If experience automatically produced self-awareness in leadership, leading would get easier every year.
But many capable, experienced leaders find the opposite happens. They work harder. They carry more responsibility. And yet certain problems keep resurfacing—miscommunication, friction, disengagement, decisions that don’t land as intended.
This isn’t a lack of intelligence or effort.
It’s a misunderstanding of how self-awareness in leadership actually works.
Key Takeaways: Why Even Smart, Experienced Leaders Still Miss Things
- Self-awareness in leadership has two distinct forms, and they don’t always develop together
- Leadership blind spots often come from gaps between intent and impact
- Feedback in leadership improves judgment, not just relationships
- Leadership growth slows when insight doesn’t keep pace with seniority
The Two Types of Self-Awareness Leaders Need
Self-awareness in leadership is often talked about as a single trait. In reality, research by Daniel Goleman for Harvard Business Review has discovered that it’s made up of two separate skills.
Internal Self-Awareness
Internal self-awareness is about understanding yourself clearly:
- your values
- your reactions under pressure
- your strengths and blind spots
- your decision habits
- how you intend to show up day to day, the manager you want to be
This kind of self-awareness helps leaders lead with intention. It supports confidence at work because leaders understand why they think and act the way they do.
External Self-Awareness
External self-awareness is different.
It’s about understanding how others actually experience you:
- how your communication feels to others
- how your decisions affect the team
- how your behavior is interpreted in real time
This isn’t about intent. It’s about impact.
Research shows that many leaders assume these two forms of self-awareness rise together. In practice, they often don’t. Leaders can be strong in one and weak in the other.
And that gap explains a lot.
Why These Are Separate Skills
Looking inward to understand your values and motivations is not the same as understanding how others perceive you.
Internal self-awareness relies on reflection.
External self-awareness relies on feedback.
One happens privately. The other happens relationally.
Without feedback in leadership, even thoughtful leaders can misread situations, overestimate clarity, or miss how their behavior affects others—especially under pressure.
This is how leadership blind spots form.
The Feedback Gap: Why Thinking Alone Has Limits
Most leaders spend a lot of time thinking.
The issue isn’t effort—it’s perspective.
When leaders reflect alone:
- they see problems from a single angle
- their ideas stay constrained by their own assumptions
- blind spots go unchallenged
There’s also a natural gap between how leaders think they’re doing and how others think they are doing.
The same gap exists with ideas. What feels solid internally can become much stronger when other perspectives are invited in. Growth doesn’t come from knowing more—it comes from seeing more angles.
Everyone misses things. No one has a complete view.
That’s not a flaw. It’s human.
That’s why close teams where there is a constant give-and-take of ideas and frequent feedback consistently outperform siloed work groups. When team members work mostly alone, feedback is not a natural or easy part of the process.
Why Insight Doesn’t Automatically Scale With Seniority
One of the most surprising things about leadership growth is this:
experience increases confidence faster than it increases awareness.
As leaders become more senior:
- habits get reinforced
- approaches feel familiar and efficient
- questioning slows down
Some leaders stop looking inward and start protecting territory. They’re capable and reliable, but no longer expanding how they see themselves or their impact.
This is how people get “stuck” at a level.
From the outside, they look fine. Internally, growth has stalled. Over time, senior leaders notice the drag—slower execution, repeated issues, teams that aren’t learning as fast as they could.
It’s a pattern many organizations quietly recognize.
What This Means for Leadership Growth
Self-awareness in leadership isn’t a personality trait.
It’s a set of skills that must be developed deliberately.
Ultimately, you are responsible for your own growth. As you move up, no one is going to push you out of your comfort zone. It’s up to you to challenge yourself and seek new opportunities to stretch your thinking and abilities.
Learning to see yourself clearly and understanding how others experience you are both foundational to leadership growth. When either side is missing, blind spots persist—even with years of experience.
This is why leadership becomes more effective—and often easier—when awareness deepens instead of just effort increasing.
If experience alone isn’t providing new insight, learning how to see more clearly—both inwardly and outwardly—may be the next step.
Keep Learning
Leadership growth is closely tied to confidence and managing yourself and trust and building teams. Developing self-awareness in leadership strengthens judgment, reduces blind spots, and improves how teams experience your leadership over time.
→ Explore Confidence at Work: How to Build it and Why it Matters
→ Explore Why Trust in Leadership is the Fastest Way to Improve Team Performance
FAQs
What is self-awareness in leadership?
Self-awareness in leadership is the ability to understand your values, reactions, strengths, blind spots, and how your behavior impacts others. It includes both internal and external awareness.
Why do experienced leaders still have blind spots?
Leadership blind spots persist because insight doesn’t automatically grow with experience. Without feedback in leadership, patterns can repeat even as responsibility increases.
How does feedback in leadership support growth?
Feedback helps leaders understand how their actions land on others, improving judgment, relationships, and long-term leadership growth.
