A survey of 75 members of the Stanford Graduate School of Business Advisory Council found that self-awareness is the most important competency for leaders to achieve. By understanding yourself and others, you are better placed to fully engage, motivate, and inspire.

When the leader then encourages his or her people to also practice self-awareness as an everyday value of the organization, he or she will be providing the foundation necessary in the modern business to promote: creativity, innovation, agility, and the ability to change.

Articulate the natural you with a leadership style assessment (printable)

Key to cultivating self-awareness is using the tools that promote self-awareness. A leadership style assessment – printable for ease of reference – will provide a reference point for improvement.

Self-awareness will enable you to identify your strengths and weaknesses, taking advantage of the former and improving the latter. It is a key aspect of emotional intelligence and drives effective leadership. With a high level of self-awareness and heightened emotional intelligence, you’ll be more adept at building collaborative leadership partnerships. Ultimately you will be more effective as a leader.

The starting point to improving self-awareness is to take a leadership style assessment. This will inform the route for improvement as a leader.

How leadership style assessments work

A study of 302 leaders undertaken by the world famous Center for Creative Leadership examined feedback from superiors, peers, and subordinates. What this 360 degree feedback discovered was that eight emotional subscales could predict superior leadership performance 80% of the time. The inference, of course, is that by improving along these subscales your effectiveness as a leader is stimulated and developed.

In a separate study, Telecom New Zealand found that EQ-I scores accounted for 48% of the difference between high and low performing leaders. Put another way, almost half of the skillsets required for effective leadership is emotional and social skills. Understanding this relationship, here at Primeast we utilize a 360 degree process that measures not eight, but 15 subscales of emotional intelligence and social functioning.

With the assessment complete, the leader will benefit by:

• recognizing current thoughts, actions, and behaviors;
• gaining a higher level of self-awareness and recognize impact on others;
• reflecting and improving awareness of others emotions; and
• exploring and developing stress management strategies for more effective leadership.

From this starting point the leader will have identified areas of self-development and emotional intelligence where leadership coaching is required to improve effectiveness. Certainly, he or she will be in a position to recognize how they interact with others and what motivates them in their behaviors, as well as how problem solving is approached.

In summary, a leadership style assessment is the stepping stone to embedding habits and actions that will improve self-awareness.

Contact Primeast today to discuss our Leadership EQI 2.0 Assessment and Debrief and Leadership Coaching packages.