Self-awareness forms the foundation of effective leadership and personal growth. It means accurately appraising your abilities, preferences, and their implications for your behavior and impact on others—a true reality check against life’s facts. This insight includes knowing your strengths and weaknesses, vulnerabilities and passions, idiosyncrasies and normal traits. It often emerges from diverse sources: a sudden epiphany in class or therapy, performance appraisals, successes and failures, feedback from others, or even personality tests.
Yet self-awareness has a dark side. Pathological forms appear in hyper-vigilant, counseling-addicted, self-obsessed people fixated solely on themselves. This phase many adolescents outgrow, but some get stuck, rendering it deeply unattractive and counterproductive. Discovering who you are—your place in family, organization, or community, and your best contributions—can take years. Lucky individuals gain opportunities to test skills, observe their impact, and recognize natural behaviors in specific situations.
Early career triumphs often doom derailed leaders later because they fail to learn. Careers demand letting go of outdated, dysfunctional assumptions and beliefs while acquiring new skills and ideas. This requires embracing threatening learning situations that risk failure. Strong organizations prepare people for senior roles through planned experiences and courses, transitioning them to higher management responsibilities. All potential leaders must upgrade social and technical skills, shifting from tactical to strategic thinking. Incompetent or derailed leaders typically suffer from narrow experiences and overreliance on either technical or social skills.
Senior leadership thrives on handling ambiguous, threatening, and uncertain situations with calm rationality. Inflexible executives struggle to adapt their mindset. Common transitions include promotions to senior or general management, losing a supportive boss or team, navigating mergers, or facing disruptive change. Support like coaching, mentoring, mature teams, and feedback on strengths, limitations, and blind spots proves invaluable.
Feedback, however, falters due to systematic biases in rating others, especially during interviews. These errors distort self-awareness efforts:
- Halo/Horns effect: Inappropriate generalizations, painting someone as entirely excellent or hopeless, ignoring nuanced traits.
- Leniency: Inflated ratings where “softies” deem everyone outstanding, avoiding poor marks.
- Central tendency: Rating everyone as average, overlooking performance differences.
- Harshness: Lowballing all as weak or inadequate.
- Contrast effect: Judging relative to others, ignoring baseline standards.
- First impression error: Locking in an initial favorable or unfavorable view, dismissing later evidence.
- Similar-to-me effect: Favoring those who seem like you.
Mastering self-awareness demands vigilance against these traps. By seeking honest feedback, embracing growth through challenges, and calibrating against reality, leaders avoid derailment and unlock their true potential.
Source : Backstabbers and Bullies: How to Cope with the Dark Side of People at Work by Adrian Furnham
Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23127672-backstabbers-and-bullies
Read the Previous Article in the Series :
Thinking Beyond Science 
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