Self-Awareness Toolkit for Teams

Improving self-awareness is the foundation to almost all growth as leaders. We need help becoming more self-aware.

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Last week, we shared a Self-Awareness Starter Toolkit for Individuals. This week, the focus is on what we can do to foster a culture of self-awareness throughout our organization. 

No Human Is an Island

It may seem paradoxical to have group practices for individual self-awareness. However, living with self-awareness throughout our daily work is actually really hard. Many a team meeting gets derailed because someone is bringing in baggage from the previous meeting or a recent email. Taking some time to pause to reset can help us respond rather than react. Those few minutes will pay exponential dividends in productivity and team satisfaction.

Also, utilizing our team and organizational meetings to highlight the value of self-awareness helps to build a culture of intentionality. When leaders pause to reset, it gives others permission to get off the hurry train, take a few minutes to gather themselves, and bring their best selves to the next task. Do not underestimate the transformative power of simple, healthy rituals.

Organizational Tactics

• Eliminate Back-to-Back-to-Back Meetings. Few things are mind-numbing and body-tightening quite like a wall of meetings from morning to night. This is not your fixed destiny. Establish a company norm that meetings will stop 10-15 minutes before the hour or 5 minutes before the half hour. In addition to being biological beings who need regular breaks for fluid adjustments, we are also mental/emotional/spiritual beings who need literal and figurative breathers between meetings so we can decompress and regroup (maybe via some of the individual tactics above). If a meeting is running over, make sure people feel empowered to drop off to prepare for upcoming appointments.

• Emotional Check-Ins. For in-house meetings or connections with trusted external partners, it is often a good practice to start with an emotion-minded ice breaker. If these sound canned or corny, you can make them real by being honest about your emotional state first. You’ll be surprised how the rest of your team opens up. Here are a few suggestions:

• What’s the weather like in your head today?

• How are you - really?

• How are you coming into this meeting today?

• Rose/Thorn/Bud: Share one thing you are grateful for lately, one thing that has been hard, and one thing you’re looking forward to. 

• Emotional Mirroring. Sometimes other people can see us more clearly than we can see ourselves. We can provide a real gift to each other just by naming the emotions we are perceiving. Even if we aren’t spot on, drawing attention to the emotional realm can often help the other person identify the real emotions at play and start to dig into why. This is a bit tricky though. It requires an environment of psychological safety and trusting relationships. At the beginning, it usually can’t happen in the moment of high emotion, but must be part of a debrief. Also, it is often helpful to gently ask for permission to go there: “I noticed the meeting with John got a little intense. Would it be OK if I share a little about what I think I saw?”

• Walk (and Talk). Steve Jobs famously took many of his meetings walking circles around the inner courtyard of Infinite Loop 1, and many CEOs since have copied his example. Walking during meetings will invigorate creativity, and it connects you to nature and your body. If you lead a remote team, consider planning some of your more frequent informal meetings (like 1-1s) as phone calls so that both of you can walk as you go.

Organizational Strategies

• Work-style Profiles. Personality tests are proliferating the market. But many, like the Myers-Briggs (or MBTI) or the enneagram, can get a little too complicated for easy use. To understand personal work styles, the best tool may be the DiSC profile. This framework is simple without being simplistic. It identifies each person’s basic style (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, or Conscientiousness) and their secondary style, and then it provides language and tips for how teams can work together in more effective ways. Doing this as a team can turn on light bulbs about sources of conflict and empower each person to bring forward their best gifts.

• Leadership 360s and Coaching. Scholarly evidence and common sense concur that more effective leadership leads to higher performance in every sector and size of organization. However, leadership profiles are a dime-a-dozen, usually organized around a particular leadership style or theory. The most comprehensive, credible, and useful leadership profile seems to be the Leadership Circle Profile. This robust assessment deploys a 360 review to provide a holistic assessment of both positive strengths and shadow-side reactive tendencies. Simply seeing how your own ratings compare to how others rate you will be eye-opening. To maximize this tool, use it with the whole leadership team, and combine it with ongoing coaching. 

• Normalize Attention to Mental Health. Encourage and affirm self-care, vacations, and setting boundaries around work hours, even email. Make mental health resources widely available, whether through employee assistance programs, training on resiliency, or contracts with mental health providers. Leaders can really set the culture here by spotlighting how they unplug and how their therapist is helping them.

Common Pitfalls

Thinking of This as Religious

Self-awareness tends toward the spiritual because we are learning to know the deepest parts of ourselves. However, spirituality is a territory rich with both gold mines and landmines. Many of us have had bad experiences with religion or have been warned about the dangers of other religions. What we’re talking about here is something that can happen alongside or even separate from religious creeds. Particular religious beliefs and practices may help or hinder your self-awareness, and it’s up to you to figure out your own secret sauce. 

Thinking Any of This Should Be Easy

One of the most common pitfalls for people venturing into self-awareness practices for the first time is trying something (say a mindfulness exercise), struggling with it, and then abandoning the whole enterprise. We are literally rewiring the neural circuitry of our brains to function in healthier and more productive ways. The learning process for self-awareness is similar to that of learning to play a new instrument or a new sport. It’s going to be awkward and not very pretty at first. That’s fine. That’s normal. Don’t give up. Take a break and try it again. Try something else. Keep experimenting until you find what works for you.

Start Now

• Reflection Question: How much does your organization encourage people to cultivate self-awareness? How can you do a little more? 

• Immediate Action Step: At the beginning of the next meeting you lead, ask people to go around the room and describe how they are really doing in one word. 

• Join: Never climb alone!

• Apply for a CEO Frontiers Forum. Leverage 6-8 peers and an experienced guide to help you breakthrough your most pressing challenges every month.

• Request a free assessment. Meet with our expert team to clarify where you are going, identify your roadblocks, and chart a path into your frontiers.