Self Awareness In Leadership

Introduction

1.1 Background Information

The past 50 years has seen various leadership scholars attempt to provide a sound profile of who an ideal leader is. Kevin Sharer, who is the Amgem president and current CEO, in his experience as an assistant of Jack Welch during the 1980s said that everyone in the company wanted to be like Jack. In his point of view, leadership comprises of many voices. An individual has to thrive in his or her own self-identities and not emulate or reflect the images created by others. The past five years has made many citizens to develop complete distrust in their leaders. The twenty first century is in need of a new and fresh breed of business leaders (Baron, 2016, p 123).

At the age of twenty-three, I am confident

Through self-awareness, a leader or someone aspiring to be a leader is able to understand people in his environment, their perception on the aspirant and the consequent responses. In order to be self-aware, there is need for an awareness relative scale. The existence of awareness in an individual forms an avenue for alteration of beliefs and behaviour (Peterson, Walumbwa, Avolio & Hannah, 2012, p 503).

A recent study involving 75 members selected from Stanford Graduate School saw them unanimously respond that the most important capability that leaders were to develop was self-awareness. It has consequently been observed that leaders who are at the early stages of their careers spend more time trying to place themselves in the global picturesque and give themselves less time for self-exploration. Majority of these leaders strive to seek success and fame in various tangible ways best known to the external world. These ways include fame, rising stock prices, status and power. Leaders who neglect self-awareness and strive for self-exploration have a short-lived success tenure after which the success, which rode them to glory, becomes unsustainable. When these leaders become mature of age, they discover a big hollow in their hearts, which potentially holds them back from the personalities they want to become. Therefore, discovering one’s authentic self requires honesty and courage to examine and open up various life experiences. In doing so, a leader becomes humane and expresses willingness to become vulnerable (Nelson, Boudrias, Brunet, Morin, De Civita, Savoie, & Alderson, 2014, p