On Self-Awareness

“What is your damage, Heather?”

— Veronica Sawyer

Those of a certain age <ahem> will remember this comeback from the halls of high school. The question, however, is critical. Those who achieve self-awareness likely have spent a significant portion of their lives exploring the answer.

Jim Collins discusses the role of self-awareness in leadership in his seminal book Good to Great. “Level 5 leaders [Collins' highest order] are a study in duality: modest and willful, shy and fearless.” Leaders able to project conviction yet be truly and constantly receptive to dissent and ideas from throughout the organization cannot exist without high degrees of self-awareness. 

“Without knowing your damage, you may be capable of determining what makes you tick but you will be blind to what makes you react.”

Self-awareness is my number one predictor of future success because it essentially predetermines one’s capacity for growth. Combine self-awareness with exceedingly high levels of intellect and curiosity and – BOOM – you’ve got a winner on your hands. Add experience and the necessary winning personality to the mix and you should do all you can to prevent the candidate from walking out the door. But please don't break the law like Veronica and J.D. did.

Without knowing your damage, you may be capable of determining what makes you tick but you will be blind to what makes you react. If you’ve often found yourself angry, defensive, or aggressive, there is a deep seated fear that is being triggered. Walling it off may have saved you as a child but it’s limiting you as an adult. The truthful exploration of your joys and traumas, your desires and needs, and your habits and peccadillos is necessary to understand why you do the things you do. 

Collins posits that great companies "became relentlessly disciplined at confronting the most brutal facts of their current reality." I say this is true of great leaders as well. I devote considerable energy to this exploration. The mind doesn’t want to walk down these unpleasant avenues. The psyche is built to defend itself. Reflecting on your shortcomings is a choice you must make. How can you improve a habit if you don’t understand its origins? You empower yourself to internalize life’s lessons and achieve new levels of personal and professional success if you can closely and critically observe yourself, particularly when you are exposing the raw wounds of the damage holding you back. 

Too much unexplored damage and, one way or another, your behavior will change to the point where it's noticeable to others. If you aren’t self-aware, it means your mood is being affected by something you don’t know (or want to know) is bothering you. If you are self-aware however, you are constantly practicing being your best self and rising to the occasion. If one is conscious as to who they are, how they think, and what they fear, they have the tools to affect their own change. Self improvement is impossible without self awareness. 

“The mind doesn’t want to walk down these unpleasant avenues. The psyche is built to defend itself. Reflecting on your shortcomings is a choice you must make. ”

Self-aware teams persevere through adversity and learn at ever increasing rates. Self-aware managers know how to build effective teams because they challenge their teams to become ever more aware of what motivates and stifles them (collectively and as individuals) and thus their decision making. A highly functioning team knows who each team member truly is, how they think, and how the combos of those thinking modes interact. Highly functioning teams have the courage to own their behavior and they use this collective self-awareness to be the change they wish for. Smart, curious, self-aware teams can achieve any goal and carry out any plan.

I've previously written about wanting to build heterogeneous teams of people who are continuously exploring their gifts and their shortcomings and building each other up as a result of those explorations. How do you identify these candidates? Brains and experience and niceness can all be tested. Here are just a few of the questions I mix into a 60-90 minute conversation that I believe expose a candidate's level of and capacity for self-awareness:

• What's the single most important thing you do every day?
• Describe a time you felt you were right but you still had to follow someone else's directions.
• What were you doing the last time you looked at a clock and realized you had lost all track of time?
• What business do you fantasize starting?
• What would you most like to learn working at MyCo that will help you in your future after MyCo?
• Where do you not want to be in five years?
• What would you say is the biggest misperception people have of you?
• Without thinking quickly name three reasons why I should not hire you.
• Tell me about the last time a co-worker or customer got angry with you. What happened?
• What do you enjoy most about working and what do you enjoy least?
• Are you nice? When are you not nice? Tell me about the last time you were not nice.

Self-reflection can take place anywhere at any time. I’m getting better at the habit of writing a few things down when I’m feeling agitated and reacting emotionally. It’s difficult, and the answer isn’t always there. But growth starts with asking ‘Why?’. If I can learn to spend more time seeking to understand rather than to be right, I’ll end up understanding and being right more often.

You Deserve

You deserve to surround yourself with a team that has the right culture, one capable of moving with urgency to solve problems that create new opportunities. You deserve to be part of a team that enjoys helping each other become increasingly successful.

You deserve to work with folks with little tolerance for politics and posturing because it undermines the culture that can drive success. You deserve leaders that welcome mistakes but hate needless surprises.

