Self-awareness as a Leader

'Self-awareness gives you the capacity to learn from your mistakes as well as your successes. It enables you to keep growing.'

Lawrence Bossidy

Self awareness is an intelligence. It's part of emotional intelligence, and one I believe to be extremely important in remote working. When we work alone in our own environments, have autonomy and flexibility in our day and communicate on a global scale, we need to be aware of ourselves.

How are we feeling? What do we need to do in order to feel our best selves today? When do we feel most productive and energised? Have we worked across multiple timezones today, meaning we've been online 10+ hours?

You get the drift.

When we are truly self-aware, we can start to see our own blind-spots. In my coaching business, I work with leaders and founders of companies of remote teams. I help them identify their own blind-spots in the ways that they manage and build companies. For example, it could be something as simple as they don't delegate to employees they've never met in person before.

It sounds silly, right? Not having trust with employees you've never met when you manage remote teams?

What if I told you this leader had never managed a remote team before. He spent the past 25 years of his career working in an office environment. Of course he has these biases, perceptions and blind-spots.

We all have blind-spots in our leadership abilities and skills. We also have blind-spots in our communication. Blind spots are not your weaknesses. They aren't things you know you need to improve. Blind spots are things you think are working well but are actually frustrating your team. The danger to you as a leader is by not understanding these blind-spots, you’re investing time and energy into the wrong things. 

The below worksheet is a reflection questionnaire that is designed to enable you to reflect on your own blind-spots.

I encourage you to print the below worksheet and put pen to paper.

Take some time to reflect on what communication success truly means to you as a leader of a remote team.

I often find with my clients in similar positions to you, that they don't take this time to truly think and reflect.

If you take this seriously, and dedicate time to thinking about the questions below, you'll be guaranteed to open up new ways of thinking and problem solving in your remote team.

You can feel free to post your reflections or learnings in the Slack group here