Knowing Self Knowing Others: Unlocking the Power of Self-Aware Leadership

Knowing Self-Aware Leadership

Hello KSKOers

⭐️Today is Christmas Eve, which is also my birthday. So, I’d like to share a little gift with you - a free copy of The Self-Awareness Superhighway: Charting Your Leadership Journey ebook. Get your copy now! Thank you in advance for leaving a rate and review! ⭐️

For those who celebrate, I wish you a very merry Christmas, full of love and good cheer. I wish you rest and time to reflect on the last year. I hope you get the chance to look back at all of the things you’ve experienced, achieved, learned and overcome.

This year, lots of people have asked me about my journey to self-aware leadership. Here’s a little insight in to what it means to me - and what it means to you.

Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey in 2025!

Start Here

Many years ago, I worked with some unpleasant people. If you weren’t in their club you were out in the cold and boy, was that made clear. I often used to ask myself, in between my tears, ‘do these people have any idea of the impact they’re have on others??’. Sometimes impact would be exchanged for ‘damage’, ‘pain’ and ‘hurt’, but they were all variations on a similar theme.

“Do they have any idea of the impact they have on others?”

I left the organisation as soon as I could.  Soon wasn’t soon enough though, and I had to tolerate it for nearly three years before I was able to find a different job.

The organisation I moved on to was on a different planet - psychologically speaking. Your class didn’t matter, your professional status didn’t matter. Your fit in the clique? Well, no one cared!  What mattered was your passion for the community, your service to your customers and your care for your staff.  The impact people had on each other was a far cry from what I’d experienced before. I saw, heard and felt a very new kind of leadership.  

People without any line management responsibility or the word leader in their job titles ‘lead’.  Servant leaders were everywhere, at all levels. The people who cared for others rose up and represented them. They spoke up on their behalf and stood up for the little guy.  It was a chalk and cheese situation. 

Two Lanes, Same Superhighway

These two situations kept replaying over and over in my mind. For an age, I didn’t know why. I spent a long time trying to work out the connections and eventually the fog cleared. Even though the situations were at two different ends of the work-culture spectrum, there were commonalities. The two situations were the yin and the yang of work life. They were the ‘this is what you do’ and the ‘this is what you don’t do’ of work experience that helped me shape and define excellent leadership.

The common themes between the two situations were:

• Behaviour, impact and awareness

• Leadership and relationships 

• Hierarchy and culture

And so began my journey on the superhighway to discover more about self-awareness, leader effectiveness and leadership at all levels.

What is Self-Aware Leadership?

So, what is self-aware leadership?  Over time, the definition has morphed from being a wordy academic descriptor to something far more useful to you in your workplace. Now it’s three clear layers….

• REFLECTION - of your hard and relational skills

• RECOGNITION - of your impact

• REGULATION - of your behaviour

• Reflection of your hard and relational skills is about introspection. It’s about looking inward at both what you do (hard skills) and how you do it (relational skills). I consciously refrain from using ‘soft skills’. The skills you need to maintain effective relationships with people are work are anything but soft! Brave leaders also seek help from other people to reflect on their behaviour. They actively seek out feedback from others.

• Recognition of impact is about your ability to ‘read the room’. It’s about your ability to be emotionally intelligent and pick up on verbal and non-verbal cues that tell you what’s really going on with someone, or a team. It’s also your ability to develop trusted relationships with people who are willing to speak up and tell you when things aren’t landing as you’d want or intended.

• Regulation is that final layer of the definition of self-aware leadership is about behaviour change. You have the ability to chose how you behave and with that, you also have the choice to change how you behave. With all of the data you’ve gathered through consciously reflecting on your behaviour and recognising your impact, your’e able to make informed decisions about how you will behave next time.

What does it mean to you?

The more people I speak to, the more evident it’s becoming that self-awareness is a foundational element of success in any situation where you are dealing with other people. Whether you’re negotiating a deal, standing in the coffee queue, riding a busy train, driving a car, raising children, caring for sick patients - it’s all about being in relation with other people. They may be fleeting moments or they may be life-long connections, but the role you play in the interaction with others matters.

Being more self-aware will help you boost your business relationships. By better understanding how you are received and perceived, you will be able to influence others’ views of you. You can take back control of your reputation and ensure you model the leadership characteristics you value.

