Take A Look Inside: The Benefits Of Self-Awareness

Self-awareness is the ability to remain in touch with yourself.  It is an understanding of how you think and feel about yourself in different situations. This acquired knowledge about self shapes your decisions and determines your actions and behaviors. Most workers want to understand their motives, conflicts, behaviors, issues, and relationships while at work. Church (1997) maintains that high-performing workers are also highly self-aware and are able to accurately assess and determine their workplace behaviors.

So, take time to do a little introspection and reflect on the following:

  • True understanding of yourself requires effortful introspection (Showry & Manasa, 2014). This process of self-assessment can be cognitively complex, and typically occurs at the unconscious and subconscious levels. Yet, it takes the simple conscious decision to do it to get the ball rolling.
  • Self-aware workers can express both their strengths and their weaknesses. In so doing, self-aware workers know that they can convert weaknesses into strengths by working on self (Showry & Manasa, 2014).
  • Self-aware workers are open to objective feedback (Duval and Lalwani , 1999). When you reject the validity of negative feedback or overlook your faults and failures or take more credit for your group’s work than you give to other members, you are protecting your ego from injury. In turn, this negatively impacts the organization. And while your ego may have been saved from harm, your self-esteem drops.
  • The more you understand yourself, your communication at work (and at home) improves. Improved communication at the workplace will ultimately increase your work performance (Wegner and Giuliano 1982).
  • Finally, the depth of your self-awareness equals your breath of success (Morris, 2016)

Self-aware workers understand who they are and what they want to achieve. Instead of becoming defensive when confronted with hard times, they accept the situation, transform themselves and thrive.

Selected References:

Church, A. (1997). Managerial Self-Awareness in High-Performing Individuals in Organizations, Journal of Applied Psychology, 82(2), 281-292.

Duval, T. & Lalwani, N. (1999). Objective Self-Awareness and Causal Attributions for Self-Standard Discrepancies: Changing Self or Changing Standards of Correctness, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, (25), 1220-1229.

Ickes, W. J., & Knowles, E. S. (1982). Personality, roles, and social behavior. New York: Springer-Verlag.

Morris, N. (2016, February). Metacognitive Skills Training as a Positive Psychology Intervention for Within-Person Fluctuations of Wellbeing at Work presented to University of East London, London, England.

Showry, K., Mendemu, V. & Manasa, L. (2014). Self-Awareness-Key to Effective Leadership. IUP Journal of Soft Skills, 8 (1), 15+.

Wegner, D. & Giuliano, T. (1982). The Forms of Social Awareness. In Personality, roles, and social behavior. New York: Springer-Verlag.

Facilitating Employee Work Performance

key-lockAs a manager, have you ever wondered why you or your employees may be inconsistent regarding work performance?

You may be scratching your head…you have hired people who have the expertise necessary to perform the job; you have given your employees on-going feedback; and you have provided your employees with acceptable working conditions.  What more is required?

Consider the following:

Effective managers are aware of their responsibility to challenge and develop their employees to think and act for themselves.  As well, good managers are interested in developing their employees’ strengths. Managers who care about their employees and want their employees to succeed will find that their employees are happier and more engaged.

Here are 10 strategies that can help elevate how you are viewed by your employees, impacting their level of consistent work performance:

  1. Share your personal knowledge and experience. Employees want to hear about your successes as well as your failures. Your employees want to know how you mastered the necessary skills to do your job.
  1. Encourage employees to learn from one another. Managers who encourage and create mechanisms for employees to exchange knowledge among each other foster a trusting environment. As well, peer mentoring can be an effective way for employees to motivate each other.
  1. Provide time for one-on-one, two-way discussions. Giving feedback in meaningful, one-on-one, two-way discussions provides the opportunity for you and your employee to share observations regarding the work environment. These informal discussions demonstrate to your employees that they are important.
  1. Conduct formal performance appraisals. During a formal performance appraisal, don’t just assess your employees’ performance. Take this time to ask your employees about their career goals. While these discussions can occur at any time, the formal appraisal ensures that they do happen.
  1. Facilitate learning. Employees learn by doing and managers must find the time and techniques to facilitate learning. Not only can employees be encouraged to learn new skills, but they could expand their general business knowledge and embrace the organizational culture.
  1. Consider self-awareness training. Self-awareness is important for your employees’ personal development. It is my fundamental tenet that your employees’ depth of self-awareness equals your employees’ breadth of success. Science backs this up.
  1. Respect the need for daily recovery. When employees are able to ‘unplug’ from work, they return to work feeling more refreshed. Finding the daily balance between engagement at work and detachment while at home benefits all.
  1. Monitor the number of daily negative events. Daily work events and daily turmoil can drive the emotional states of your employees. It is important to keep the number of negative events down, in order to minimize negative emotional states.
  1. Go with the flow. Like you, employees experience concentration fluctuation and find that some days are better than others. These concentration fluctuations have been shown to increase creativity and performance. Unless it becomes a problem, go with the flow.
  1. Relinquish some job control. When employees feel that they have control over their job, they will optimize their work environment. Managers must encourage employees to keep stretching and learning; and allowing them to make some decisions. Empowered employees become self-sufficient and confident workers.

Success & Pleasure

How much do you truly enjoy your work? Do you get up in the morning eager to get to the office? Excited about the opportunities of the day? Are you anxious to see your colleagues and clients?

If your answers are “no” or “not really” or even “yeah, sometimes,” I can tell you right now you will never really achieve success until you can categorically say “YES.”

Sure, you may achieve some financial success, but you probably won’t feel a sense of fulfillment.

Action – Make a list of all the things you’ve really enjoyed from all your jobs so far. Honestly look at all the aspects of what you did and how you did it that made it a fun proposition.

As you uncover the aspects that brought you the most pleasure, you will begin to see how to make that happen in your current job OR you will realize that it really is time to find another environment worthy of your abilities.

True accomplishment comes with real pleasure.

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