Comments on: Self-Awareness Powers Great Leadership

By: Steve Hill

Steve Hill — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 03:32:14 +0000

Hi Trish,
As with the others, I couldn’t agree more. I came across your blog looking for reinforcement in this area to help educate the “blind”. We have developed an holistic experiential program that specifically focuses on Self Intelligence, launched last year in New Zealand.
In a previous business we spent a good part of it working with senior exec. and management teams and the lack of self awareness was rampant. It seems to be the higher up the rank the worse it got.
The other interesting point is that sometimes it is the senior manager that is saying that others have the problem with self awareness when it is they themselves who have the problem.
So 6 years ago we started to research and develop the JOLT Challenge program.
Self awareness also tends to get bundled in with Emotional Intelligence thanks to Daniel Goleman, which is unfortunate as it is more than that.
It is amazing what self awareness combined with self management tools can do. So far we have broken down silos, improved engagement, improved wellness, taken the dis out of disfunctional teams, enhanced leadership capability. The list goes on, yet we are still confronted with with barriers in organisations, not to mention gate keepers and red tape. If you have any knowledge on studies done in this area I would love to read them. We are using the same program with 18-25year old cancer sufferers to do a randomised study on improved quality of life which should be interesting.

By: Self-awareness an Important Key to Developing Leaders | Leadership Coach David Ferrers

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 09:06:12 +0000

[...] by Leadership Coach, David Ferrers I just read a most interesting and thought-provoking article on the HR Ringleaders Blog. The title of the article is Self-Awareness Powers Great Leadership. [...]

By: Anne Perschel

Anne Perschel — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 11:09:44 +0000

Trish – Another salute the Self-Awareness flag that you raise. Without it the Emperor is naked, doesn’t know it, and fails to remedy the situation by getting dressed.

On the more serious side, when a client’s assessment results indicate that he/she rates himself higher than others across the board, I see red flags.

Willingness to look at Self precedes ability. I’ve learned to declare up front in the coaching agreement that if there is a problem in either willingness or capability for change I will talk to the client first. If nothing changes I then recommend ending the coaching engagement. It is not a good investment of the company’s money, the client’s time or mine.

I’ve appreciated a number of your posts and will return.

Anne Perschel aka@bizshrink

By: Lisa Rosendahl

Lisa Rosendahl — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:37:32 +0000

Trish, I agree totally. Identifying the right people for leadership is critical. The wrong people are problematic on so many fronts.

By: R. J. Morris

R. J. Morris — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:20:58 +0000

Great post. This is what led to the development of multi-rater feedback…trying to give unaware managers some understanding of how they impacted those around them. Agree with the comments above; some folks don’t care and think they can just plow ahead. This should be a career derailer, but some organizations will let talent impact others negatively, if they are really good at certain tasks. For baseball fans, this is “Let Manny be Manny.” If you are trying to build a culture, however, this is short term thinking.