The Leader You Think You Are vs. the Leader Your Team Experiences
Leadership self-awareness begins with a difficult question: Are you the leader you think you are?
Most leaders have a picture in mind of the kind of leader they are. Maybe they see themselves as approachable, believe they communicate clearly, think they give their people plenty of autonomy, or consider themselves a good listener, a strong coach, or someone who genuinely cares about their team.
But another perspective matters just as much: Who is the leader your team actually experiences?
A significant gap can exist between how we intend to lead and how the people around us experience our leadership. Closing that gap requires something many leaders struggle with: self-awareness.
Our intentions matter, but they don’t tell the whole story.
A leader might think they are giving autonomy, while their employee is thinking, “My boss never tells me what they expect.” A leader might believe, “I am holding people accountable,” while their team experiences constant criticism. A leader might think, “I am moving quickly and getting things done,” while their team feels like there is never enough time to think, contribute, or ask questions.
Neither perspective is necessarily dishonest. They are simply experiencing the same leadership differently.
What Is Leadership Self-Awareness?
Leadership self-awareness is the ability to recognize your emotions, behaviors, strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies, and to understand how they affect the people you lead.
That second part matters.
Knowing yourself is valuable, but leadership doesn’t happen in isolation. You can have good intentions and still create confusion, frustration, or dependency without realizing it. True self-awareness requires comparing how you believe you are leading with how your leadership is actually experienced.
This is where Emotional Intelligence comes in.
At Arrowhead, we define Emotional Intelligence as the ability to acknowledge, identify, process, and manage your own emotions and the emotions of others to make the best decisions and get the best results for the team.
That starts with self-awareness, which means understanding your own feelings, reactions, strengths, and weaknesses. But it can’t stop there.
One leadership challenge is recognizing and adjusting how we see ourselves through our own lens. Everyone naturally sees the world through their own experiences and perspectives. One of the most important things a leader can learn is to see situations through other people’s lenses.
Your communication style makes sense to you because it is your communication style. Your decision-making process feels reasonable because it is your process. Your expectations seem obvious because they are obvious to you.
But other people aren’t you.
As Eric Lopez writes in Structured Empowerment, “Social awareness requires leaders to understand the people around them, their personalities, backgrounds, experiences, strengths, weaknesses, feelings, and perspectives.”
That changes the leadership question.
Instead of asking, “How do I want to lead?” we begin asking, “What does this person need from me to be successful?”
That is a very different mindset.
Leadership Self-Awareness Requires Honest Feedback
One of the most valuable exercises in Structured Empowerment is asking trusted people to describe “Understanding You.” Not the version of you that exists in your own head, but the version they actually experience.
An important part of this exercise is asking people to be honest, even if the feedback is uncomfortable.
As a leader, you have to check your ego and become more concerned about future growth than protecting your past performance.
That’s humility.
Humility doesn’t mean thinking less of yourself. It means being willing to recognize that you may not see yourself as clearly as you think.
Sometimes the feedback will confirm what you already know. Sometimes it will surprise you. And sometimes it will sting.
But just because feedback is uncomfortable doesn’t mean it is wrong. It may mean there is something there that you need to look at.
How Leadership Strengths Can Create Blind Spots
Personality assessments such as DiSC can help with this process because they give us another lens for understanding our natural tendencies.
Our EQ materials identify different strengths and potential weaknesses across Dominant, Influencer, Conscientious, and Steady styles.
For example, decisiveness can become controlling. Enthusiasm can become disorganization. Attention to detail can become perfectionism. Patience can become indecisiveness or over-accommodation.
The point isn’t to put yourself in a box. The point is to recognize how your natural tendencies may affect other people.
Your strength may be someone else’s frustration. Your preferred communication style may not be the communication style your employee needs. Your version of “helping” may feel like micromanagement to someone else. Your version of “giving someone space” may feel like a lack of support.
That’s where leadership blind spots become dangerous. We often continue a behavior because we see the positive intention behind it, while the people around us experience the unintended impact.
Self-awareness asks, “What am I doing?” Social awareness asks, “How is it affecting them?”
Great leadership requires both.
How to Identify Your Leadership Blind Spots
You don’t need a complicated assessment to begin closing the gap between the leader you think you are and the leader your team experiences.
Start by asking the people you lead two questions:
“What is one thing I do that helps you succeed?”
Then ask:
“What is one thing I do that makes your job harder?”
And here’s the hard part: don’t defend yourself.
Don’t explain your intentions. Don’t immediately tell them why they misunderstood you. Don’t turn their feedback into a debate.
Listen.
Because the goal isn’t to prove that your perception of yourself is correct; the goal is to learn something you couldn’t see on your own.
At Arrowhead, we believe relationships come first. Our methodology is built on the idea that leaders must know and care about people before they can effectively challenge and develop them.
That kind of relationship requires trust. And trust requires enough humility to say, “Tell me what I’m not seeing.”
Leadership Is About Impact
Ultimately, the leader you think you are matters. But the leader your team experiences matters more.
Your leadership philosophy, personality, intentions, and strengths all provide a foundation. But leadership becomes real in the moments when other people experience you.
That’s why the first pillar of Structured Empowerment begins with people, and why its first principle is Build Mutual Trust. Trust is created through genuine relationships, honest communication, vulnerability, and understanding.
As a coach, I often give my clients exercises. So here’s yours.
First, ask yourself this question and write down your answer:
What do I believe my team experiences from me?
Be specific. Think about the way you communicate, make decisions, delegate, respond to mistakes, give feedback, handle pressure, and show up when things get difficult.
Then ask your team.
Ask the people you lead:
“What is one thing I do that helps you succeed?”
“What is one thing I do that makes your job harder?”
Write down their answers.
Then compare what they told you with what you wrote about yourself.
The answers may be consistent. They may reveal something you hadn’t considered. Or they may challenge what you believed about your leadership.
Either way, you’ll have something every good leader needs: a clearer picture of the gap between who you think you are and who your team actually experiences.
And closing that gap?
That’s where leadership growth begins.
Are You Too Valuable to Be Doing This Work?
One leadership blind spot we see often is a leader continuing to carry responsibilities that someone else on the team is ready to learn.
It usually comes from a good place. You know how to do the work. You want it done well. It may even be faster to handle it yourself.
But over time, holding onto too much can make you the bottleneck and keep the people around you from developing the confidence, judgment, and ownership they need to grow.
Our free leadership guide, Too Valuable to Be Doing This Work, will help you identify where you may be holding onto work your team is ready to own and how to begin developing leaders around you.
