Self-Awareness — The Skill It’s Easy to Ignore

Perry Holley:
Welcome to the Maxwell Leadership Executive Podcast, where our goal is to help you increase your reputation as a leader, increase your ability to influence others, and increase your ability to fully engage your team to deliver remarkable results. Hi, I’m Perry Holley, a Maxwell Leadership facilitator and coach.

Chris Goede:
And I’m Chris Goede, Executive Vice President with Maxwell Leadership. Welcome and thank you for joining. Super excited to dive into this lesson today because I think it’s going to really help Perry and I maybe more than you. We’re going to talk about something that 95%— I was reading a quick little article on this— 95% people think they are, but really only 10 to 15%. are actually this.

Perry Holley:
I’ve never met anybody that would say, no, I’m not self-aware.

Chris Goede:
And so that’s what we’re going to talk about is we’re going to talk about today. The title is Self-Awareness, the Skill That’s Easy to Ignore. I love this title because—

Perry Holley:
Well, thank you.

Chris Goede:
Not because of the self-awareness part. I don’t like that part, but I do like the skill.

Perry Holley:
It is a skill.

Chris Goede:
It is a skill. And that’s what we’re going to unpack and dig in a little bit today. As we get started, I want to encourage you to go to MaxwellLeadership.com/ExecutivePodcast. And there you can fill out a form and maybe you go, hey, I need a little bit of self-awareness, and you wanna go through some leadership coaching. That is what we do day in and day out. And I know Perry would love to, love to coach you on your self-awareness. By the way, let me just tell this. I don’t know that I’ve ever told our, our podcast crew this.

Chris Goede:
The reason Perry and I started working together years and years ago, years ago.

Perry Holley:
Yeah.

Chris Goede:
I think Perry was—

Perry Holley:
How old are you now?

Chris Goede:
I’m not talking about that. Um, was I was looking for a coach for executive presence. And that is a lot of self-awareness in certain things. And so a good friend of ours connected the two of us, and we used to meet at Chili’s. We used to tell stories and eat, and then maybe talk a little bit about my executive presence. And that was years ago. And I just say that because seriously, we are blessed with some incredible executive coaches.

Perry Holley:
That’s right.

Chris Goede:
But maybe it’s executive presence. Maybe you just wanna know self-awareness. here’s your guy. And if you will fill out that form, we’ll follow back up with you and be able to help you.

Perry Holley:
That’s a lot of fun. Let me ask you this. If we can agree, and since it’s just the two of us and Wade, let’s agree that self-awareness is a skill. Do you personally, the question really is, can this skill be overlooked the higher you go in the organization? That’s my presupposition is that the higher you go, it’s easier to overlook this as a skill that you adopt some different personality traits, the more senior you become. When you’re lower in the organization, I’m always worried about my self-awareness, but the higher I go, I don’t think about it.

Chris Goede:
What do you think? Yes.

Perry Holley:
Why is that?

Chris Goede:
Okay, so here’s— I think the longer we have led, the longer we have done what we’re doing, quote unquote, I think the more unaware you become of what it’s like to be on the other side of your leadership? I think we get complacent. I think we get comfortable. I think we get in rhythms. And maybe the word is you think you’re seasoned, right? And you’ve been around a long time. This is how I’ve always done it. This is going to work. And I think that if you were to ask your team, hey, what does it look like to be on the other side of my leadership? I think it would be drastically different. And so I think that’s one of the key drivers for me in people that have lack of self-awareness.

Perry Holley:
Yeah. And it’s funny, I just, a guy reached out, it’s a new way I’m getting podcast title ideas. A guy reached out on LinkedIn, he’s become a friend, just telling me he likes what we do. And he was complimenting both of us. He actually used your name.

Chris Goede:
What?

Perry Holley:
Yeah, it was nice.

Chris Goede:
And— You know that other guy, that other guy with you, what’s his name? Chris. Yeah, Chris is on the podcast.

Perry Holley:
That’s the one. That’s right. He said, You should do a podcast on how to work for a narcissistic leader. And I thought, that is interesting to me, but it really is. If you’re narcissistic, meaning it’s all about you, everything’s about you, that’s really a lack of self-awareness.

Chris Goede:
I agree.

Perry Holley:
And so I was thinking, this is not my podcast for narcissistic leaders, but if you have a lot of self-awareness, you’re going to develop others awareness and maybe situational awareness because you’ll know it’s not all about you. And you’ll start to, remember we used to state, how I see self-awareness is, are you aware of your effect on other people? Are you aware of your effect when you walk in a room?

Chris Goede:
And— Let me, let me just stop you for a minute. You need to write that down because I even take for granted that statement you just made, meaning self-awareness. Do I really know about me? No. What Perry’s saying is, do I really know about the impact of me on other people? So say that again because I want, I want, I want people to write that down, make a note of it, cuz that is That’s massive, and I hadn’t thought about it like that.

