The 9 Directions of The Self-Aware Leadership Compass: #1 - CARE
Knowing Self-Aware Leadership
Hello KSKOers
Welcome to 2025! I wish you a year of kindness, creativity and above all self-awareness leadership, in your practice and in the practice of those around you!
To support you, the first nine Knowing Self-Aware Leadership blog articles of 2025 will be exclusive extracts from my book The Self-Awareness Superhighway about the nine directions of the self-aware leadership compass.
Scroll to the end and I’ll share a secret with you too!
Looking forward to joining you on your learning journey!
Care is the first direction of the 9 CHARTABLE directions.
Care
“Leadership is not about being in charge. Leadership is about taking care of those in your charge.”
Simon Sinek
Care is one of the most fundamental behaviours all humans need to function well. To maintain your health and happiness, you need to both receive care and show care for others. You don’t switch off this need when you step into work, much to the chagrin of the bosses and strategic-level leaders who are gripping hold of the industrial age with their fingernails. Care is as relevant to each of you at work as it is at home, and if you want to be an effective and self-aware leader, you must be able to demonstrate care for others and care for yourself.
As we journey along the superhighway of care, we’ll pass the town of kindness, the city of respect and the village of empathy. You can’t travel along the route of care without passing these special places, supping the water from their streams and feeling their warm breeze on your face.
Let’s journey along route number one and follow the compass point of care.
During my research, I interviewed someone who clearly hadn’t prepared and, by the surprised sound of their voice, had totally forgotten I was going to be calling them. It was a bit of a meandering, rambling discussion and not everything made sense, but then they said something, and it was as if they’d taken a floodlight and illuminated the midnight sky:
“Ineffective leadership is, you know, it’s like a lack of care.”
It was said with such genuine and unfettered authenticity that I can still hear their voice in my ear, cutting through the babble with this golden one-liner.
Self-aware leaders care. One of the critical factors when you throw your behaviour out into the world is that you need to care about how it lands with someone else. If you don’t care whether your bad behaviour is going to cause upset and worry to someone else, you’re certainly not a self-aware leader in my book (pun intended, sorry not sorry).
Don’t confuse a caring leader with someone who isn’t prepared to have difficult conversations, though. Care is neither sycophantic nor blinkered. If you’ve listened to the conversation I had with Tom Desch in the anniversary episode of his podcast, Conversations on Leadership (9 May 2023), you’ll have heard me say that I value leaders who are able to have difficult conversations and not shy away from them. “Embrace the suck” (thanks, Brené Brown) and “feel the fear and do it anyway” (thanks, Susan Jeffers). When leaders care, they’re honest with people and don’t dodge the discussion about performance or bullying behaviour. They appreciate the sentiment behind being cruel to be kind and care enough to say what needs to be said, respectfully and kindly.
As you already know, my research focussed on the public sector, and it dawned on me that for organisations to provide services to their communities by keeping it healthy, safe, clean, well maintained, sustainable, fed, watered, dry, housed, taught, etc., those organisations had to fundamentally care about their communities. That’s what public services are all about, aren’t they? Putting in place formalised structures of care, whether that be healthcare, social care, highway maintenance, education… whatever. If you’re thinking about organisations that ‘do’ care in a hard skills kind of way, then surely the organisation itself needs to extend that care in a relational skills kind of way to the employees providing that care? It’s a pretty logical step to suggest organisations that care about their customers should also care about their employees. If you have organisations that show no care for their staff, then I’d question whether those organisations are really able to show genuine care for their customers, service users or patients.
Richard Branson said, “If you look after your people, your people will look after your customers.” Exactly this. When an organisation’s operating premise is having high external standards of care towards customers, they really should mirror these standards of care to the people inside their organisations. This seems especially important in organisations that can’t recognise their employees’ commitment or high performance through pay rewards and bonuses, like most public-sector organisations. Covid really brought this home, and recognition of health professionals’ contribution and commitment became a topic of regular discussion during and since. A national round of applause at 8pm on a Thursday doesn’t pay the rent.
A live LinkedIn discussion between Stephen Shedletzky and Tiffani Bova in July 2023 explored the challenges employees face when they aren’t valued in organisations and the benefits of balancing customer engagement with internal stakeholder engagement. When your focus of care is weighted towards customers and not balanced between customers and employees, your organisation will suffer the consequences with high staff turnover, low productivity and limited growth.
In the studies exploring complex adaptive systems and relationsorientated leadership, being caring and the impact of being uncaring are very evident. They talk about the importance of demonstrating a concern for subordinates’ welfare and wellbeing1 and how appearing to be uncaring undermines successful leadership.2 There are leaders in the world who, of course, don’t care. My research interviewees talked about people climbing the career ladder and said things like, “People who are nice to your face wouldn’t think twice about not supporting you if it didn’t benefit them.” That probably fits with Tessa West’s definition of ‘the kiss-up/kick-downer’ in her book Jerks at Work. But maybe this is the difference between a leader and a self-aware leader. To be a selfaware leader, you must care about your people as individuals, teams and an organisation as a whole. You must constantly be balancing the implementation of policies and procedures to ensure equality and equity for everybody, whilst ensuring that people are valued as individuals.
