors? Probably not, although if the answer is yes, then you are well on your way to becoming a self-aware leader. It is still fairly uncommon to focus on our own socio-emotional learning as we go through primary and secondary school. If you don't have a regular self-reflective practice, it is more difficult to be effectively self-aware. Self-awareness is like a scientific process of discovery for the self. It requires observation, reflection, and action to test out and change behaviors. Instituting a small but consistent, self-reflective practice, can overcome barriers to building our self-awareness. It's worth pointing out that leaders face unique challenges in today's complex, emergent, global, and interconnected environment. This means that it is even more difficult for busy leaders to find time to focus on themselves. One of the reasons we consider self-awareness as an important leadership trait, is because it's often easier said than discovered. Some days it will feel like you are cranking through a to-do list with no end in sight. These are exactly the days when you want to take a moment to see how the challenges of your job are impacting your cognition, emotion, and behavior. Among the demands placed on today's leaders is to increase their own socio-emotional awareness so that they can understand and adapt to others. Recognizing that one of your employees refuses to do a project because he's angry at the way he was treated in a prior meeting and then addressing that underlying anger instead of dismissing it, can facilitate better relationships and make you a more effective leader. Another unique element for today's leaders relates to our reliance on technology. Social media is specifically designed to create an addiction. If our attention is focused on our technology, this can reduce our time to reflect on ourselves and our interactions with others. In this module, we've considered the significance of observing ourselves for the purpose of developing higher self-awareness of how we act, and interact with others. Cultivating our self-awareness as leaders can lead to improved performance and improved relationships in our work environments and this contributes to an overall better work experience.