Perry Holley:
I had another organization I was with, I had a leader that I had a relationship like you and I have, and I could say something that I said, listen, we’re gonna go into the room. I’m the senior, I’m gonna come in, but I’m gonna wait till you guys get in the room. But would you do me a favor? Would you just take notes? Would you watch people in the room? How are they reacting to me? Are they rolling their eyes? Are they with me? Are they not with me? Is there buy-in? Is there no buy-in? Are people, are they talking behind my— what’s going on? And I could trust this leader to tell me the truth. It was my inner circle. And I said, please just, I need to know, but that’s my, I want to know what is my effect on people? And when I walk in a room, what is the general overall feeling about that? Because I can’t see it necessarily. And so that’s what I’m going to talk about today is that, are you, especially the higher you go, you need it at every level.

Chris Goede:
Yes.

Perry Holley:
It is probably the number one skill of great leadership is high self-awareness. But are we paying attention to it? And how do you learn it? How can you grow in it? And how do you do that is really where I was trying to go.

Chris Goede:
Daniel Goleman talks a lot about IQ is going to get you the job, EQ’s gonna keep the job. And 90% of your success, he says, is tied to your emotional intelligence. And this is one part of the emotional intelligence.

Perry Holley:
Can I ask you this? Just another question though, but, and you and I were talking about it just a little earlier before we went on the air, was I’d had somebody gave me this way of, I wish I could remember who said this, but your intent versus your impact is that are you paying attention to I don’t know a lot of leaders that come in a room with bad intention. They don’t talk to their team individually or in a group with bad intention. They have great intent, but their impact, the way they leave those people, is not matching what they intended. What are your thoughts on this? Can you monitor your own impact versus your intent?

Chris Goede:
I think you can monitor, but let me back up. You know what I was thinking about? What’s the old saying? A road to is paved with good intentions, right? Meaning we have great intentions as a leader, but the outcome of what we intended to do did not hit home. And we talk about, in some of our different trainings we do with organizations, we talk a little bit about this intent versus perception gap.

Perry Holley:
Right, right.

Chris Goede:
Which is in this line. But I like the intent versus impact because that impact is taking that perception a step further. And what is the action that they took from what your intent was on the beginning. Do you follow me on that?

Perry Holley:
No.

Chris Goede:
So it’s like, I love that, ’cause then now it’s taken at a different level, but it’s the leader’s responsibility to close. We call a lot, we love talking about leadership gaps, and it’s the leader’s responsibility to close that gap. So whether we’re talking about intent versus perception or yours of intent versus impact, We have to figure out, hey, did the end result match up with my intent? Now, there are sometimes as a leader, I’m thinking about this, that you’re gonna quickly know that you missed the mark on your intent before the team or your peer has had the chance to even impact it and you missed that. So there are things that we can measure and we can get feedback from. Sometimes it’s not till the end of a project, but it could also be right in the middle of a project if you have great feedback loops and communication from your team.

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Perry Holley:
Well, I find it hard to manage my own. I think I need help sometimes to see, am I feeling like I’m having the impact I want to have? But the question is, what is this costing me to have this gap between my impact and my intent? I’m reminded of a leader I had years and years ago, but he had no self-awareness. I felt I finally figured out he had no— he was a good guy, a friendly guy. You wanted to be friends with this guy, but it was all about him. And he was manipulating and orchestrating and trying to get things lined up for his own purposes. And there were 3 of us senior executives that worked for him. And I’m the type that would come around and after every meeting he would come in. I actually wrote an article, I’m not sure he ever knew it was about him on my blog site, but it was called, How Much Wake Do You Create?

Chris Goede:
Oof.

Perry Holley:
I was out, you know, you boat, is that every time you come into— I love that. into the harbor, into the marina, there’s always a little bobbing sign out there that says, no wake zone. But I noticed every time he came in, you would think a meeting with your team would be a no wake zone, but he would come in and start throwing things around and accusing people and making accusations and challenging. There was everybody, all the boats were banging up against each other, which is why we have a no wake zone. We don’t want the valuable boats banging up against each other. But everybody was being rattled by this guy. And then I, would go around, you seem like this kind of person too. You would go around to the team afterwards and try to make it all better.

Perry Holley:
And I thought, have you seen this kind of behavior? This is the cost. What do you think the cost of that is when you have a leader that is unself-aware, not self-aware, and the team has to go around and mend the fences after the breakage to do that? It was fully destructive.

Chris Goede:
Not only in time of cleaning up, but the missed opportunity of what the team could have been doing.

Perry Holley:
Oh yeah.

