Self-awareness in business, leaders, teams and staff rarely has anything to meditation or other tropes you can throw at it.
Rather, the best businesses have self-awareness built into them with systems and processes that engage leaders at all levels to communicate well in teams and across silos. The result is a more nimble and successful company that identifies and fixes problems quickly, and better yet, does not generate unnecessary problems that inevitably arise from poor systems and processes.
Transcript
Steve Rice: Can self awareness be systematized into a business or into a leader?
John Lamy: Without answering the question, I would just say that’s an extremely important question. Because, in my view, the performance of the company – how well it does financially and market-wise – is going to be correlated. It won’t be absolute. But it will be correlated with the degree to which there is self-knowledge within the leadership team.
Stephen Sendar: I completely agree with that. And, the trick of course, is to remember that there’s a level at which some people have a sort of unconscious self-awareness. They don’t want to talk about it. They don’t want to know the theory about it. They don’t want to be instructed in that way. But, they are naturally that way. And leaders have to be able to not get into a technique-driven format that has to apply to everyone in an organization.
That is not self awareness. To me, that is the opposite of self awareness. But that’s the trap that is out there – you get a formula and it “looks like this”. That does not breed self-awareness from top to bottom, in my belief or experience. What does is a commitment to taking everybody as they are and helping them to feel comfortable, as they are, owning their mistakes and their excellence and being confident about their capacities. That’s what it takes to make self-awareness, and that is not formulaic.
John Lamy: So Stephen, let me ask you a question. Why exactly would a formula or a technique-driven process not really skin the cat? You’re saying that you need something else. But what’s wrong with a technique-driven format?
Stephen Sendar: So let me correct what I said so that you understand. I’m not saying it’s not good to bring in techniques. But because people have different learning styles, someone in the engineering department is gonna have a different intellectual and academic training in a way of coming to understand topics – someone who reads a great deal versus someone who works on the factory floor who may not read at all.
There are certainly parts of the technique that will work for everybody. But if part of it is meditating or dreaming or writing your dreams – I’m just using examples not necessarily from a corporate structure – if you go in saying it has to “look like this”, you will miss out on the individuality of something else. Because to me, self-awareness that is culturally embedded in a company is directly related to the freedom every person in that company feels to be themselves.
When you have a culture where self awareness exists, people feel free to be themselves and mistakes don’t have people feel radically deficient. Meaning, “I’m not deficient because I made a mistake or because somebody has a different point of view. I feel so comfortable being who I am. And I am feeling comfortable that I am embraced for just who I am, and that allows me to go on every day.”
To me, that’s one of the markers of a company that has ingrained self-awareness.
Steve Rice: I have to think that, around the question of whether self-awareness can be systematized at the corporate and personal level in a company, I have to believe as an experiential fractional-CMO/CTO type person, that systems do matter. And that they also can’t get you all the way there. I truly believe, and have seen multiple times – outside the realm of just corporate self-awareness, but just getting things done in the company – that a really good system or set of systems and processes allows the good people to do really good work and the bad people to stick out like a sore thumb. And a bad system makes everybody look bad and has everybody wonder, “Why do we have a bunch of bad people working for us?” when that is usually not true – something is wrong with the system.
So when I look at companies that I’ve worked with that have more awareness, both at the corporate level and the leadership level and even awareness between departments – cross silo awareness – what we’re really talking about is that ability to communicate freely. This comes from what Stephen was mentioning: a comfort level of being yourself and knowing that you can do that. And so there’s got to be systems, and I think we could probably name a few like ‘Stop, Start, and Continue’ and what-not, that allow that self-awareness to bubble up and bloom up and give people the ability to take that 80% that the system will get them there. And then there’s probably that 20% where the human factor comes in and they have to work a little harder.