Some years ago, I was involved in a wholescale restructure of my service. It involved around 100 people and took nearly 18 months to plan, refine and implement. One thing that was very important to me was ensuring I’d had one-to-one conversations with the individuals whose jobs were being disestablished or changed. This was to make sure they knew about things impacting them before anybody else or anything was shared in a group. They needed time to think about the implications for their careers and their families. They needed the opportunity to deal with the emotional impact with as small a number of people in the room as possible so that when the message was shared in a big group of staring eyes, they’d be able to respond in the way they wanted, not react with fight, flight or freeze. Emotionally charged situations should never be a spectator sport. This is one of the ways that self-aware leaders show care: by being respectful and pre-empting the emotional responses of others.
When you consider the layoffs that happened in the global tech industry in 2022–23, you can certainly see the absence of care. There are several reports of people trying to log on to their work network from home one day, only to find they’d been barred access and a follow-up email arriving in their private account an hour or two later saying their job had gone and their contract had been terminated. I don’t care what country you’re in and what employment law framework exists there – that is a bad way to treat human beings. This shows a reprehensible lack of care, and I’m always shocked and saddened that even if one person thought this was okay, there were 20 others who ratified the approach from across HR and the C-suite. No one pulled the process and said, “We don’t behave like that here.”
As a self-aware leader, your care of others must be underpinned by respect, both for others and yourself. Behaving respectfully can never be wrong because it sets out who you are and, like it or not, when you’re the leader and you’re under 24/7 scrutiny, how you behave, how you care and how you show respect for others says more about you than it ever will about them.
Gunther Verheyen (episode 5) said self-awareness was the foundation of empathy, and empathy is necessary to truly understand and develop effective relationships with work colleagues. Without understanding your own drivers and behaviours, you can’t have empathy for others and you can’t begin to understand their behaviour and your impact on them. If you fail to grasp the essence of empathy, it will impede your ability to develop effective relationships with other people.
Show care; don’t hide away from care. Be kind, show empathy and always, always be respectful to others. As a self-aware leader, it’s up to you to lead the way in showing what care means in your team and organisation. Model care, expect care and demand care within your organisation.
Resources
Here are links to the resources referenced in the section above, taken from The Self-Awareness Superhighway
Conversations with Tom Desch in the anniversary episode of his podcast, Conversations on Leadership
“Embrace the suck” (Brené Brown)
“Feel the fear and do it anyway” (Susan Jeffers)
A live LinkedIn discussion between Stephen Shedletzky and Tiffani Bova
Jerks at Work by Tessa West
Gunther Verheyen (episode 5 - The Knowing Self Knowing Others Podcast)
The Self-Awareness Compass Quiz
Top Tips to Develop Your Self-Aware Leadership
How can you lean into your self-awareness, discharge your duties as a manager and inspire as a leader from the perspective of care? Here are five top tips for you…
Prioritise Your Well-Being: Lead by example and prioritise your own well-being. Demonstrate self-care practices, like taking breaks, making sure you have a healthy work-life balance, and managing your own stress. By doing so, you model the importance of well-being to your team.
Encourage Open Dialogue: Create a workplace culture that encourages open communication about mental health and well-being. Being open fosters a environment where people feel supported, comfortable seeking help and able to speak up and express concerns.
Regularly Assess Workload: Reflect on your own workload and make sure people aren’t overwhelmed. Regularly assess your team's capacity to manage their stress, help them to prioritise and de-prioritise tasks and re-evaluate their workloads to maintain wellbeing .
Promote Work-Life Balance: Advocate for and model a healthy work-life balance. Encourage people to take breaks, use their holidays, take back time owed and disconnect from work beyond the 9 to 5. In the long run, it’ll promote a more sustainable and fulfilling work environment.
Invest in Professional Development: Invest in your professional development and that of others. Your commitment to growing and learning sets an example for your team to follow. Encourage ongoing learning and skill-building across your whole team to enhance the skills of both individual and the whole team.
Fernandez, S., Cho, Y. J. and Perry, J. L. (2010) ‘Exploring the link between integrated leadership and public sector performance’, The Leadership Quarterly, 21, pp. 308–23.
Klare, D., Behney, M. and Kenney, B. F. (2014) ‘Emotional intelligence in a stupid world’, Library Hi Tech News, 31, pp. 21–4.
Sssssh! I have a secret to tell you!
In 2025, I’ll be writing my second book! It will focus exclusively on the nine direction of my Self-Aware Leadership Compass.
It’ll focus on each direction and their ‘sub-directions’. Just link a normal 'directional compass’, has north, east, south east, north west, east by south east, west by north west and so on, the same it true for the self-aware leadership compass!
When we think about care - kindness, respect and empathy are all relevant. When we think about authenticity, courage and honesty are inextricably linked.
I’ve joined the 12 Chapters Club hosted by
to keep me motivated and on track! I can’t wait to head out on this journey with you!
New Reflections Journal for 2025
The new Self-Awareness Superhighway Reflections Journal 2.0 is out now!! It has more space to assess yourself against the nine directions of the Self-Aware Leadership Compass, room to reflect, jot down your thoughts, take notes, doodle, draw and access the creative part of your brain alongside the analytical!
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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.
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Harvard Reference: Thomas, N.D., 2024. The Self-Awareness Superhighway: Charting Your Leadership Journey. Knowing Self Knowing Others.