What’s in it for me? Learn how self-awareness transforms good leaders into great ones.
There’s a cruel irony at the heart of leadership: the higher you climb the corporate ladder, the fewer people are willing to tell you what you need to hear.
When you’re the boss, are your jokes funnier?
Do your ideas become more brilliant?
Or do your weaknesses just become invisible – most of all, to yourself?
As a leader, self-awareness isn’t just valuable, it’s essential.
Without it, you can make costly mistakes, miss critical opportunities, and create toxic cultures – all while believing you’re performing brilliantly.
In this Blink, you’ll discover practical tools for breaking through your own blind spots, learn how to build systems that deliver honest feedback, and identify the distinctive strengths that make you irreplaceable.
You don’t need to be perfect to be a leader.
But what you do need is concrete practice to confront your weaknesses while maximizing your strengths.
The courage to see what’s there
The path to exceptional leadership often begins with a moment of recognition.
Consider a client of the author Les Csorba.
Despite a successful track record as CEO of a $10 billion energy company, his introverted personality created a barrier between him and his employees.
He was perceived as distant and disconnected, undermining his effectiveness as a leader.
Rather than accepting this limitation or making excuses, he took an unusual action: he removed all the chairs from his office.
This limited the time he could spend in his comfort zone, forcing him to engage directly with his team face-to-face.
By eliminating the option to retreat into his office sanctuary, he made sure he’d practice the very behaviors that challenged him most.
His story illustrates a pattern found again and again among the most effective leaders: they possess the self-awareness to recognize their weaknesses and limitations, paired with the courage to address them.
These leaders understand that their biggest obstacles aren’t external circumstances – market conditions or competitive pressures – but rather those obstacles within themselves.
They embrace the ongoing struggle to improve, knowing that personal growth is never finished.
But working on yourself requires first seeing yourself.
According to a Japanese saying, each person has three faces.
The first is the face you show to the world – your public persona.
The second is the private face you show to family and close friends.
And the third is the one you hide even from yourself – those aspects of your personality and behavior that you deny and often refuse to examine.
Inquiring into this hidden third face holds incredible potential for transformation.
But it requires the courage to look inward and see what’s really there, rather than what you wish there was.
Failing to engage in honest self-examination creates barriers that hold back both leaders and those they lead.
One executive learned this during his evaluation for a CEO position.
When colleagues provided feedback that he was “controlling,” he spent an entire hour arguing with them about their assessment.
This defensive response revealed exactly the controlling behavior they’d identified, and he was passed over for the role.
The lesson is clear: you can only manage those aspects of yourself that you actually see and acknowledge.
Whatever you don’t see – your blind spots – are destined to shape your future in ways you can’t control.
Your blind spots are everyone’s problem
So what do you, your last boss, and your car have in common?
You’ve got it – you all have blind spots.
Leadership blind spots are areas where leaders fail to recognize problems – whether within themselves, their teams, or their organizations.
Like the blind spots in automobiles that cause countless accidents when drivers change lanes without checking their mirrors, leadership blind spots create dangerous zones of invisibility that can lead to devastating consequences.
Blind spots become particularly problematic as you ascend the organizational hierarchy.
When you’re not the boss, you have multiple sources of corrective feedback – colleagues and superiors can challenge you.
But once you reach the top, the number of people willing to confront you about what you’re missing becomes smaller and smaller.
The higher you go, the more isolated you become from honest feedback – even as the potential consequences of your blind spots grow more severe.
Why is that?
It’s because leaders’ blind spots don’t stay contained at the executive level.
Instead, they cascade throughout the entire organization, creating systemic flaws that can compromise decision-making, culture, and performance across all levels.
A leader who can’t see results in an organization that can’t act.
The collapse of Lehman Brothers provides a stark illustration.
Richard Fuld, the firm's Chairman and CEO, began receiving warnings about major threats to the real estate market as early as 2005.
Despite them, he continued pushing risky mortgage-backed securities, convinced that his strategy would prevail.
Fuld had multiple opportunities to course-correct.
Credible experts repeatedly approached him, independently, with data and analysis about the dangers of Lehman’s mortgage strategy.
But none of them succeeded in convincing Fuld to reexamine his fundamental assumptions.
