“How am I doing as a leader?” and “How would I know?” can be combined into one similar question – “How closely does my opinion of my leadership performance match the opinion of my direct reports, my peers, my organization at-large and my customers/bosses?”
Why is this important to ask? No matter how good you feel your leadership performance is or how great the organization seems to be doing, the question remains: “How much better might the organization be doing if I added the development of my own leadership ability to the business plan?” The other side of the coin is, “What are the opportunity costs of blind spots in my leadership performance?”
Every leader has blind spots. A study by the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence illustrates the extent of these blind spots. According to their research, first, mid and senior level leaders had a significant pattern of rating themselves higher on their leadership performance than those around them rated them. In other words, these leaders thought they were doing better with emotional intelligence related skills than did the people they led, served, worked with, and reported to. What’s more, the higher a person’s rank, the greater this gap became.
The higher the leadership position you hold, the more likely you are to suffer from what is called CEO disease, or CEO syndrome. Daniel Goleman in his book Primal Leadership defines this disease as “an acute lack of feedback…Leaders have more trouble than anybody else when it comes to receiving candid feedback, particularly about how they’re doing as leaders…the paradox, of course, is that the higher a leader’s position in an organization, the more critically the leader needs that very feedback.”
| Would you like to learn more? – Read this short, real-life story about a leadership team who decided to bravely go after the blind-spots in their leadership effectiveness. |  |
| Read the full article about the importance of honestly assessing your leadership effectiveness. |  |
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