Developing self-awareness is vital for leaders today. If you look at any current leadership model, you’ll find that this quality is at the top of the list. People who understand their impact on others and who are tuned into their weaknesses as well as their strengths are well suited for demanding leadership roles. In a diverse workplace where managers must exhibit sensitivity and empathy to be effective, the old, cold leadership stereotype is obsolete. Emotional intelligence is a requirement of leadership in the 21st century. Executives have to be keenly aware of who they are and how being who they are might derail their careers.
No doubt, years ago someone in Tony’s position could have been effective if he lacked even a smidgen of self-awareness. More so than in the corporate world, a gangland leader could be as insensitive as a two-by-four and perform perfectly well. Though I’m no expert, I suspect that Al Capone was not the world’s most self-aware person. Yet times change in all fields, and even in Tony’s relatively isolated New Jersey subculture, self-awareness has become important for leadership effectiveness. Tony can’t afford to let his emotional problems impact his decision making; he can’t permit his paranoia or identity issues to cause him to react inappropriately; he can’t allow unresolved issues from his past to affect his relationships with people he does business with. In Tony’s organization, as in most corporate cultures, there’s no longer much tolerance for the superegotistical leader or the supereccentric one. Both have poor people skills due to their lack of self-awareness, and that’s a leadership death sentence in these cultures.
Let’s start by describing what a self-aware leader looks like and how Tony is closer to this profile than many so-called enlightened leaders in Fortune 500 companies.