Self-Awareness: The Gateway to Development

The most difficult leaders I encountered in the Army were not the hardest ones. They were not the officers who demanded too much, or who were short with people, or who held a standard that felt unreasonable at the time. Difficult in that sense is survivable, and a fair amount of it turns out to be good for you.

The ones who were genuinely difficult were the ones who could not see themselves.

The pattern repeated often enough that I came to expect it. You would sit down with one of them and offer an honest appraisal of where things stood, and before the sentence was finished the reasons would start arriving. There had not been enough time. The team was not strong enough. The environment was working against them. The requirement itself was unreasonable, or the headquarters above them did not understand the situation on the ground. You could almost see the personal accountability evaporate.

I want to be fair about this, because my observations were not always correct either. Some of those explanations were true. Resources really are short, timelines really are compressed, and plenty of good leaders have inherited a situation they did not create.

Something else was happening, though. These were leaders for whom no appraisal of any kind could land. There was no version of the conversation where they walked away holding something. Whatever went out never came back, and the reflex of explaining why somebody else was responsible for where they stood turned out to be a reliable way to go nowhere at all.

The thing that was missing

It took me a while to name what I was looking at, because from the outside it resembles stubbornness or arrogance, and neither one was quite right.

What was missing was a loop. There was no mechanism by which that leader’s abilities and shortfalls were ever reflected back to him in a form he could use. Without one, improvement is not merely difficult. It is unavailable. A leader cannot close a gap he cannot see, and he will not see a gap if nothing in his world is permitted to show him one.

·   ·   ·

A Friday afternoon that went sideways (in a good way)

When I was commanding a cavalry squadron, I tried to spend an hour or two with the lieutenants most Friday afternoons. The session I had planned for one of them fell apart before it started, for reasons that are not interesting, so I improvised.

I asked each of them to write down the two best leaders and the two worst leaders they had ever been in personal contact with. I was deliberate that these did not have to be Army officers. A coach counted. A parent counted. A teacher counted. Anyone who had held real influence over them at some point in their lives.

Then I asked them to write down why, which is a different question from who. What were the specific things that had put each of those four people on the list where they landed?

We went around the room. I never asked for a name, only for the descriptors, and we built two columns on the board. Positive attributes went on one side and negative attributes went on the other.

The lieutenants were engaged, the exercise was going well, and up to that point it was a perfectly ordinary professional development session.

Then I asked them one more question.

Do you think these people know that they are these things? If one of them found out tonight that she had landed on your list, which column would surprise her? And would she be able to tell you why she was on it?

The room changed. For the next half hour nobody discussed the lists at all. They discussed how a person ends up on one of those lists without ever knowing it. They worked over whether the worst leaders in the room’s collective experience had any idea how they were seen, and whether the best ones did either, and what it would take for anyone in either group to find out.

That afternoon is where I understood something I have not stopped believing since. You cannot go anywhere until you know where you are.

·   ·   ·

Why the baseline has to come first

The idea is not complicated, and it is considerably easier to see outside of leadership than inside it.

Consider a swimmer who wants to get faster. The first thing she does is get in the water and get timed. The second is to let a coach watch the stroke and say where the time is going. Only then does training mean anything, because only then is there a specific thing to fix, and the only way to know whether it worked is to swim it again and measure it again.

None of that functions without an accurate starting number. A swimmer who believes she is two seconds faster than she is will train the wrong thing and will never understand why the results do not come.

Leadership resists that kind of measurement, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Most of what matters in leading people cannot be put on a clock. A great deal of what appears subjective can be objectified by anyone willing to do the work, though, and the alternative is not some more sophisticated approach. The alternative is guessing. Or avoidance.

If you do not know where you are, you do not know where you are going, and you may well move in a direction that leaves you further from it than when you started.

Two ways to get the baseline wrong

There are two failure modes here, and the first is the obvious one. Some of us carry a picture of ourselves that is more flattering than the evidence supports.

The second gets discussed far less and disables a person just as thoroughly. Some people are committed to a version of themselves that is worse than the truth, and that is its own kind of inaccuracy, carrying its own cost. A leader who believes he has nothing worth offering will not offer it.

The most expensive error is a third one, and it does not look like an error at all. It is the conclusion that there is nowhere left to go. I have done this long enough. I have seen enough of it. I have reached about what I was going to reach. That belief is almost never true, and it does its damage quietly, because it never announces itself as a mistake. It presents itself as experience.

The best leaders I have been around are, without exception, dissatisfied with their own abilities. They are still hunting for something, still convinced there is an inch out there they have not found yet. The value in that is not really the inch. It is the posture underneath it, which is a standing willingness to listen and to be told things.

·   ·   ·

What the doctrine is telling you

Army leadership doctrine is quietly interesting on this point. ADP 6-22 defines what a leader is through fourteen named attributes, sorted under character, presence, and intellect. Humility is on that list. Self-awareness is not. The manual does not leave the idea out, though. Paragraph 1-33 states that self-awareness is fundamental to understanding one’s abilities, and that leaders require self-awareness in order to accurately assess their own experience and competence.

I have come to read that as a clue rather than an oversight. Self-awareness is not sitting beside humility and discipline on the list because it is not the same category of thing.

Those attributes are qualities a leader develops over a career, and self-awareness is the condition that makes developing any of them possible. You cannot deliberately build humility you do not know you lack, and you will not correct judgment you are certain is already sound. It sits underneath the list rather than on it, and that is the stronger position rather than the weaker one.

·   ·   ·

You cannot do this alone

Reflection by itself will not get you there, and this is where most honest attempts stall. An accurate picture has to come from other people, and from more than one direction. Your boss sees one version of you. Your peers see another, and theirs is often the most candid. The people at home see whether any of it is consistent with who you are when nobody is watching. And the people you lead see the version that matters most, while being the least likely to volunteer it, which is precisely why that one has to be pursued deliberately rather than waited for. Doctrine makes a quiet point worth keeping here, which is that some of the best feedback does not come from formal counseling or surveys at all. It comes from talking informally with Soldiers.

The part that decides whether it works

Gathering the feedback is the easy half, and it is where a lot of leaders stop and congratulate themselves on being open.

What decides whether any of it matters is what happens next, which is whether you acknowledge it, whether you internalize it, and whether you build something resembling a plan against it. Those three steps are where the effort usually dies. Too many of us take in difficult feedback and immediately begin locating its true cause somewhere outside ourselves, which is where this piece started and is the entire reason those leaders were so hard to be around.

Reconciling what other people see with what you believe about yourself is uncomfortable work, and that is why it gets skipped. It is also the only dependable way to find the themes worth doing something about.

·   ·   ·

Self-awareness in leaders

I have never seen self-awareness listed first among the attributes a leader ought to have. I think it belongs there, and not because it is the most admirable one. It belongs there because nothing else on the list can be built without it.

So here is the question I put to those lieutenants, turned around and pointed the other way.

If the people you lead sat down tonight and made their two lists, which column would your name land in? Would it surprise you? And would you be able to say why?

If you cannot answer that last one with much confidence, that is not a failure. It is a starting point, and a starting point is the one thing you were always going to need.