Insight: The Importance Of Self-Awareness For Strong Leadership
Welcome to the Outside Performance newsletter. Each week, I write about topics, people, and ideas that I find interesting and inspirational. Following my own curiosity to ignite the spark in others. Join by subscribing below:
In today’s edition:
Quote - Action Is Everything
Leadership Stories - Max De Pree
Insight - The Importance Of Self-Awareness For Strong Leadership
Quote - Action Is Everything
“We cannot become what we want by remaining what we are.” - Max De Pree
If we want to change anything, action is everything.
Change is essential for our progress. If we want to grow - whether in our businesses or own our lives - we must embrace change and let go of our old habits. There is a level of discomfort we must endure in order to achieve transformation.
Yet, if we take steps beyond our current state, we will put ourselves in a better position to grow and reap the rewards that change can bring.
[Read more about Max De Pree in this week’s Leadership Stories 👇]
Leadership Stories
Max De Pree
Max De Pree was the CEO of Herman Miller, a furniture company that grew from a family firm into an international business.
The Herman Miller Furniture Company was formed in 1923, when D.J De Pree (Max’s father) renamed the Michigan Star Furniture Company into Herman Miller. Max’s father had started at the company in 1910 as a clerk; he was 18 years old. From his father, Max understood the power and benefits that a focus on change can bring.
As a leader, Max looked at change in its broadest sense - not just of the business, its products and service lines - but in relation to the most important aspect of any company: its people.
In his 1989 book, ‘Leadership is an Art’, Max De Pree focused on the human aspects of leadership, emphasising values like service, integrity, and the importance of people in organisations.
When De Pree wrote his book, he was in the later stages of his career, having played a significant part in transforming Herman Miller from a modest family business into an international leader in design and innovation. His leadership philosophy was deeply influenced by his time at the company, where he fostered an open, employee-centric culture. He wanted Herman Miller to be a company where creativity thrived, not just in its designs but in terms of how the company treated its workers - with respect, autonomy and a shared sense of purpose.
This week’s quote from De Pree is a call to embrace the discomfort of transformation. Companies - and individuals - cannot achieve their highest potential by holding onto the old ways of working even if for the moment, those old ways are working; the focus must be on improving. To become a better leader or organisation, one must be constantly questioning one’s behaviours, assumptions, strategies, and step into new, sometimes uncertain territory.
Truly transforming our companies and ourselves so that we remain relevant and resilient for the future requires the courage to face change head-on, knowing that progress and success will demand it.
Personal and professional growth only happens when we are willing to let go of what is familiar and move towards what is necessary for future success.
Insight
The Importance Of Self-Awareness For Strong Leadership
How well do you know yourself?
Not just in terms of everyday things - like the material things you like, or the favourite foods you want to eat - but in terms of your ability to understand and recognise your own values, behaviours, thoughts, feelings and emotions. In my time as a senior leader, emotional intelligence - or EQ - has always been one of the most important aspects of my leadership. In challenging, novel, or unexpected sets of circumstances, the ability to understand my strengths vs the team; to understand how the team are reacting, managing and coping; and the ability to ‘read the room’ and galvanise opinion - these have all been critical to getting through the more testing periods in my working life.
In many of the instances where high EQ has been necessary, the team have often thrived on the experience, in circumstances where they could otherwise have easily ended up ‘burned out’.
Here are three pieces of insight I have garnered through my career:
Before We Understand Others, We Must Understand Ourselves
Management may sometimes be a one-way street that focuses on skills and knowledge; leadership is not.
We can’t begin to properly understand others until we really have an idea about ‘who we are’ on a deeper level. Leadership is about understanding how to get the team to effectively work together, and this has to start with understanding your own strengths, values and behaviours first.
The leader must get the best out of the team on the bad days, as well as when the waters are calmer. It is more difficult to do that without understanding what innate personal strengths you are bringing to the team. As an individual, I have understood that some of my core strengths are my ability to maintain perspective and joining the dots; to think of new ways of looking at the problem; to be interested in how others are thinking through the problem and seeing where they are struggling; and my ability to identify the core strengths of others and what types of work they will not thrive on. This latter point also contributes to being able to understand my own weaknesses, and to give certain aspects of the work to those other members of the team who will thrive on them. The reason this is important is that the team can maintain high pressure work for bursts without burning out; they will actually thrive on the pressure, as each member is working to their own strengths.
When we understand our own strengths, we understand ourselves more fully beyond our qualifications, skills and knowledge. A quick way to understand your own strengths is to do a strengths assessment - the VIA Character Survey is a good one - it will likely throw up a few surprises! Our own ‘superpowers’ come so naturally to us that we don’t often acknowledge them or are sometimes not even aware of all of them.
By starting with your own self-awareness, you will become a much clearer leader with a strengthened ability to sustainably and positively get the most out of your team when the work level heats up.
Be Emotionally Tuned-In
If we understand our own strengths, we can be more tuned-in to the needs of others.
When a work crisis hits, we can often feel like we want to retreat into our own thinking-worlds to assess the situation from our perspective; sometimes this can be to the exclusion of others. And this is where the problems start, as your team feel that you are not valuing their input, you are distanced from how they are coping and managing, and/or you start to develop blind spots due to your own lack of strength in some areas.
As human beings, we all want to be heard. For someone to properly listen to what we are saying, thinking or feeling, this can really elevate connection and build relationships into much stronger forms. However, many leaders feel that they either don’t want to be seen as someone without the answer, or worse as someone who is temporarily feeling vulnerable. Yet, it is at these precise moments that leaders should be engaging with their team, seeking their opinion and benefitting from the strengths of the whole team. The team will feel more involved, heard, trusted, and valued.
So, we need to be emotionally tuned-in to the needs of others, particularly in times of crisis. It is easy to feel that you want to retreat to find the solution, but this will just isolate you from your team. In addition, your team will feel that they don’t have value to add and cannot support you - this doesn’t help contribute to their own self-worth and will likely demotivate the entire team.
Showing vulnerability as a leader by engaging them where you don’t always have the answers will not cause you problems with respect; quite the opposite, it will help reinforce that you are human and you value your team highly…and that is a huge motivating factor for all of us.
Reading The Room And Galvanising Opinion
As leaders, we get paid for making decisions.
We are often removed from the day-to-day ‘doing’. Yet, without self-awareness we may struggle to ‘read the room’ on certain decisions - either regarding our team or in higher levels of governance - and this can cause our performance to suffer.
In order for there to be high performance levels in any organisation, we need to
understand the different opinions,
listen to and value those opinions; and
galvanise those opinions so that all are aligned in the direction of travel.
Lack of strategic alignment - from top to bottom - is one of the main reasons why teams and organisations fail to perform, leading to disjointed efforts, wasted resources, and missed opportunities. Individuals, teams or the organisation as a whole are invested in conflicting goals without a unified direction.
A team or company is really just a collection of people and, whilst it might have products and services that it sells, nothing would exist without the people involved in generating activity. If you have an inability to temperature check your team or organisation’s feelings, emotions, thoughts and opinions, there will be conflict and a lack of belief in the worthiness of the goal or cause. As a leader if you are unable to pick up on dissenting opinion, non-verbal cues and lack of real buy-in vs stated buy-in, you will have difficulty in aligning everyone behind what you want to achieve.
Having a high level of, or improving your own, self-awareness will help you better understand the thoughts, feelings and emotions of others, which is a critical part of galvanising others behind a plan that they will feel invested in.
That’s it for this edition, I hope you enjoyed it.
Please remember to subscribe if you want to keep up to date on future editions:
Also, if you like the Outside Performance newsletter, please share it amongst your network: