We know that leaders need self-awareness to be effective. That is, an understanding of their strengths, weaknesses, feelings, thoughts, and values — as well as how they affect the people around them. But that’s only half of the story. Self-awareness is useless without an equally important skill: self-management.
A client of mine, we’ll call him Rick, serves as a case in point. He has been given repeated feedback that he speaks too often and for too long in meetings. He has told me that he wants to improve this behavior and learn how to be a more productive participant in order to help his team make better decisions. After a recent meeting with 15 people where he spoke for 30% of the time, I asked him to evaluate his participation. He replied, “I know I talked too much but I had a lot of points to make.” He then continued to tell me more about his ideas. Rick is very self-aware, but he isn’t as effective as he could be because he doesn’t self-manage.
Self-management is a conscious choice to resist a preference or habit, and instead, demonstrate a more productive behavior. It’s a four-step process:
For Rick, self-management would look like this:
What makes self-management so hard goes back to the definition. The most productive behaviors are often not aligned with our habits and our preferences. (If they were, we would not need to manage ourselves.)
Behaving in ways that aren’t aligned with your preferences can make you feel uncomfortable (“I always respond first in a Q&A. I worry others won’t get it right”), unskillful (“I don’t know how to give negative feedback”), and even unpleasant (“I like being direct and get impatient when I have to choose my words carefully”).
Operating in ways that contradict our habits can evoke similar negative reactions. With a habit, our brain creates a shortcut and moves from stimulus to response without thinking, saving both time and effort. But non-habitual behaviors require us to think about a situation, consider choices, make a choice, and then demonstrate the behavior that aligns with that choice. This takes work. The auto-pilot efficiency of habits is what make them so hard to change. It’s easier and more pleasant to default to an old habit than it is to invest the energy in creating a new one.
Despite these barriers, self-management is a learnable skill. This is how you can start:
It’s natural to behave in ways that feel good and familiar — to not self-manage — and yet, if we did this all the time, we’d never get better at anything. To become as effective as possible, leaders need to move beyond self-awareness to self-management. Start by recognizing your current actions, considering alternative options, and then putting in the hard work required to resist what may be most familiar or comfortable. Instead, commit to effectively executing what is most productive.
This content was originally published here.