09/24/2024

Many Leaders Lack This One Quality

Find out why it's essential for success

As a professor at Babson College, I've researched leadership for over two decades. I've partnered with more than 50 companies to help their employees grow and asked hundreds of leaders how they define self-awareness. Almost everyone talks about how well they know their strengths, weaknesses, values and goals. This kind of internal self-awareness is critical to our professional growth and development.

But there's another component of self-awareness that's just as essential to entrepreneurial success. External self-awareness is the ability to predict how others experience our leadership, including how they view us, our actions and our choices. It allows us to better collaborate, lead and motivate our teams — and yet my research and others' research shows only around 10-15% of leaders, including entrepreneurs, embody it.

The good news is that, with practice, any leader can become more externally self-aware. Here's why external self-awareness is so important and how you can start building it.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Entrepreneur.