Every individual is a beautifully complex being — physically, mentally and emotionally. Taking time to understand how to embrace and unleash the entirety of our complex selves is as rewarding as it is challenging, and it can massively transform your leadership style for the better. Here, we’ll explain why leaders need to make room for and integrate additional dimensions to enhance their self-awareness and how it can both improve their own lives and their abilities as a leader.
The Two Foundational Human Needs
Often, to feel fulfilled, people aim for notable achievements and to make a difference. This mindset can drive people to challenge themselves at all costs, setting high targets and meeting or striving to exceed them. However, this can sometimes come at the expense of meeting their own personal needs.
At a basic level, humans crave happiness and fulfilment, but they also need personal security and safety, as outlined in Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Eliyahu Goldratt, father of the Theory of Constraints (TOC) and his daughter Efrat Goldratt call out the dilemma between seeking satisfaction and needing security. This dilemma generates a tension between the actions people take to meet these primal needs, and highlights that the pursuit of one often leaves the other falling short.
To play it safe, people tend to stick to what is familiar — the tried and tested way to do things. However, to gain satisfaction, we are driven to explore unknown territory, pursue challenges and try something new.
There is no apparent tension between the two needs until we consider the conflicting actions people undertake to fulfil them. To resourcefully address these conflicts and uncover ways to break through them, people need to understand what underpins their assumptions and values, and what drives the actions they take. Leaders with high self-awareness will be able to make more responsible and empathetic decisions by remaining aware of their own responses to certain situations, as well as how their responses will impact others.
How to Build Self-awareness
Building self-awareness is considered a core capability for people to be happy, fulfilled, have strong relationships and be authentic. But, the actual understanding of how to build self-awareness tends to be relatively shallow.
Research has widely addressed the cognitive and emotional aspects of self-awareness. In the workplace, applied practice in generating self-awareness has focused on two core angles: internal and external. The internal angle of self-awareness promotes the idea that we can all benefit from understanding our values, passions and aspirations, as well as our innate preferences and those that are environmentally influenced. It might take the form of asking people to identify their values or of using psychometric instruments that give individuals insight into preferences and personality traits by classifying them into types.
The external angle relates to how others perceive and experience people. Its value is in using insights from feedback to surface blind spots and find untapped potential. Encouraging feedback enables people in a work setting to see the world through the eyes of others.
These insights can help people understand themselves better, and at the same time, leaders can develop both a deeper insight into how to empathetically lead diverse people groups and understand their own tendencies, too.
A Physiological Perspective on Repetitive Stress Responses
It’s also critical to consider what drives our deeper needs for satisfaction and security beyond viewing the more surface traits and characteristics that form part of people’s personality, behavior and perspective. We need to understand the less visible consequences of these drivers.
The medical domain has evolved from the concept of dualism, which is underpinned by the belief that the mind and body are not connected. This approach might have served us during the Industrial Revolution, when more mechanistic approaches to learning prevailed and were appropriate given higher levels of predictability. However, it underestimates the impact that our environment has on us.
Gabor Maté, in his book “When the Body Says No,” explains simply, “Stress is a response to a perceived threat that affects every system in our body.”
When we perceive a threat, our hypothalamus triggers an endocrine pathway as a regulative response. Certain hormones are released that trigger the production of cortisol, which floods the blood supply in our body with glucose. The glucose serves as an immediate energy source to mobilize our muscles, readying us to confront or run away from the threat.
In chronically stressed people, this pathway is triggered regularly, meaning that cortisol is produced more frequently than needed. Over time, cortisol destroys tissues, raises blood pressure and can damage organs like the heart. Therefore, developing self-awareness about what triggers stress responses has proven health benefits for leaders, too.
In the next article in this two-part series, we’ll continue to explore how self-awareness can help you transform your leadership style and enable you to lead higher-performing, more impactful teams.
