What Your Team Knows About You That You Don't

See yourself clearly.

In the last edition of Self-Awareness Changes Everything we explored 5 common leadership blind spots that I have seen over years of conducting executive level 360-degree feedback assessments. Tasha Eurich's research offers a sobering starting point: 95% of people believe they are self-aware, yet only about 10–15% are.[1]

As leaders, we want to be seen as unshakable, resilient and brilliant. Being vulnerable seems counterintuitive. Sometimes we forget that as we climb the ladder, we are less likely to hear development related honest feedback and honestly, maybe we seek it less as our confidence and successes grow. We intend to treat our colleagues and direct reports with fairness and objectivity, but are we succeeding?

Your reputation isn't built by your intentions. It's built by the experience other people have when they interact with you.

Self-reflection tells us who we believe we are.

Feedback tells us who we are for everyone else.

Neuroscience no longer views self-awareness as simply looking inward. The brain builds a predictive model of who we are as leaders, but that model is only as accurate as the social information it receives. The very brain networks that allow us to understand ourselves are also responsible for understanding how others experience us. Neuroscience increasingly understands the self not as a fixed internal representation, but as a dynamic model constructed from our experiences and context. The brain continually integrates information to construct what researchers describe as a “self-in-context.” This has an important implication for leadership: if our understanding of ourselves is based primarily on our own perspective, we are working with an incomplete picture of how we are experienced by others.[2]

And neuroscience gives us another reason to pay attention to how others experience us. Research on social cognition describes “reflected self-knowledge” (our understanding of what others think about us) as an important component of high-level social interaction, particularly where trust is involved.[3]

Our ongoing growth and development are dependent on knowing how we are showing up for others. When we couple that with Tasha Eurich’s study on self-awareness we can see the benefit of opening the door a little wider and peeking in.

Growth requires more than self-reflection.

It requires seeing ourselves through the eyes of others.

Everyone experiences and interprets a situation based on a combination of personal experience, culture, etc. No one person has the exact same reaction as another person.

That is precisely why multiple perspectives matter.

This forms the basis for 360-degree or multi-rater assessments. This is where 360-degree or multi-rater feedback becomes so powerful. It brings together multiple perspectives to reveal patterns, differences, and blind spots that are difficult to see from a single vantage point. In fact, Management Research Group's (MRG) 2024 global study of nearly 40,000 leaders who completed a 360-degree assessment, demonstrated that leaders average 7.6 blind spots across 22 leadership behaviours measured, regardless of management level, geography, gender, industry, work environment (remote, hybrid, or in-person), or generation.

This finding reinforces the strategic value of helping leaders see what they cannot see themselves.

But not all 360-degree assessments are created equal.

To generate meaningful insight that leaders and organizations can trust and act upon, several conditions need to be in place:

a) Survey and interview respondents need to feel that their feedback is confidential. This can be achieved through hiring a third-party to conduct the assessment, protecting respondent anonymity, and ensuring that individual responses cannot be attributed to specific respondents. Also, the third-party assessor should never provide verbatim comments. Qualitative feedback should be synthesized into themes rather than presented as verbatim comments, particularly where comments could inadvertently identify the respondent.

b) The most senior leaders in the organization, should ideally be assessed first thereby demonstrating an openness and support for receiving feedback. An exception can be made where an organization’s psychological safety is secure and the individual being assessed buys in to the process to further their development and progression.

c) The 360-degree assessment is most effective when it is tailored to the organization’s values, objectives, and leadership competencies within specific roles.

d) The assessment benefits from both surveys and one-on-one interviews. Personally, I like to complete the surveys before the interviews. This way I can have more meaningful and tailored interviews.

e) A holistic approach that covers the most important aspects of successful leadership including delivery on objectives is critical for ensuring feedback covers different areas of leadership and different points-of-view.

f) The organization must know what it is measuring. If leadership competencies are not well-defined, as an example, some pre-work is required prior to engaging in a 360-degree review. There may also need to be a gap between defining core competencies and allowing leaders to adjust to the new measurement.

The time is now.

Organizations are navigating extraordinary change. AI is reshaping how work gets done, transformation has become continuous, and leaders are being asked to make consequential decisions with greater speed, complexity, and uncertainty.

In this environment, understanding how leaders are actually experienced by the people around them becomes increasingly important.

Well-designed 360-degree assessments provide objective data from multiple perspectives, combining quantitative ratings with qualitative feedback and confidential interviews from managers, peers, direct reports, and other key stakeholders. The result is a more complete picture of leadership effectiveness than any single perspective can provide.

Repeated over time, this data creates a meaningful benchmark for measuring leadership growth, revealing persistent blind spots, and identifying emerging leadership risks before they begin to affect organizational performance.

Leadership blind spots are business risks.

Knowing what your team knows about you is a performance advantage.

Boards, CEOs, CHROs, and investors all have a vested interest in ensuring leaders possess the capabilities required to navigate an increasingly complex business environment.

The organizations that thrive over the next decade will not necessarily be those with the most advanced technology. They will be those whose leaders have the self-awareness, adaptability, and courage to recognize and address their own blind spots.

One of the most effective ways to reduce leadership risk is to identify those blind spots early and before they undermine trust, culture, engagement, succession, innovation, and business performance.

As AI reshapes how organizations operate, human leadership capability may become an even greater source of competitive advantage.

In my next article, I'll explore how leaders can use the insights from a 360-degree feedback assessment to lead more powerfully and turn greater self-awareness into meaningful behavioural change.

#LeadershipDevelopment #Self-Awareness #360Feedback #LeadershipEffectiveness

[1] Eurich, Tasha. Insight: The Surprising Truth About How Others See Us, How We See Ourselves, and Why The Answers Matter More Than We Think. Crown Publishing Group (2017, 2018).

[2] Koban, L., Gianaros, P.J., Kober, H. et al. The self in context: brain systems linking mental and physical health. Nat Rev Neurosci 22, 309–322 (2021).

[3] Amodio, D., Frith, C. Meeting of minds: the medial frontal cortex and social cognition. Nat Rev Neurosci 7, 268–277 (2006).