Chris Goede:
Right? If the wake, and I love that, I love that visual image of the wake, you know, coming into a no-wake zone as a leader and doing that. So got me thinking about oftentimes we’ll ask, hey, how’d the meeting go with other people? Hey, what’d you think about that meeting? Whatever. Or as a leader, maybe sometimes you prepared for a meeting and you want feedback on, I do this sometimes with you as a coach of mine. I’ll say, hey, we’re going to have to have a meeting with so-and-so, whatever. You’re going to be in part of it. I want you to gimme some coaching. And so we’ll get back together. I’ll say, what’d you think? How’d the meeting go? And so there are questions like that.

Chris Goede:
I think one of the encouragements for you as we’re talking about this with wakes is maybe you start asking, what did you have to clean up on my behalf as a leader? Because we did this, or what, what did I cause disruptions or wakes in other part of the, your business that I unintentionally did it, but I did it. And that’s part of, I mean, that’s on me, right? That’s my self-awareness.

Perry Holley:
But you could be, if you have to intentionally disrupt, that’s one thing. But this is, I use, you, you said this unintentionally disrupting.

Chris Goede:
Yeah.

Perry Holley:
You don’t even know you’re doing it.

Chris Goede:
Yeah. You don’t even know.

Perry Holley:
Yeah.

Chris Goede:
You don’t even know.

Perry Holley:
Yeah. Let’s, let’s talk about How to build self-awareness. And I’ve heard somebody on the— I’ve had it more than once. Somebody said, I said, you really seem to be struggling with your connection with the team. And it is, let’s talk about self-awareness. And it’s always been men, but they say, he says, that’s just the way I am. Okay, it’s not the way you am. This is, you can change.

Chris Goede:
Do you know that I said that one time to my wife, Sarah? One time I said that. I just wanna, I felt like I needed to confess right there, ’cause Perry said it’s usually men. It is. And I actually have done this before. In the past.

Perry Holley:
Yeah. You can grow. You can learn. So let’s talk about these skills. What do you think?

Chris Goede:
So one of the things that I have learned throughout this process as a skill to do this is to pause before I respond. I’m thinking, I’m really thinking about the point I just made about, you know, in my family when I don’t necessarily agree with something or we get into a discussion and I just react in the moment, it’s obviously, we all know this, not the best thing to do. But I’ve learned to say, let me just slow down just a minute and let me pause before I react. And then that way I can make sure that I can maybe self-regulate a little bit, but then also be somewhat aware of how I’m about to respond in the moment.

Perry Holley:
Yeah. Somebody taught me years ago, I actually, I got this from marriage, was having tough conversations and really almost everything’s fight or something. Said E plus R equal O. And that’s ancient. and it’s been around a long time, but event plus response or react equals an outcome. And so I notice I’m getting bad outcomes at work or at home. I can’t control the E, the events, what somebody says, what somebody does, what happens next, what somebody lashed out, somebody triggered. I can’t control the E, but the R is all yours.

Perry Holley:
You’re either gonna react, which is quick, gonna be bad usually, or as you were saying, take a pause, take a breath, and do it. R would be response. So whatever event happened, I choose—

Chris Goede:
Yeah.

Perry Holley:
After a pause, my response, I get a much better outcome on that. Going to the impact versus intent, I started, can you question for that, asking about the impact, not just the intent? And I’m guilty of asking, you did this so well because you asked me to kind of sit quietly and watch your impact in the meetings. And you always come back and said, okay, what did you notice? How could I have done it better? How was it received? Did I sound like I was dictating? Did I sound like I was abdicating? How did it come across? So instead of asking, how was the meeting? Or how did it sound? Which you always get affirming from people that won’t tell you the truth. Start to say, how did that land with you? Tell me some specifics. This is what you do with me. You say, don’t gimme a lot of platitudes. Tell me what it actually felt like to you. So getting that feedback, I think, helps a lot.

Chris Goede:
By the way, that’s the only time Perry ever wants to attend one of our team meetings.

Perry Holley:
I can open up a can, that’s true.

Chris Goede:
So yeah. So that’s really, I just gave my secret out. I just want ’em in the meetings with me. The other thing we wanna encourage you as you’re thinking about this is review patterns, not just moments. We’re all gonna have moments of things that are outliers of how you either lead. What does that look like? How, where your awareness shows up. Or you could even think about this. You could think about— Maybe it’s in a communication and you’re not listening properly.

Chris Goede:
You continually interrupt, you continually one-up, you continually, and yeah, versus listening. That is a lack of self-awareness when it comes to the communication pathways between you and your peers and other people. And so when you look at that, you’re asking sometimes for patterns or you’re trying to reflect and look for patterns in yourself. to make sure that, okay, that’s an area that I really need to work on. And it just wasn’t an anomaly. It just wasn’t one-off.