He felt his judgment was superior.
Even after Lehman’s collapse triggered global financial devastation, Fuld demonstrated continued lack of self-awareness by insisting he wouldn’t have changed much – blaming external factors for the firm’s demise.
This response reveals perhaps the most dangerous aspect of leadership blind spots: they can persist even in the face of overwhelming evidence, making leaders unable to learn from their most costly mistakes and leaving them vulnerable to repeating similar errors in the future.
Your self-awareness toolkit
Self-awareness is one of the most fundamental leadership competencies.
So how can you develop it?
Let’s look at three approaches.
The first is to deliberately seek structured external feedback – to gather data from those who observe your leadership in action.
A 360-degree review is a comprehensive assessment where feedback is collected from supervisors, peers, and direct reports across multiple dimensions.
Unlike casual feedback, these structured assessments use standardized tools that measure a range of specific competencies and areas for growth.
Sarah, a VP, believed that her direct communication style was efficient and clear.
But her 360-degree review revealed that, while peers appreciated her clarity, direct reports experienced her approach as dismissive and intimidating.
This information prompted her to experiment with different ways of delivering information to reports, including deliberately acknowledging efforts and successes alongside critical feedback.
Beyond formal reviews, another great channel for feedback is mentoring relationships, particularly with senior leaders outside your organization.
These mentors, freed from internal politics and daily operational concerns, can offer objective views that internal colleagues might hesitate to address directly, helping you find organisational or personal blind spots.
A third form of external feedback is a peer advisory group.
This is a group of peers that meets regularly to discuss challenges, exchange views, and commit to specific growth actions, holding each other accountable.
A regular cadence of meetings ensures that self-awareness development becomes an ongoing discipline rather than something sporadic.
But awareness doesn’t stop at external feedback.
You also need time to reflect internally.
Daily journaling can become a powerful tool for recognizing patterns and stuck points, especially when focused on specific questions rather than general rumination.
Using thoughtful prompts like, What assumptions did I make today that might be wrong?
, and How did my behavior impact others in ways I might not have intended?
can help you examine your automatic responses and hidden biases.
Another form of internal reflection is a weekly decision review.
Here, you create space for yourself to analyze significant interactions and choices you’ve made.
By using this kind of self-reflection, Marcus, a department head, discovered that his tendency to immediately problem-solve when team members raised concerns was holding him back from truly understanding their perspectives.
This insight led him to adopt a listen-first approach that dramatically improved team trust.
Finally, mindfulness practices can add real-time awareness to these retrospective techniques.
By developing the capacity to notice emotional reactions and thought patterns as they arise in real-time, you can make more conscious choices in the moment, rather than simply analyzing them after the fact.
These three approaches – structured external feedback, internal reflection, and mindfulness practice – complement each other.
External feedback reveals what others can see; internal reflection helps you understand why patterns exist and how to change them; and mindfulness creates space to make better decisions.
Together, they can transform your growth as a leader from a matter of chance to a conscious, deliberate practice.
Marcus thought he’d covered all the bases when he announced his company’s new remote work policy.
His team had spent weeks crafting what seemed like a comprehensive plan.
Building self-aware organizations
Then, the implementation began – and the complaints started flooding in: IT support gaps, communication breakdowns, and manager confusion about expectations.
What happened?
The team had planned for success, but never seriously considered what might go wrong.
This scenario illustrates a common leadership blind spot: the tendency to focus on intended outcomes while failing to anticipate unintended consequences.
Advanced self-awareness requires you to identify and challenge the fundamental assumptions you hold.
Scenario planning represents one powerful tool for this.
Rather than defaulting to optimistic projections, systematically explore all potential outcomes, including those that feel uncomfortable to consider.
The point is to reveal underlying assumptions and biases that often remain hidden in conventional planning processes.
When you ask yourself, What if my key assumptions prove wrong?
, you begin to see the blind spots before they create problems.
Perspective-taking exercises require you to step into the shoes of different stakeholders – not just intellectually understanding their concerns, but genuinely attempting to experience situations from their viewpoint.
This might involve asking, How would this decision feel to a new employee versus a twenty-year veteran?
or, What would this change look like from our customers’ perspective versus that of our shareholders?
