A popular study from the University of Queensland highlights that being seen as an authentic leader takes more than knowing yourself. To gain support, leaders need to show that they understand both who they are as individuals and how they belong to the group they lead.
Acquiring awareness isn’t easy, yet decades in the field have taught us that the exercise is not only important, it’s critical for leaders to transform from reactive and task-focused to strategic and visionary if they’re to succeed.
Self-aware leaders carry significant advantages that enable them to navigate different kinds of environments and situations with confidence and ease:
- They incorporate self-knowledge into their development plans, empowering them to reach their goals
- They identify what they need to change about their approach to influence the success of the team and the organisation
- They have a greater sense of purpose about why and how they’re leading their team or organisation
Dr Tasha Eurich’s groundbreaking research in the field found that only 15% of people demonstrated true self-awareness, yet 85% of the people asked in the same survey felt there were self-aware!
That means there’s tremendous blindspots room for growth in this area.
Most leaders come to the table with a good understanding of their likes, dislikes, what they value in life and what they’d like to achieve (or perhaps only 15% of them, keeping Dr Eurich in mind). This is a good start, yet navigating the gap between reactive and visionary leadership requires understanding yourself on a deeper level.
Along with self-awareness, organisational psychologist, Dr Tanya Boyd (Insights Thought Leadership Lead), refers to a second important type of awareness for leaders which is other-awareness, or awareness of the strengths, challenges, hopes, fears and dreams of those around you.
Both sides of this awareness coin, self- and other- awareness, are equally important to leadership success.
Explore how Insights leadership development solution helps turn
awareness into practical actions.
How to gain awareness of yourself and others
At Insights, we use a four-colour model to help you understand yourself and others.
The four colours or ‘energies’ have distinct characteristics that represent your most natural ways of behaving. Everyone has a preferred mix of all four colours. It's this mix that creates your unique personality and influences how you react to certain people, situations and challenges.
Good day
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Bad day
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The four colour energies give you and your colleagues a shared language for discussing working preferences. They can help you recognise what comes naturally, understand differences and explore where adapting your approach could help.
Consider a day of shifting priorities and urgent decisions. Someone drawing on Fiery Red energy may want to act quickly and maintain momentum, while someone drawing on Cool Blue energy may want to examine the detail before committing. Both approaches have value; the challenge is making room for what the situation needs.
A manager with a preference for Cool Blue energy, for example, might ask colleagues to share key information before a decision-making meeting. Explaining this need gives them time to prepare and helps others understand how to work with them. Equally, a leader who prefers to move quickly could pause to invite questions before agreeing the next step.
The aim is not to label people or assume how they will respond. It is to use awareness of your own preferences, alongside feedback from others, to make more deliberate choices about how you lead.
Self-awareness in action
Shane Murphy Goldsmith of Liberty Hill Foundation in Los Angeles encountered this gap between intention and impact when she introduced Insights Discovery to her team, starting with herself.
The programme uses a personal profile to help people explore their colour energy preferences and how their behaviour may come across to others. For Shane, some of that feedback was difficult to accept. Her profile suggested that her direct approach and high expectations could sometimes be experienced as harsh or overbearing.
This was not how she intended to lead, or how she thought others saw her. An exercise with her team helped her consider a different perspective:
The most revelatory moment was when I did an exercise with my team and we all put a post-it on each other’s back and indicated what colour we thought people led with. Most people gave me Fiery Red and I couldn’t believe they knew this about me and I didn’t. These people work with me every day and they know me. Having this perspective, I took it more seriously and, once I looked at it with more open-mindedness, I could see the whole picture about how I was showing up.
Shane’s experience is not unique and it was because she had the courage to embrace the reality of how her behaviour was impacting her environment that she was able to change herself and her environment for the better.
Discover your colour energy preferences
Take a look at the colour energy wheel and the bullet points below. Which colour energies do you relate to most strongly?
Accepting how others may perceive you in the workplace will help you consider how others are showing up too, so you can better adapt your responses.
Viewing your workplace colleagues through the lens of the colour energies
We can’t always change the issues that arise in the office, but we can certainly reduce the amount of chaos, stress and miscommunication that can occur between people.
This level of awareness and the mutual understanding it generates, is what fuels breakthroughs when you’re fighting those fires. This is why self-awareness is the most important factor in becoming a visionary leader.
Exercise: Which colour energy best reflects how you act on a good day and on a bad day?
- Looking at the Insights Discovery colour energy wheel again, which primary and secondary behaviours do you feel best describe how you are on a good day and on a bad day?
- Now show the diagram to your colleagues. Ask them which primary and secondary behaviours they feel best describe you on a good day and on a bad day.
Good day
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Bad day
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How to integrate your self-awareness into a leadership model
Becoming a visionary leader means bringing the four manifestations of leadership into balance. Now that you’re aware of your colour energies, let’s look at how these colour energies interact with different leadership styles.
The four leadership manifestations are:
How to apply this awareness and change how you lead in your daily work life
We said earlier that everyone has a unique mix of all four colour energies and the same is true for all four leadership manifestations.
Although knowing how we prefer to react and show up are useful tools in themselves, the real value, from a day-to-day leadership perspective, is knowing how to balance opposite styles when leading. In this way, we become skilled at switching between them as the situation warrants.
Discover your development opportunities and expand your repertoire
This simple exercise will reveal to which extent you rely on one leadership manifestation over another and focus your development in areas you need to work on.
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In the first row, write the percentage of time you spend in each area. All four areas should add up to 100.
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In the second row, write the percentage of time you’d like to spend in each area. All four areas should add up to 100.
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Identify the manifestation that has the largest growth opportunity – this is your mission-critical priority.
The leadership manifestation with the largest gap is your mission-critical development priority.
The leadership manifestation with the second largest gap is your next priority.
Looking at your own chart, which leadership styles do you need to develop or tone down?
We’ve collected a of series stretch tasks you can practise for all four leadership manifestations. Even integrating one or two targeted stretch tasks into your daily life can make a marked difference in how you lead, how you’re perceived and how you perceive others...