Chris Goede:
Yeah.

Perry Holley:
And I don’t want this conversation to end without us talking about something we teach a lot right now is about feedback. And do you have a feedback relationship? Not just a feedback event where you, like the example you asked me to be in there was, that’s a feedback relationship. And I always title this, if I’m speaking from a stage, I said, do you have an inner circle? Do you have 1 to 2 people that will tell you the absolute truth for your benefit? They’re not trying to overwhelm you with positivity. They’re gonna tell you the truth. And if you have that relationship, our wives, for you and I, it’s the center of the— for us, they don’t, for some reason, don’t have any problem telling us the truth.

Chris Goede:
They don’t have any problem with that.

Perry Holley:
But do I have a— I have a couple of guys in my life that will just tell me, hey, why are you doing that? What was that about? You sounded like— and they’ll tell me the truth. So that to me is a huge, let’s get that, Yeah, I got great intent, but where’s my impact? Are they telling me the truth?

Chris Goede:
Love that. What I love about these 4 is that these are skill sets, these are operational habits. And that’s why we started off by saying we gave you the data on how many people think they’re self-aware, how many probably actually are, but it’s a skill set. In your title, we talk about we’re going to be able to do that. These things, these are operational. These are things where you can pause, you can ask a sharper question, you can look for patterns, Standing relationships with people that’ll give you honesty, like Perry and I shared about him giving me feedback. And so this is something that we absolutely want you to practice. We want you to think about as you’re leading people, team, or even family, and build them in.

Chris Goede:
Here’s what also, when we start talking about development, and really that’s what our podcast is all about, is helping leaders develop. These are not additional things we’re asking you to do. I love how you talk about when it comes to developing other people, you go, well, let’s work it into the calendar that you already have.

Perry Holley:
Yeah, don’t add it.

Chris Goede:
It’s the same thing with self-awareness and the things that we’ve talked about. How do we work ’em into the things that we’re doing on a daily basis? And I think when you can do that, it just becomes part of who you are as a leader.

Perry Holley:
I’ll add before you close, as you go higher in the organization, as your title gets bigger, as you become more important, these things get harder. And because it doesn’t seem that I should be asking for help, I should be asking for feedback. I’m gonna tell you, that’s called vulnerability, to submit yourself humbly to ask somebody, can you tell me how I’m doing? Like Chris would invite me into a meeting to say, watch me and watch others and tell me how I’m doing. That’s vulnerability, and vulnerability is the number one builder of trust in organizations. So I wanna encourage you, the higher you go, you do not get exempt from this skill. You need to actually probably double down on it because there’s nothing more attractive than a very highly self-aware senior leader. People are, they wanna, they buy into you faster.

Chris Goede:
Totally agree. So as we wrap up today, a quick thought for you and then a very simple exercise. We talked about the wake zone. There’s no doubt that if you’re leading something, you are creating some type of wake for some people. And so we want to make sure that you ask that question, maybe identify somebody on a team or a volunteer group or in your family. Where you maybe just have a little bit of intuition that you’ve created some wake. And the conversation is not, what does it look like to be on the other side of my leadership? Not how am I doing? But hey, what have I caused to maybe be an uproar or something that became a boulder in what you’re doing on a day-to-day basis? I basically have caused more trouble or they’ve had to smooth things out for decisions that you’ve made as a leader? Ask ’em that question. They’re probably not gonna know how to answer you right away, but then let them come back to you.

Chris Goede:
And then the final thought is what you brought to us about the intention versus impact, right?

Perry Holley:
Mm-hmm.

Chris Goede:
Like, we all have great intentions. Like you said, we don’t show up trying to do things, help people, run a meeting without the right intent. But man, what is the impact that we’re actually having And what is that gap? We talk about how do we close the gap? And so reflect on a couple of those things. Your intent was this, and now we’ve kind of measured it and here was the impact. Oh man, like I missed it and I gotta close that gap.

Perry Holley:
Man, you just, I just had a bad thought run through my head. How much time has my wife gone behind me to repair with the kids? Because I was—

Chris Goede:
With the kids.

Perry Holley:
Yeah, that she’s the one fixing. So if you got people on your team that are fixing your messes, get the feedback and then stop causing messes. Self-awareness will help with that. Great conversation. As a reminder, you can get the learner guide for this issue. You can also learn about our offerings, and you can leave a comment or a question. You can learn about our other podcasts. Do all that at MaxwellLeadership.com/ExecutivePodcast.

Perry Holley:
We love hearing from you. We’re very grateful you spent this time with us today. That’s all from the Maxwell Leadership Executive Podcast.

Transcript created by Castmagic.