Are You Self-Aware? (Hint: Probably not.)

“Self-awareness is one of the foundational skills for success in the twenty-first century.” This sentence leapt off the page as I was reading Christine Porath’s excellent new book Mastering Community.

Wait, what? Self-awareness is foundational? How can that be? It has nothing to do with robotics, data analytics, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, carbon-neutral…or does it?

Hopefully Ms. Porath will forgive me for picking through this wonderful chapter and pulling out the things that make self-awareness foundational:

· It allows us to keep learning and self-correct

· It helps us tolerate high levels of stress and endure setbacks

· It makes us better communicators

· It helps us achieve excellence

· It helps us lead with authenticity and integrity

· Self-aware people are happier and have stronger relationships at work and at home

I can see how that would be foundational for a high-performing, resilient and engaged team. But what happens if your team is not high on self-awareness? Well, according to one study cited in Mastering Community, companies with large numbers of unself-aware people were 79% more likely to have poor financial returns.

We’ll get back to self-awareness specifically in a minute. For now, let’s consider whether most organizations think about what personality traits are foundational for success.

What traits will fit in with our culture and strengthen it? What type of person has been successful, and what was it about that person that made them work with our team so well?

Do we know what we’re looking for in a colleague outside of job experience, education and training? We’ve all worked with people who had the perfect set of education and experience for a particular job, only to find out that we couldn’t work with that person (or that person couldn’t work with us).

If we don’t know what to look for, then we’ll get whatever lands in our lap. It’s like sitting down to solve a problem without agreeing on what that problem is. It’s wanting to find a company where we fit in without knowing what our own values are. It’s not having a vision for where you want to be and wondering why you never get there.

If we know what traits we’re looking for, we can start to identify them during the interview process (see my earlier blog about the pitfalls there), and then we have a better chance of ensuring fit and success. For example, there’s a great story in Conscious Capitalism about how Whole Foods tests for customer service mentality during the interview process.

Our team at AI added humble, hungry and smart to their list of traits after reading Patrick Lencioni’s The Ideal Team Player. We’ve sought out humble people for a long time. We realized that big egos just don’t work for us. To say it in Texan, we just don’t cotton to folks that are all hat and no cattle.

We interview for humble, hungry and smart. Mr. Lencioni helped us better understand what humble means in the context of critical traits. More specifically, we understood that there is such a thing as unhealthy humility.

In my experience, people with a healthy sense of self-esteem are in the minority. What I’ve seen, over and over, is that people don’t have the right amount of self-esteem. Many arrive at our doorstep without enough self-esteem, which often leads to the avoidance of risk and a fixed mindset.

Sometimes it manifests in someone that puts on a mask of self-confidence to combat their own perception of being unworthy. Perfection is often lurking around and driving people to measure themselves to an impossible standard.

Lencioni’s humble isn’t just about avoiding the ego maniacs that think they are perfect. It’s also being aware of the folks who don’t think enough of themselves. We have to account for that in assessments, interviews, selection, feedback and development.

Lencioni’s smart doesn’t mean book smart or being the master of a particular skill. It means emotional intelligence, the ability to work with people of all kinds. It’s a person with empathy and the ability and desire to understand another person’s point of view or situation.

Self-awareness is there in Lencioni’s healthy humble and emotional smart. It would be pretty difficult to be either of those two things if you are low on the self-awareness scale.

So, are self-aware people as rare as healthy humble?

Based on the data cited by Ms. Porath, 95% of people believe they’re self-aware, while only 10-15% actually are. This reminds me of the adage about good drivers – most of us believe we’re above average, which is impossible. Ms. Horath quotes one of the researchers as saying, “Self-awareness is a skill that almost nobody prioritizes because they think they’re already there.” How many people voluntarily go to driving school?

Those researchers discovered that almost all of the people they found to be self-aware weren’t able to explain how they got that way – it was just the way they were wired.

Digging deeper, they were able to find a very small number of people that who were able to build their self-awareness over time. They found that, despite the rarity of this group, self-awareness is a surprisingly developable skill. “You don’t have to be born with it. But you do have to really want it.

As I began to think about interviewing specifically for self-awareness, I realized that I had already been doing it. I’ve asked candidates a question that very few have been able to answer. I want to know what people took from their upbringing that they still have – for better or worse. When your parents kicked you out of their house, what traits did they stick in your suitcase that you’ve been carrying around with you forever. Do you know what those things are and what to do about them?

My parents were not social people. I don’t remember them entertaining at home or going away on trips with friends. I met very few people that they considered friends. At the end of their lives, there weren’t many friends at the service. This wasn’t terribly surprising given the demands on them. I didn’t think it was unusual. Until I met my wife’s family. While I live a different life than my parents, I carry their anti-social gene. Recognizing this, I strive get better bit by bit at knowing how to deal with that in a healthy way. It’s a work in progress.

Ms. Porath puts forth what I think is a much better question to test for self-awareness: Tell me about a time when you were convinced you were right about something, but then came to change your mind. This question will be less confusing to explain and much more likely to produce an answer that will help with assessing self-awareness. Another one I’ve heard is: Tell me about a failure and what you learned from it. That one is subject to more gaming as the failure can often be: “I just work too dang hard all the time.”

What other questions could we ask to help find out whether someone has this trait or is actively working on developing it?

If most people are not self-aware, but most people think they are, how do we encourage people to work on it? Mastering Community includes a wonderful section about fostering self-awareness and thriving. I’d like to finish up by commenting on two favorites from this section.

I liked: Go Out for a Dinner of Truth. Pick someone you want to improve your relationship and, over dinner, ask: “What do I do that is most annoying to you?”. [You may want to have a glass of wine first, but not too many, so you can listen without being defensive.] The story about this practice introduced me to a word that I love: ‘humblebragging’. It made me stop in my tracks and think about how often I might be humblebragging. I’ve added that to my own self-awareness testing because I suspect that I do that too dang much.

My absolute favorite part of this chapter was…Write a User’s Manual. In Practically Positive, I wrote about this as an Accelerator Practice for thriving. It is a simple exercise to build high quality connections at work more quickly and therefore it is tied to a lot of great research about the value of those connections. We offer a free starter kit if you want to try out the User Manual.

In Practically Positive, I mentioned that I cannot remember where we first heard about the concept of User Manual, so I was excited to see it in Ms. Porath’s book and tied to a trait that has been shown to increase thriving. Ms. Porath mentions that, in her practice of user manuals, she found that “it speeds up the learning process and provides a rich touch point with community members.” Along with building connections and community, the User Manual is an important tool in our own journey toward more self-awareness, and all the good that flows from there.