Greater self-awareness will help you manage disagreements and differences of option with your colleagues. It will also help you deal with employee conflicts and navigate emotionally charged situations. By better understanding your own emotions, you can support others to understand and regulate theirs.

Nine Directions to Travel

Through my research, nine behaviours have consistently appeared as critical to moving from being a good leadership to excelling as a self-aware leader.

The first nine ‘Knowing Self-Aware Leadership paid blog articles to be released in 2025 will be exclusive extracts from my book focussing on each of the nine directions of the Self-Aware Leadership Compass. Subscribe here…..

They are the CHARTABLE directions….

1. CARE is about empathy and respect, appreciating the human aspects of the lives of your colleagues whilst not shying away from having difficult conversations.

2. HUMILITY is about letting others’ light shine, supporting them to step forward and being open when you don’t know the answers.

3. AUTHENTICITY is about living your values, beliefs and priorities with integrity and make conscious decisions about who the professional ‘you’ really is.

4. REFLECTION is about being reflective in the moment and giving yourself the opportunity to respond rather than react, so you can grow and become the best version of yourself.

5. TRUST is about kindness and consistency, where you instil trust in your colleagues so that they choose to follow you.

6. ADAPTABILITY is about responding with openness, flexibility and a growth mindset to the changing demands of your role and the changing needs of your people.

7. BEHAVIOUR is about modelling the behaviour you expect to see in your organisation and rewarding the behaviour of those who live the values you espouse.

8. LISTENING is about giving voice to the quieter and marginalised people in your organisations to ensure everyone is heard.

9. EXPERIENCE is about learning from your experiences and sharing what you know with others to nurture their growth and development.

You can take the Self-Aware Leadership Compass Quiz to find out where you are on your self-aware leadership journey. The quiz has two parts:

• PART ONE: The first part is your self-assessment. You can assess yourself against each of the nine CHARTABLE compass points.

• PART TWO: The second part is your ‘others’ assessment. This is where you can email the quiz to up to three people and they can also assess you against the nine compass points.

After seven days your quiz will close and you will receive your scores - which might look something like this:

Raising Awareness of Awareness

There are millions of travellers, all on their own self-aware leadership journey  The best way to hear more about them? The Knowing Self Knowing Others Podcast.

I wanted to bring the discussion about self-aware leadership to life and share it around the globe.  So, I began an audio interview series and the podcast was born. 

The conversations are rich and the insights enlightening.  People have shared wise guidance and disaster avoidance tips.  I’ve spoken to psychologists and medical doctors, CEOs and academics.  I’ve talked to coaches and behaviour experts, authors and people managers.  Our topics have ranged from happiness, to bullying, from imposter syndrome to introversion, all explored through the lens of self-aware leadership.

The Knowing Self Knowing Others Podcast

The Last Word

To find our more about self-awareness…..

• BLOG: become a regular subscriber to this blog

• PODCAST: follow the The Knowing Self Knowing Others Podcast

• BOOK: read my book ‘The Self-Awareness Superhighway: Charting Your Leadership Journey’

• WEBINAR: and come along to one of my webinars

Join me on my mission to develop self-aware leaders around the globe to generate kinder, more respectful and creative working relationships through reflection of hard and relational skills, recognition of impact and regulation of behaviour.

Quintessential Christmas Gift Guide

Events

Join me for The Self-Awareness Superhighway: Charting Your Leadership Journey webinar on 15th January from 1pm - 2pm London time (GMT) to discover, explore and grow! Booking via eventbrite. Free access for paid subscribers.

Grow Your Show

If you’d like to advertise your services, resources and expertise on The Knowing Self Knowing Others Podcast or the Knowing Self-Aware Leadership Newsletter, you can now purchase perfect packages here. Terms and conditions apply!

Rates and Reviews

The digital world loves rates and reviews - on podcasts, books and businesses. I’d love it if you could drop a review on Google to let people know how Knowing Self Knowing Others is helping you grow your self-aware leadership skills. Click here. Thank you! I appreciate you!

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 a Director in a Children’s Charity.

Find out more about Self-Aware Leadership by getting your very own copy of The Self-Awareness Superhighway! It’s an Amazon Best Seller in.....

• 🥇Business Management & Leadership

• 🥇Occupational & Organisational Psychology

• 🥇Business Careers

Harvard Reference: Thomas, N.D., 2024. The Self-Awareness Superhighway: Charting Your Leadership Journey. Knowing Self Knowing Others.