From Likeability to Self-Awareness: Two Decades of Leadership Research

Knowing Self-Aware Leadership

Hello KSKOers

This week’s blog captures a thread that’s been running through my thinking for a long time. It started with a simple question I asked early in my career, and over the years that question has shifted, stretched and grown alongside my own experience of leadership. What you’ll read below isn’t a grand theory or a neat conclusion, but rather, a reflection on how my understanding has evolved and what I’ve learned along the way.

Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey!

If you’d asked me twenty years ago ‘what makes a leader effective?’, I might have given you a fairly familiar list: competence, confidence, good communication, trust, perhaps a touch of charisma. At that time, my research was focused on a simple question: does a leader need to be liked to be effective?

That question was the focus of my masters’ dissertation, which explored likeability and leadership within the NHS in South Wales. I was interested in the lived experience of leadership rather than abstract theory, and in understanding what people actually respond to in workplaces shaped by pressure, service delivery and human complexity. The findings were clear. The qualities associated with being likeable and the qualities associated with effective leadership were almost identical, differing only in emphasis rather than substance.

At the time, that felt reassuringly logical. Leaders who are liked are often perceived as effective. People value fairness, warmth, approachability and respect. It aligned with my experience and with much of the practical wisdom shared in organisations by those people who’d been around the block once or twice.

But, the answer felt incomplete, something felt unresolved. Likeability described what people experienced, but it didn’t really explain the mechanism behind it. It showed me the outcomes rather than causes. My questions started to shift toward whether likeability was the reason for leadership effectiveness, or simply a by-product of something more fundamental?

Years later, my doctoral research returned to leadership, but from a different starting point. Instead of asking whether leaders were liked, I began exploring self-awareness and its relationship to leader effectiveness. That shift marked a gradual but significant change in my perspective, moving from external reception and perception to internal reflection and recognition.

My doctoral thesis critically explored self-awareness and leader effectiveness across all levels of the Welsh public service. In doing so, I developed a three-layer definition of self-awareness made up of internal self-awareness, internal-social self-awareness and external-social self-awareness. This framework mattered because it moved the conversation away from personality labels and towards an ongoing reflective process. Self-awareness was not treated as a trait someone either had or lacked, but as a capability involving recognising someone’s hard and relational skills, recognising how they were received and perceived by others, and making decisions about how they wanted to regulate or change their behaviour next time. In later years, this has morphed in to ‘reflection, recognition and regulation’.

Leader effectiveness was reframed. It became defined not only through technical competence but through awareness of the self’s emotional and behavioural impact and the ability to regulate that impact.

Looking back, the connection between the two research projects is clearly evident. The MSc explored the visible surface of leadership. The doctorate explored what sits beneath that surface.

The most obvious difference between the two pieces of work lies in their direction of attention. The masters’ examined leadership from the perspective of others. It asked what people value and how they judge leadership. In contrast, the doctorate looked from the inside out, exploring what is happening within leaders themselves that enables effectiveness.

That difference changes the conversation in important ways. Likeability is an external judgement. Self-awareness is an internal capability with external consequences. One does not automatically produce the other. Someone can be well-liked but ineffective, particularly if decisions are avoided or difficult conversations are softened beyond usefulness. Equally, a highly self-aware leader may not always be universally liked, especially when making necessary but uncomfortable decisions.

The doctoral findings introduced further complexity. Effective leaders were identified at all job levels, challenging the assumption that leadership belongs primarily to those working at the most senior levels of organisations. This reflected what many of us observe in practice: leadership emerges in moments, not just in job descriptions. People without formal authority often step forward, represent others, lead the charge and influence change.

One finding in particular disrupted conventional thinking. Effective resonant leaders at the strategic level had lower levels of self-awareness than effective leaders at other job levels.

This challenges the comforting idea that experience and seniority naturally build self-awareness skills and muscle. Instead, it suggests that distance from day-to-day relationships, coupled with organisational pressure, may reduce opportunities for honest feedback and reflection.

Seen through the lens of the earlier MSc work, this raises interesting questions. Likeability may operate differently across organisational levels. In close working environments, daily interaction provides constant feedback. As leaders move up the hierarchy, those feedback loops can constrict, making genuine self-awareness more difficult to achieve and maintain.

Across both pieces of research, one of the clearest shifts is the movement from thinking about leadership as a collection of attributes to thinking about leadership as an ongoing relational and reflective process. The MSc engaged heavily with leadership theories focused on traits, styles and contingency approaches. The doctorate drew from these academic traditions and placed greater emphasis on emotional intelligence, relationships and self-regulation.

This evolution mirrors a broader change in how leadership is understood in practice. Organisations have long invested in competency frameworks and skills development, yet often struggle with the human dimensions of leadership. Training can teach communication techniques, planning skills and performance management processes. It is far harder to cultivate genuine self-awareness and the willingness to examine how the self impacts others.

The qualitative themes emerging from the doctoral research reinforced this point. Behaviour, reflection, people management, individual experience and the impact of decisions were all highlighted as areas requiring exploration. These are not technical issues. They are relational and human issues. They sit at the heart of how leadership is experienced by others.

Reflecting on the two studies together, I now see the MSc question as an early doorway rather than a final destination. Likeability matters because leadership is relational, but it is not sufficient as an explanatory concept. It tells us something about how leadership feels to others, yet it doesn’t fully account for how leaders make decisions, regulate behaviour or adapt in complex environments.

Self-awareness offers a sharper lens. It explains how leaders notice their own responses, understand their impact and adjust deliberately and with intention rather than just through habit. In many ways, it shifts leadership from performance to practice, from impression to understanding, and from academia to the office.

There is also a personal dimension to this arc. Early in many leadership journeys, there is a strong focus on being accepted, respected and trusted. Over time, and often through difficult experiences, the emphasis shifts towards responsibility and impact. The question becomes less about whether people like us and more about whether we are leading in ways that are effective.

What I find most interesting now is that both pieces of research remain relevant. The MSc reminds us that relationships and perception matter a lot. The doctorate reminds us that inner awareness shapes those relationships in ways that are often invisible but critical.

Taken together, they suggest that effective leadership sits at the intersection of external experience and internal understanding. Leaders who are able to hold both perspectives simultaneously are perhaps those most likely to create healthy cultures and meaningful outcomes.

The journey from talking about likeability to self-awareness has not been about replacing one idea with another. It’s been about broadening the frame of reference and recognising that leadership is more complex, more human and more reflective than what one construct can define..

The question that now feels most important is not whether leaders are liked, it’s whether they understand themselves well enough to lead with clarity, intention and awareness of their impact, which in turn will generate positive relationships, where they may well be liked!

The Last Word

When I look across both pieces of research now, what stays with me most is how human leadership really is. It lives in relationships, in reflection, in the small choices we make every day. Likeability, self-awareness, impact, connection, they all matter, but none of them sit on their own. My hope is that this leaves you with permission to see leadership as a practice rather than a perfect state, something we keep learning, and growing into as we travel on our superhighway of leadership life.

Nia is an expert leader who talks the talk and walks the walk. She is an academically awarded thought leader in self-aware leadership and practices self-aware leadership every single day in her role as an interim CEO in a homeless charity.

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