What Is Self-Awareness in Leadership?

Self-awareness in leadership is the degree to which a leader's perception of their own behavior matches how others actually experience it. It is not a personality trait itself, but a property of the relationship between self-perception and external perception. A highly self-aware leader has a self-rating that closely tracks how their manager, peers, and direct reports rate them. A leader with low self-awareness shows a substantial gap between the two, usually because they rate themselves more favorably than others do.

Why Self-Awareness Matters for Leadership

Personality shapes leadership in well-documented ways. Judge, Bono, Ilies, and Gerhardt (2002), in a comprehensive meta-analytic review, established that specific personality traits, particularly extraversion and conscientiousness, consistently predict leadership emergence and effectiveness. But possessing leadership-relevant traits is not the same as knowing how those traits show up in practice. A leader can be genuinely conscientious and still be unaware that their attention to detail is experienced by their team as micromanagement.

This gap between trait and perception is where self-awareness becomes consequential. A leader's actual behavior, filtered through their own self-concept, may diverge substantially from how that behavior lands with the people they lead. Self-awareness closes this gap. Without it, leaders make decisions based on an inaccurate model of their own impact.

What the Research Shows

Fleenor, Smither, Atwater, Braddy, and Sturm (2010) conducted the most comprehensive review of self-other rating agreement in leadership to date. Their analysis established that the direction and size of the self-other gap is not a minor statistical detail. It is one of the most consistent predictors of leadership effectiveness available.

Leaders whose self-ratings substantially exceed how others rate them, commonly termed over-estimators, consistently show lower leadership effectiveness than leaders with more accurate self-perception. Over-estimators are also less likely to act on developmental feedback, because they do not perceive a gap that needs closing. This creates a particularly difficult coaching challenge: the leaders who most need to change their self-perception are often the least receptive to evidence that they should.

Fleenor et al. (2010) also found that the relationship between self-other agreement and effectiveness is not simply linear. Leaders who under-rate themselves relative to others, while less common, also show effectiveness costs, often related to under-confidence, reluctance to take on stretch opportunities, and difficulty projecting the confidence that followers look for in a leader.

The Four Self-Awareness Profiles

Atwater and Yammarino's (1997) foundational work on self-other rating agreement, comprehensively reviewed by Fleenor et al. (2010), classifies leaders into four groups based on the direction and size of the gap between self-ratings and how others rate them.

In-agreement and effective. These leaders rate themselves in close alignment with how others rate them, and both self- and other-ratings are relatively high. Across the literature, this profile is consistently rated among the most effective.

In-agreement and ineffective. These leaders also rate themselves accurately, but both self- and other-ratings are relatively low. This is a difficult but workable position. The leader has an accurate picture of their current limitations, which is the necessary starting point for targeted development.

Over-estimators. These leaders rate themselves considerably higher than others rate them. This is the profile most consistently rated as least effective across the studies. Over-estimators are also less receptive to feedback that contradicts their self-view.

Under-estimators. These leaders rate themselves lower than others rate them. Somewhat counterintuitively, the research reviewed by Fleenor et al. (2010) generally rates under-estimators as more effective than over-estimators, and in some studies about as effective as in-agreement leaders. The picture is not fully consistent across studies, and some research finds that both over- and under-estimation can coexist with strong leadership performance depending on context.

How to Build Self-Awareness as a Leader

Seek structured, multi-source feedback regularly. Self-awareness cannot improve without an accurate external reference point. Structured 360-degree feedback, gathered from direct reports, peers, and managers, provides the comparison data that self-reflection alone cannot generate.

Treat the self-other gap as information. Leaders who react defensively to a gap between self-perception and others' perception are less likely to use the feedback productively. Approaching the gap with curiosity, rather than as a personal failure, makes the data more usable.

Request specific behavioral examples. Vague feedback such as "you could communicate better" is harder to act on than a specific example of a moment where communication broke down. Ask raters and coaches for concrete instances tied to specific situations.

Revisit the gap periodically. Self-awareness is not a fixed trait that a leader either has or lacks. It changes as leaders receive feedback, reflect on it, and adjust their behavior. Periodic reassessment tracks whether the gap is closing over time.

Work with a coach who can hold up an honest mirror. De Haan, Duckworth, Birch, and Jones (2013) found that the coaching relationship itself, more than any specific technique, drives coaching outcomes. A coach who can deliver honest, well-supported feedback plays a central role in helping a leader close a persistent self-other gap.

How Deeper Signals Approaches Self-Awareness

Self-awareness is foundational to how Deeper Signals designs its assessments. The Core Drivers Diagnostic and Core Values Diagnostic are both built to give leaders an evidence-based description of their own personality and motivations, often surfacing patterns they had sensed but never had language for. This is the starting point for self-awareness: an accurate, structured account of who a leader actually is.

That self-report picture is only half of what self-awareness requires. Comparing it against structured input from managers, peers, and direct reports, gathered through a dedicated 360 process, gives leaders the self-other comparison that Fleenor et al. (2010) identified as central to leadership effectiveness. Deeper Signals is developing a structured 360-degree feedback instrument, so leaders will soon get a clear picture of where their self-perception matches how their team experiences them.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can self-awareness be measured directly?

‍Self-awareness is typically measured indirectly, by comparing an individual's self-ratings against ratings from others on the same behavioral dimensions. The size and direction of this gap is the measure of self-awareness, rather than a standalone self-report score.

Is it better to over-estimate or under-estimate your own leadership ability?

‍Neither is ideal, but the evidence suggests over-estimation carries greater costs. Fleenor et al. (2010) found that over-estimators show the lowest leadership effectiveness and the weakest responsiveness to developmental feedback of any self-awareness profile.

Does self-awareness change over a leader's career?

‍Yes. Self-awareness can improve with structured feedback, coaching, and deliberate reflection, though the pace of change varies by individual. Leaders who actively seek feedback and remain open to it tend to develop more accurate self-perception over time than those who do not.

How is self-awareness different from emotional intelligence?

‍Self-awareness, as used in leadership research, specifically refers to the accuracy of self-perception relative to how others perceive a person. Emotional intelligence is a broader construct covering the ability to perceive, understand, and regulate emotions in oneself and others. Self-awareness is often considered one component within broader emotional intelligence frameworks.

Why do some leaders resist accurate feedback about their self-awareness gap?

‍Fleenor et al. (2010) found that over-estimators are specifically less likely to accept and act on feedback that contradicts their self-view. This is partly a self-protective response and partly a genuine cognitive difficulty in updating a long-held self-concept based on new information.

Last reviewed by Dr. Reece Akhtar — June 2026

References

Judge, T. A., Bono, J. E., Ilies, R., & Gerhardt, M. W. (2002). Personality and leadership: A qualitative and quantitative review. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(4), 765–780.

Atwater, L. E., & Yammarino, F. J. (1997). Self-other rating agreement: A review and model. In G. R. Ferris (Ed.), Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management (Vol. 15, pp. 121–174). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

Fleenor, J. W., Smither, J. W., Atwater, L. E., Braddy, P. W., & Sturm, R. E. (2010). Self-other rating agreement in leadership: A review. The Leadership Quarterly, 21(6), 1005–1034.

de Haan, E., Duckworth, A., Birch, D., & Jones, C. (2013). Executive coaching outcome research: The contribution of common factors such as relationship, personality match, and self-efficacy. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 65(1), 40–57.

‍