Insight: Why We Are Less Self-Aware Than We Think—and What to Do About It

by Tasha Eurich

tend to be terrible judges of our own performance and abilities—from our leadership skills to our car-driving prowess to our performance at school and at work. The scariest part? The least competent people are usually the most confident in their abilities.

At work, for example, employees who lack self-awareness bring down team performance, reducing decision quality by an average of 36 percent, hurting coordination by 46 percent, and increasing conflict by 30 percent.

parent. For example, the majority of mothers and fathers grossly overestimate the number of words they speak to their pre-verbal children (children who hear more words at home develop better vocabularies, higher IQs, and better academic performance).

suggests doing what he calls a pre-mortem by asking the following question: “Imagine that we are a year into the future—we have implemented the plan as it now exists. The outcome was a disaster. Write a brief history of that disaster.”

A true commitment to ongoing learning—saying to ourselves, the more I think I know, the more I need to learn—is a powerful way to combat knowledge blindness and improve our effectiveness in the process.

The real social ill was that most people felt too good about themselves (often without any objective reason).

people often confuse humility with low self-worth, and thus label it as undesirable, even though the opposite is true—because it means appreciating our weaknesses and keeping our successes in perspective, humility is actually a necessary ingredient for self-awareness.

humility requires accepting a certain degree of imperfection, and most goal-oriented, Type A people rarely give themselves the permission to do so.

Like many of my Type A compatriots, my nirvana is achieved by checking off all of the items on my daily to-do list.

When was the last time your boss sat you down to tell you how you could do better? The last time your colleagues gathered—willingly, voluntarily, and of their own initiative—to critique one another so they could improve? The last time you got honest, critical feedback outside an HR-mandated performance review (or sometimes even in one)? Wait, you can’t think of a time where that happened? You’re not alone.

as a leader, his role wasn’t to control their every move, but instead to help connect them with the bigger picture, to give them the right tools, and to provide them the space to make mistakes but still hold them accountable.

Five Cornerstones of Collective Insight. First, their objectives: what are they trying to achieve? Second, their progress toward those objectives: how are they doing? Third, the processes they’re employing to achieve their objectives: how are they getting there? Fourth, their assumptions about the business and their environment: do they hold true? And finally, their individual contributions: what impact is each team member having on the team’s performance?

there are Three Building Blocks that must be in place for a leader to drive a self-aware team. First, if the team doesn’t have a leader who models the way, the process will be seen as insincere or even dangerous. Second, if there isn’t the psychological safety to tell the truth, the chance of candid feedback is almost zero. But even with all this in place, you also need an ongoing process—not unlike Mulally’s BPR—to ensure that the exchange of feedback isn’t just a one-time thing but rather is built into the team’s culture.

if a team doesn’t know where it’s headed, they are missing the “because” of self-awareness, and trying to get there would therefore be both frivolous and pointless!

However, when a leader commits to confronting his flaws while also striving to improve, his team is motivated to do the same. In fact, this is a great example of preeminent psychologist Albert Bandura’s theory of social learning, which suggests that followers tend to imitate the attitudes and behaviors of their leader. When a leader is authentic, team members learn that it’s not just okay but expected to honestly reflect on the Five Cornerstones of Collective Insight (and the Seven Pillars on an individual level, for that matter).