The most damaging leaders are often not the least capable, but the least self-aware.

When leaders do not understand their own habits and cannot see the impact of their behaviour on others, the consequences often ripple quickly through culture, performance, and the employee experience. This is despite the fact that the risk could have been identified before the appointment was made.

We help organisations move beyond traditional recruitment practices that often fail to predict a candidate’s future effectiveness using our 4 Critical Dimensions of Leadership Assessment:

1. Capability Fit
2. Development Potential
3. Self-Awareness
4. Culture Fit.

This is the third article in a four-part series in which we are sharing these insights for the first time. Each article explores one dimension in turn, offering practical guidance to help organisations assess candidates with greater confidence and appoint leaders who can move the organisation forward.

The first two covered Capability Fit and Development Potential. This article explores Self-Awareness.

Self-Awareness

Self-awareness, in a leadership context, is the ability to recognise what drives your behaviour, how you tend to respond under pressure, how others are likely to experience you, and what you may need to adapt to lead effectively across different people and situations.

Personal Effectiveness

The first impact of low self-awareness is on a leader’s personal effectiveness. Psychologists such as Robert Hogan have found that most cases of leadership failure arise not from a lack of technical knowledge or ability, but through strong and poorly managed personality preferences that drive unhelpful behaviours. Poor self-awareness is a key factor behind these ‘derailers’. In essence, this is where leaders allow themselves to do too much of one thing (known as ‘over-indexing’) at the expense of something else.

For example, a leader with a high level of self-confidence and a preference for trusting their intuition could be inclined to make very quick decisions, without much active data gathering or sense-checking. In situations where that leader has a great deal of relevant experience, and the stakes are relatively low, this can serve the leader well. However, if the leader has a low level of self-awareness about their personal style and the pros and cons of that approach, this could lead to making rash and overconfident decisions if there is greater complexity or risk involved. Here, the leader does not recognise the need to adapt their habitual approach to different circumstances.

Leadership Shadow

Self-awareness matters because leaders cast a long shadow. Their behaviour, decisions, and interpersonal style shape organisational culture and employee outcomes far more than they may realise. Whether intentionally or not, leaders signal what is acceptable through both what they do and what they allow to happen around them.

The standards leaders model often become the social norm. Through their own actions and through the behaviours they endorse, leaders play a defining role in shaping the culture people experience at work. For example, in their book ‘The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron’, Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind describe how senior executives, such as Jeffrey Skilling, transformed the corporate culture into one that was focused on intellectual superiority and high risk taking, to the point where dissent became associated with not “getting it” and critics could be dismissed as insufficiently sophisticated. This ultimately created the backdrop for Enron’s failure.

Relating to this, in our 2025 Psychological Safety at Work research, managers were most frequently identified as the source of toxic behaviour (63%), and most respondents (57%) believed that meaningful cultural change depends on leaders changing their behaviour.

When workplace culture is poor, the consequences are felt at the employee level: lower wellbeing, reduced job satisfaction and higher turnover. Leaders with strong self-awareness are better able to recognise the impact they have on others and to manage that impact deliberately. In doing so, they are more likely to create the conditions for healthier cultures and better employee outcomes.

How To Assess Self-Awareness

Personality Profiling

At Pearn Kandola, we strongly recommend personality profiling. Personality profiles identify patterns in people’s preferred ways of working and interacting. They do not tell you everything about a person, but when used well, they can provide a structured way to understand differences in style, motivation, and behaviour. This additional data point can then be explored further during the interview process to create a more holistic view of a candidate’s level of self-awareness.

In addition, many personality profile reports include information on a candidate’s response style, which gives us insight into self-awareness. For example, a consistency rating shows the amount of variation there was when answering similar questions. Using the consistency rating alongside interview data provides important insights about self-awareness.

In particular, a low consistency score can be indicative of one of two things. The first is low self-awareness about one’s own personal style, habits, and preferences. This lack of self-awareness leads to inconsistent responding on similar items, as the individual fails to recognise the impact of their preferences on their approach.

Conversely, the second reason for a lower consistency score is high self-awareness coupled with a focus on reporting – when responding to the personality questionnaire – behaviour over underlying preferences. In these cases, the individual recognises their natural preferences, but has developed, over time, a series of ‘learnt behaviours’ that have become second nature. Here, the low consistency score is a genuine reflection of the person’s readiness and ability to adapt their behaviour to differenct circumstances. Often, when interviewing these candidates, it will be apparent that they deeply understand their underlying preferences, but that their responses to the personality profile were coloured by the variation in their real-life approach.

Therefore, a powerful approach to gauging self-awareness is to use the consistency score in a personality profile report alongside evidence from the interview. In short, a person with a low consistency score and, from the interview, little evidence of varying their behaviour across different situations, is likely to have low self-awareness. Whereas a person with a low consistency score and an adaptable approach in real-life is much more likely to be highly self-aware.

In The Interview

The value of self-awareness lies in understanding the impact of our preferences on our own performance and on the experience of those around us. In conjunction with personality profile data, the interview is an ideal platform for exploring these points. There are several ways to approach this. We have outlined two in this article:

1. Options – when exploring specific situations a candidate has experienced – for instance when they have worked hard to influence a key decision maker – understanding the options they considered at different stages. For instance, when exploring how the candidate prepared before seeking to influence, we can ask ‘What options did you consider?’ Here, a self-aware candidate will do two things – firstly, recognise a broad range of options, showing that they can think beyond a habitual style. Secondly, across the span of the interview, their chosen actions will vary according to context, showing flexibility and adaptability in light of differing circumstances and needs.
2. Reflections – asking candidates why they took certain actions. Candidates with a high level of self-awareness will have richer and more nuanced insights about why they did something. In particular, they will show greater contextual awareness (e.g. ‘Because I recognised that the decision maker is influenced by the views of his immediate team’), and – across the interview – these reasons will be more varied. In contrast, low self-awareness candidates will tend to have less detailed reasons behind their actions, but also these reasons will follow a consistent theme. For example, they might say that they took ‘Quick action’ because of ‘X’, yet across other, different situations, they will also have a reason that justifies acting decisively.

Ultimately, self-awareness is what enables leaders to translate personality into effectiveness. It helps them understand the impact they have on others, manage the risks associated with their natural style, and lead in ways that strengthen rather than erode culture.

That is why it should not be overlooked during the assessment process. Organisations that assess self-awareness well are better placed to appoint leaders who will not only be effective themselves, but also create the conditions in which others can perform, thrive and succeed.

In the final article in this series, we will explore the fourth and final dimension: culture fit.

References:

• Hogan, R. and Hogan, J. (2001), Assessing Leadership: A View from the Dark Side. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 9: 40-51.
• Kandola, B. (2025) Psychological Safety at Work: Voice, Authenticity and Inclusion.