Successful leadership consists of a myriad of different skills, characteristics, and attributes - one of these attributes being emotional intelligence (EI).

There are many different aspects that make up emotional intelligence, but developing self-awareness is often the first step that leaders to increase their EI.

So why is self-awareness such a valuable attribute for leaders and how can you cultivate greater self-awareness in your organisation?

Tell-tale Signs of Self-aware Leaders

While self-awareness can look different in different people, there are some universal traits that all self-aware leaders share.

One of the key tell-tale signs of self-awareness is having intellectual humility. Intellectual humility means accepting that you don’t know everything, staying humble and down-to-earth, and having an accurate understanding of oneself, leading to a better understanding of others.

Another extremely common sign of self-awareness is having an insatiable appetite for continuous improvement. Self-aware leaders recognise their own strengths, weaknesses and biases, and they see the value of continuous learning and growth for both themselves and their teams.

The Value of Self-awareness

Cultivating greater self-awareness brings many benefits to the organisation and has an extremely positive impact of the workforce.

• Self-aware leaders often find it easier to build trusting relationships with team members, making it easier to gain buy-in from staff to get them behind change.
• Having a self-aware workforce also minimises the chance of team conflict as self-aware staff are often very open to feedback and don’t take constructive criticism personally.
• Research also suggests that “leaders who are self-aware are more likely to be high-performing, to meet their business goals, and save turnover costs”

How to Use Personality Profiling Tools to Cultivate Greater Self-awareness

Firstly, before you can begin to improve your or your staff’s self-awareness, it’s important to understand that there are two types of self-awareness:

• Internal - understanding of our own values, passions, aspirations, thoughts, feelings, behaviours, strengths and weaknesses, and our impact on others
• External - understanding how others view us

The overriding purpose of self-awareness is to better understand your personality.

There are countless different personalities - we are all unique - but research has found that they can be categorised into 16 types.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is one of the most well-known personality type questionnaires. It looks at 4 different categories:

• Introversion or Extraversion 
• Sensing or Intuition
• Thinking or Feeling
• Judging or Perception 

If you’re interested in exploring your personality type or think it would be a useful tool for your staff, you can click here to take the 16 Personalities questionnaire. 

If you’d also like to explore different personality profiling tools, you can click the link below to download a Guide to Personality Profiling that explains 5 more personality assessment tools.

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Next up on The Daily Dot, we will be looking at how to effectively manage change in your organisation and overcome resistance to achieve the results you desire.

Until next time…