The commercial power of self-aware leadership

As leaders go, I was pretty self-aware. I could reel off a list of things I’d done in service of finding myself.Mindfulness? Tick. Coaching? Tick. 360? Tick. Psychometrics? Tick.

I’d bought into the collective obsession we have with self-awareness. The common view is that the more we know, the better we’ll be. There’s even a quote about it from the legendary Maya Angelou, who said: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”

But my leadership wasn’t improving. And I certainly wasn’t creating the commercial impact I would have liked.

The self-awareness industry is fed to us at every turn. It’s not wrong. But it’s imperfect. 

For a lot of leaders, it’s become a great way of avoiding making change.

Most senior leaders I work with know themselves well. They’ve done their Hogan, their MBTI, their Insights Discovery. Like me, they have a shelf in their home office with all their reports on. They’ve done the work of self-discovery. They know default responses when under pressure. They have the language to talk about it.

But they don’t do much to change.

In some leaders, I see an arrogance. A belief that their modus operandi has worked pretty well so far. So why change?In others, I see fear. Fear of change. Fear of becoming someone new.In myself, I saw overwhelm. Making change felt too big. Despite knowing my behaviour was limiting me, my team, and my organisation, I didn’t treat it as an urgent call to action. 

We wouldn’t tolerate this in other business contexts. Imagine an operations director who’d identified a process costing the organisation money every week, documented it, discussed it, and then did nothing to change. We’d call this a dereliction of duty.

But in leadership, we call it self-aware.

Self-awareness without behaviour change is just introspection. Often it’s expensive. Commercially, it’s worthless.

The cost

People get to the top by showing confidence, decisiveness, and a point of view.

But unchanged, the traits become commercially damaging.

Confidence becomes overconfidence. Leaders respond defensively to challenge, so teams stop challenging. Vital observations are held back. Bad decisions don’t get called out. The business suffers.

I’ve watched this play out in real time. C-suites with significant decisions to make about structure or strategy. Decisions that need the best collective thinking. Instead, I’ve seen the need for consensus take over. Privately, people have reservations. But no one’s raising them in the meeting.

Bad decisions are made. It costs time, money, and the impact lasts. The information to make a better decision was in the meeting. It just never got said.

High performing cultures, where honest challenge is ingrained, come from leaders who have done the inner work and changed how they behave.

It’s all about increments

Sustainable behaviour change doesn’t happen immediately. It’s not one big decision, one coaching session, or one lightbulb moment following a psychometric assessment.

It happens step by step. Moment by moment. Behaviour by behaviour. Conversation by conversation.

The leader who knows she over-controls doesn’t fix it overnight. She does it in one meeting, on a random Wednesday, when she notices herself starting to direct and chooses to be curious instead. It feels awkward. Maybe a bit uncomfortable. She probably only half-manages it. But she does it. The next conversation, she’s a bit better. The one after that, a little more natural. 

Over weeks and months, the new response becomes hers. Her team notices the empowerment. She becomes more impactful.

This is what we often miss in leadership development. We’re not good at the sustained, unglamorous work of turning our insight into new behaviours, one interaction at a time.

Change doesn’t happen quickly. It accumulates.

Psychometrics and feedback are powerful, but they’re just a start. A 360 is merely a diagnostic that indicates where to focus. Value comes from the commitment to change, the deliberate practice, and maintaining accountability. For months. For years. For new behaviour to become instinctive.

I’ve seen leaders transformed because they finally decided to do something with data they’d had for years. Decision by decision. Interaction by interaction. Until the people around them started to notice something was different.

Ask yourself a question

I regularly ask leaders what they know about themselves and what they’re doing differently as a result.Often, there’s no answer.This isn’t a character failing. But it is a development failing. 

Building links between self-knowledge and new behaviour takes effort. Deliberate practice. Honest accountability.

Coaching is one of the few relationships where this kind of accountability is possible. A mirror held up regularly. One that calls out difficult observations and questions about what’s actually changing.

The competitive edge

Self-aware leaders who act on what they know will be more impactful.

They’ll build trust faster. Trust will enable honest challenge. Honest challenge improves decisions. Better decisions build up over time.

Awareness is just the beginning, not the end. The leaders worth following have more than a sophisticated understanding of themselves. They’re doing something with it. 

Step by step. Day by day. Incrementally. In easy moments. In difficult moments.

The question isn’t whether you know yourself. It’s what you’re doing with your knowledge.

Tom Emery is a performance coach, founder of people performance consultancy HEX and author of People People: Reach Your Full Potential as a Chief HR Officer