You deserve the trust and freedom to speak candidly and honestly, and to count on your colleagues to do the same. You deserve teammates that feel a huge obligation to hold themselves personally accountable for everything one does. Teammates that take responsibility when something goes right and when something goes wrong.

You deserve leaders who provide creativity a nourishing environment largely free of the constraints of time and capital. In return, you deserve an org that never uses creativity to create excuses.

You understand that every penny of cost or expense of a business is paid for with customer revenue. You deserve to be compensated richly for teamwork and performance, and understand that the cost of paying an underperformer to leave is demonstrably less than the cost of keeping them around. 

You deserve a team that knows that nothing is more important to the right culture than the customer, no matter what burning fire comes up.

You deserve to be part of a team of such character.

Time

We must always operate with a sense of urgency. Time is the enemy in everything we do. The one way we are created equal is we only have 24 hours in a day. The smartest person in the world hasn’t figured out how to change that. That’s why customer focus is critical. We take our eye off our customer at our peril: someone else may be looking at her just as we turn away.

The Product Maker and the Operator

Revenue is neither a raison d'être nor a dirty word.

The Product Maker dreams his dream of the new and of the wondrous. He cares little for the status quo. The Operator must deliver the product to a target audience that is known or to be found, and then get that audience to realize that the product will enrich their lives. So whereas the Product Maker can invent the wants and wishes of the target market, the Operator must find ways to show that the product will satisfy the target market if they try it. This is a complementary relationship.

Picture in your mind an ice cream soda. The guy who first put that cherry on top of the whipped cream, to delight the customer, was, in his own way, a genius. That delight does something: it causes people to want to repeat the experience. It's a growth hack.

I once worked for a founder who insisted we didn’t have customers, and even if we did he would never demean himself by trying to satisfy them.

There’s no magic in the word “customer”. We can call our target market anything we choose, so long as we know we are talking about the group(s) from whom our revenue comes. Doctors call them patients. Lawyers call them clients. Even prostitutes call them tricks.

There’s no magic in the word “satisfying”. Perhaps it is too limp a word. Perhaps it should be delighting, charming, overwhelming, titillating, innovating, or revolutionizing.

“If our customers are thrilled, delighted, and charmed, but if for some reason fail to be satisfied to the point of spending money, then we will not have moved forward in attaining the purposes that our stakeholders expect from us. ”

Regardless, a culture that focuses on the market it serves, namely customers, and tries to get them to take action which generates revenue, namely satisfying, is a culture that is likely to be successful. Our goal, with respect to our work, is not to satisfy, but to do much more. As we go about our tasks we should innovate and create earth-shaking works. Throughout, our team must be focused on the wants and needs, known and anticipated, of our target audience.

This is the basis for long-term success. High-growth operators focus on revenue growth, not profitability. There are many investments that we want to make; they may generate operating losses in the near term. So long as those investments serve the long-term goal of “satisfying customers” they will be worth it. 

The only way we’ll know whether the seeds that we plant bear fruit is by seeing whether they generate revenue. If our customers are thrilled, delighted, and charmed, but if for some reason fail to be satisfied to the point of spending money, then we will not have moved forward in attaining the purposes that our stakeholders expect from us. We do all the things we dream of because we believe someone will recognize us the traditional way: by providing revenue. 

If Steve Jobs delighted only himself, you wouldn’t know Steve Jobs. If Apple’s products failed to sell, Apple would cease to exist. If Apple ceased to exist, Steve Jobs wouldn’t have had the resources to continue delighting himself. Revenue was not the reason for his existence. Revenue was the proof of the impact of his existence.

If we lose sight of the purpose of the investments we make and innovate for its own sake, if we seek to delight solely because it pleases us to do so, we will have turned our focus inward, and by doing so forsake the crucial piece of the puzzle. It is the customer who must be satisfied. Our delight must come from delighting others.

Ten Rules

1. Focus unswervingly on the customer.
2. Make and beat audacious goals.
3. Hire the best and brightest, without equivocation, and exceed their expectations by over-delivering on what motivates them.
4. Invest continuously in learning, mentoring, and development.
5. Help the people around you excel, and in turn excel because of the help of the people around you.
6. Trust in the abilities of one's colleagues.
7. Reward and emphasize personal accountability.
8. Rip off band-aids quickly and cut loose dead wood.
9. Act with urgency.
10. Be human.

(Number 11 would be don't mix metaphors like I did in number 8.)