The discipline of systematically considering multiple viewpoints reveals assumptions that leaders often take for granted.
Developing awareness doesn’t stop with you.
It can be developed throughout the whole culture of your organization, creating an environment that facilitates self-awareness among everyone.
Begin by modeling vulnerability – openly discussing personal development goals and areas for improvement with your team.
When you acknowledge your growth edges publicly, you signal that development is an ongoing process rather than a destination, creating permission for others to do the same.
Creating psychological safety amplifies this effect by ensuring that honest feedback flows freely without fear of retaliation.
Teams begin offering more candid observations about leadership effectiveness when they trust that truth-telling will be rewarded rather than punished.
This requires you to respond to difficult feedback with curiosity rather than defensiveness, demonstrating through your reactions that intellectual honesty is valued above any one person’s ego.
It’s important to implement systems that reward learning from mistakes, rather than punishing failure.
After-action reviews should become regular practice – teams systematically examine what worked, what didn’t, and what they learned regardless of whether outcomes were positive or negative.
These sessions help to normalize a mindset of continuous improvement.
Integrating leadership practices with cultural development creates a reinforcing cycle: leaders model the intellectual humility that psychological safety requires, while organizations reward learning and honesty to provide an environment where self-awareness can manifest.
Together, they create organizations that are more self-aware and more adaptive and resilient in the face of complexity and change.
What you do better than anyone
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he transformed the company through his unique gift: visionary product design and relentless perfectionism.
His superpower lay in imagining products that didn’t yet exist.
When Tim Cook succeeded him as CEO, he brought a completely different set of abilities centered on operational excellence and supply chain mastery.
Where Jobs was the brilliant disruptor, Cook became the masterful optimizer.
Every leader possesses a unique set of talents that represents their distinctive contribution to the world – as Csorba puts it, their “superpower”.
Your goal in your professional development should be to discover your superpower and then learn to deploy it to its greatest effect.
Self-awareness thus serves two purposes in leadership development – revealing limiting blind spots along with the combination of strengths that define you at your peak performance.
There are many kinds of leadership superpowers.
Some leaders demonstrate exceptional empathy and emotional intelligence – a great capacity to understand and connect with others.
Others excel at crisis management and composure, maintaining a bedrock of calm and decisive judgment during chaotic situations.
Some leaders excel at quickly learning and processing information.
They can hoover up knowledge across multiple domains and quickly synthesize it, providing opportunities that others miss.
Still others have a gift of discernment, allowing them to detect the truth and separate good information from illusions and misrepresentations.
The first step in developing your superpower is recognizing it.
You can identify your natural capabilities through objective assessment tools, including direct feedback from colleagues and mentors.
Many leaders underestimate their most valuable abilities precisely because these talents feel effortless and natural to them.
Once identified, develop your superpower through ongoing deliberate practice.
This takes focus.
Take the time to delegate routine tasks so you can leverage your strengths, freeing up mental and emotional energy for your highest-value contributions.
To fully unleash your superpower, identify and remove anything that prevents you from using it.
This might mean restructuring meeting schedules to preserve your creative thinking time or hiring complementary team members to handle areas which you’re weak in.
To become the most effective you, understand that your unique combination of strengths, strategically deployed, becomes your organization's competitive advantage.
Like Jobs and Cook, you’ll succeed not by copying others, but by maximizing what makes you irreplaceable.
The main takeaway of this Blink to Aware by Les Csorba is that exceptional leadership starts with unflinching self-awareness.
Final summary
Your biggest career obstacles aren’t external – they’re the things about yourself you don’t want to see.
Instead of hiding behind excuses or defensiveness, embrace the discomfort of looking clearly at yourself, warts and all.
Actively seek structured feedback through 360 reviews, mentoring, and peer groups.
Build reflection into your routine through journaling and decision reviews.
And challenge your assumptions by considering what could go wrong and how different stakeholders perceive your decisions.
Remember, self-awareness serves two purposes: eliminating blind spots that derail you and discovering your unique superpower.
Once you identify your distinctive strengths, ruthlessly focus on developing and deploying them while delegating everything else.
Ultimately, what leaders need most is the awareness to see the truth clearly and the courage to take action.
So that’s it for this Blink.
We hope you enjoyed it.
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See you soon.