Self-Awareness is no leadership cure-all

Gene Mage

Evan S. Connell’s Son of the Morning Star chronicles the life of one of America’s most colorful historical figures, George Armstrong Custer. Custer’s life was a winding trail of contradiction, at times riding tantalizingly close to genuine influence, then wandering off into the sagebrush of comic relief, finally resolving in tragic climax.

Perhaps the strangest aspect of Custer’s life, from his narrow brush with graduation at West Point, to his meritorious service as a Union cavalry officer in the civil war, and his mythic exploits as an Indian fighter, was his uncanny self-awareness. Custer was a prolific writer, and through his writings he demonstrated insight into both the workings of the human mind and his own idiosyncrasies. And to paraphrase Connell, much of Custer’s writing was eerily prophetic, particularly when he spoke of how people do not really change, but tend to repeat their mistakes over and over. Custer’s spectacular demise at Little Big Horn was living proof of that adage.

Custer teaches us that insight alone does not naturally translate into a changed life. Indeed, history is littered with self-aware individuals who were painfully unable to do anything about what they knew.

Yet in the twenty-first century, leadership experts still blush breathlessly when self-awareness is mentioned. Self-awareness has become the great elixir, the Holy Grail, the unchallenged panacea of leadership development. Client companies invest millions in pseudo-scientific 360° feedback systems to help leaders create self-awareness. Indeed, major research and training institutions do little more than gather and disseminate feedback. Sadly, much of the investment in 360° feedback snake-oil yields little or no benefit to those dear, trusting organizations who write the checks, other than to sooth the minds of human resource executives and line the pockets of consultants.

But even a cursory review of history reveals that it takes more than self-awareness to improve your leadership or your life. Indeed, it takes more than good intentions and the right training. It takes more than a kindly executive coach on the end of a phone line. It takes more than workshops and seminars, tapes and books, gurus, support groups and mentors.

The Apostle Paul wrote of two powerful and opposing forces that pull at the human spirit. Holding one arm in a death grip are habitual behavioral patterns that anchor leaders deeply into the granite of status-quo. In my consulting practice, I have observed that leaders are the way they are because they like being that way, and the thought of being some other way makes them acutely uncomfortable. Therefore, leaders will move heaven and earth to self-justify and self-validate their basic rightness rather than step through some dark doorway labeled “change”.

Yet pulling urgently at the other arm is, in the words of author Harry Mathews, a more subtle “yearning for transformation”. So the trainers, coaches and pop-psychologists grab onto the leader and pull ever-harder on the one good arm. But you and I both know that as long as the other arm is anchored in the granite no genuine change will occur. Indeed, no real change can occur until the leader finds release from the anchor of self-defeating thought patterns.

So how does one become set free from the past? As John Bradshaw, a leading authority on addiction and recovery notes, real transformation has always been first and foremost a spiritual issue. Charles Dickens observed, “The mine which Time has slowly dug beneath familiar objects is sprung in an instant; and what was rock before, becomes but sand and dust.” The same Spirit who creates the yearning for transformation digs away at the rock that holds us fast. That is why every twelve-step program begins with belief in a higher power.

In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge’s transformation followed his encounter with power from outside his own walls. Only then did his perspective broaden beyond the narrow dusty confines of self. You cannot move forward by continually looking inward.