Goleman, Boyatzis and McKee in their book, Primal Leadership, refer to ‘CEO disease’ as the information vacuum around a leader created when people withhold important (sometimes unpleasant) information.
Unfortunately, we see numerous instances of ‘CEO disease’ in Asian organisation. This happen when the CEO is in denial of the real state of the business and is not open to criticism or bad news. In fact, in some organisation, the board of directors are filled with cronies and others unlikely to be critical of the CEO’s performance.
The CEO is unlikely to be offered much in form of constructive criticism needed to improve performance. He will have significant blind spots that he will never know exist.
The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them, says Colin Powell. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care.
The antidote for this disease – self-awareness. No one welcomes bad news about themselves, but self-aware leaders not only accept feedback, they even seek it out. They do so because they want to keep learning and growing.
Self-awareness is simply being conscious of your strengths while acknowledging what you still have yet to learn. This includes admitting when you don’t have the answers and owning up to mistakes.
Example, we promoted a high performance individual to a managerial role, his strength in process rigour and execution become his weakness as he micro-managed instead of empowering his team.
Get started in Self-awareness – The Johari Window, 4 major quadrant:
a)Open self – What others know about you and which you know too.
b)Blind self – What others can see about you, which you can’t see.
c)Hidden self – What others don’t know about you. In other words, your secret.
d)Unknown self – What others don’t know about you and neither do you.
The Johari Window encourages us to enlarge our Open Self while shrinking our Blind Self and unknown Self, enabling you to be in control of yourself.
The best way to shrink your Blind Self is to get constant feedback and there are numerous tools including the 360 multi-Briggs Type Indicator or even a strength assessment. It can be accelerated by honest feedback from others.
We are all going to struggle with negative feedback, but if we are unaware of how people view us, we will never be effective.
The reality, as Harvard Business School professor Bill George puts it, ‘is that no one can be authentic by trying to be like someone else. There is no doubt that you can learn from the experiences of others, but there is no way you can be successful trying to be like them. People trust you when you are genuine and authentic, not an imitation.
Focusing on yourself, regardless of mistakes or strengths, yields improvement, but zooming in on your strengths is significantly more beneficial.
‘If you want to know your past, look into your present condition. If you want to know your future, look into your present actions’ – Start thinking about yourself.
