6. Creating Self-Aware Organizations

Why leaders shape self-aware teams

Welcome back. So far, we focused on your personal self-awareness journey, but if you're leading others, you have an opportunity to create environments where self-awareness can flourish. When I talk about leading others, it's not just that you're a manager or have team responsibilities. This could also be if you're a project lead or you're helping influence others. There are all sorts of leadership where this can apply. So now we're on to Chapter Six, Creating Self-Aware Organizations. Self-aware leaders are three times more effective at leading others, and their teams are also more engaged and satisfied. Organizations that encourage self-awareness have higher productivity, stronger collaboration, clearer communication, and greater psychological safety.

Practices that build self-awareness at work

If you want this self-awareness for your organization, how do you create it? There are several things that you can do, one of which is introducing 360 degree feedback. This involves regular input from peers, managers, and reports to surface blind spots. If you haven't tried this, I highly recommend giving it a go. It really uncovers a lot of great information. You can also invest in EQ, or emotional intelligence, training, because you can develop emotional intelligence.

Doing this improves communication and resilience. Stay tuned for the next course if you want to learn more about EQ at work. You can also anchor to your core values. Ensure that everyone understands and lives the why behind the work that they do. I see this often in companies, that the why or the purpose is missing, and having it can really be motivating for employees and help with this self-awareness factor.

Turning around a toxic team culture

Let me tell you about my journey with this. At one point in my career, I inherited a team where the team culture was unfortunately the worst in the company, according to our regular engagement surveys. The team was really siloed and they were competitive with each other, sometimes purposely withholding information to make themselves look better. The team was against all odds performing, which was great, but it was really a toxic culture.

To transform the team culture, I started sharing my own struggles and growth edges with the team. In our regular team meetings, we rotated through the team sharing our mistakes and our learnings, and I also participated. I also asked for feedback regularly and acted on that feedback. Within just a few months, my team had the highest engagement scores and lowest turnover in the company. It was really a spectacular change and something that I'm still super proud about.

Measuring psychological safety on your team

Let's think now about your current team culture. On a scale of 1 to 10, how psychologically safe is it for people to admit mistakes without fear, ask for help when they need it, and give you honest feedback? What I want you to do is write down your scores for these different areas. Again, you can do this in the workbook for the course. Write down your scores and identify one area that's a little bit lower in scoring where you could improve psychological safety. Then, based on what we've covered here, what's one practice you could introduce to your team to foster greater self-awareness?

Starting small and going first

Any of these should be small enough to implement easily, connected to business results, and something that you can model personally. For example, one of these small practices could be to start meetings with a one-word check-in that describes how your team is showing up today. This simple ask normalizes emotional awareness, strengthens team connection, and makes hidden stress visible. And remember, when you're starting some of these different actions where you're asking people to be a little more open or vulnerable, you should go first.

It's a great way to show that it's a safe space when the leader, or the project leader, is the one taking that first stab. So go ahead, pause the video, take some time and write down your idea. Creating self-aware organizations is about fundamentally changing how people relate to each other and their work. The leaders who do this work are building the organizations of the future. In our final chapter, we'll pull everything together and give you a concrete toolkit for continuing your journey. See you there.