Self-Awareness as a Competency

We’ve all seen it haven’t we? That employee with good intellect that just seems to irritate people and continually struggle to gain acceptance within the organization.

It’s not uncommon to find employees who have had plenty of good coaching, training and help for whatever reason just flat out self-destruct right before our eyes. These are employees who have the brains and skills to do the job, but just can’t get along with others or are in some way more than slightly disruptive to their team.

Let’s face it, just being smart in no way translates into being a good employee. One relatively recent study by Leadership IQ found that 46% of new hires failed within the first 18 months of being hired. That statistic is certainly organization-dependent, but with a number that high across so many organizations involved in the study it illustrates that being a good employee is harder than it may seem.

Some of these employees are even great at the technical part of their jobs. But in terms of fitting in, they’re a mess. So on the one hand we have a great worker, and on the other hand a terrible co-worker. I have a friend who calls employees with excellent technical skills, but lousy interpersonal skills ‘organizational terrorists’. Of course, that doesn’t mean they are a threat to fellow employees. It simply means they can be very disruptive of their work surroundings and more than just a little frustrating to their fellow employees.

Over the years, we come to learn that people really do come in all sorts of personality packages. Based on my experience dealing with these types of employees, it seems to boil down to very often a substantial to complete lack of self-awareness. In other words, they just do not understand how they are behaving and how much their behavior is impacting others. Unfortunately in a lot of cases these employees can’t be coached to become enough more self-aware to save them from eventually having to leave the organization.

One such employee that I once had the “pleasure” of managing looked at me during a coaching session and said “I just can’t help it that I’m so rude and annoying.” And you know what, she was probably right. Those tendencies were so deeply ingrained into her personality that no matter how much I coached her, she could only get along with others for so long before she slipped back into those old habits and figuratively speaking ripped someone’s head off. Needless to say, she was terminated. The sad part of that story is that she was also one of the very best technical employees I’ve ever employed.

But there are opportunities to coach self-awareness and to make self-awareness a key competency in your performance reviews. Everyone in the organization needs to understand the importance of being self-aware and display behaviors that reflect self-awareness.

Think about your employees for a minute or two and mentally rank them on a scale of 1 to 5 (5 being highest) in terms of how self-aware you think they are. You might be surprised at how many of the employees need to work on their self-awareness skills.