Presence Podcast - Episode 8: Removing the Noise from External Self-Awareness

In this episode, John and Ali focus on the importance of External Self-Awareness, including how to navigate some of the nuances and traps of external feedback, both from a process perspective...and from a very personal perspective. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:24

Hi there, everyone. Welcome to the Presence Podcast. I'm Jeff Miller, Executive Director of the Institute for Optimal Leadership Presence. And sitting right across from me on my computer screen is Ali Carson, founder and CEO of Mouvere Coaching. Allie, here we are again, now in episode eight of the Presence Podcast.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

That's so hard to believe. Time is just flying by with us.

SPEAKER_01 0:47

It really is. It really is. So in this episode, we're going to continue our discussion on self-awareness, which, as you all may recall, is the first step to the leader self-management. And we've discussed the fact that there are two dimensions to self-awareness: internal self-awareness and external self-awareness. Internal self-awareness has to do with self-discovery, which is what I learn and understand to be true about myself and whether I believe my attitudes, words, and behaviors are aligned with who I want to be as a leader. But this internal awareness really needs to go deeper than just a surface level understanding of my individual behaviors in any particular moment. Oh, look at me, I just got sarcastic with one of my employees. I'll have to make a note of that and try harder next time. No, that's not really self-awareness. What we need to understand is that an episode of sarcasm such as this likely has its own origin story embedded in our hard and soft-wired behaviors. In other words, the behavior came from somewhere, and we need to explore that origin story to take care of the underlying problem. And we can do that by examining our six behavioral triggers and how those have been hardwired and softwired genetically and through the experiences of our lives. Specifically, we can heighten our internal self-awareness by being curious and asking ourselves some relevant and sometimes some tough questions about who we are as a leader and who do we want to be as a leader. You'll find some examples of those questions as well as some other important tools and resources around internal self-awareness in episode seven of the podcast. Also in episode seven, we talked about the Johari window, which is a tool that helps us understand the scope of our behaviors and how they impact others. And it's those impacts, how others are affected by our behaviors that lead us to the second dimension of self-awareness, which is external self-awareness, knowing what others perceive me to be and whether that perception is aligned with their expectations. According to Dr. Natasha Urich, an organizational psychologist and something of a YouTube celebrity, there is zero correlation between internal and external self-awareness. You can be highly internally self-aware, knowing your own values and emotions, but completely unaware of how others see you. That's the external piece. The goal is to balance both because high external awareness plays a key role as we navigate social situations and career growth. At the service level, gaining external self-awareness might not seem that difficult. For instance, we might have the idea that as a leader, we could just focus a little more on reading the room, trying to recognize your social impact and align your intended persona with how you think you are actually seen. Well, not so fast, my friend. In reality, reading the room, as they say, as a way of trying to gauge the feelings and thoughts of others can be severely impaired by our own biases and wiring. In other words, oftentimes we read and see what we want to read and see, and not the entire picture. What's even more ineffective, though, is when I might try to form my best guess of what my team is thinking. I might believe, for instance, that just a brief communication with only the important details on a new change that is coming up might be the best way to honor my busy team's time and let them know about what's going on. But they might think I'm being terse and vague about it. So the next time I might send a lengthier communication with tons of detail and all the specifics they would ever want to know. And this time they think I'm going too much into the weeds. Then after I talk with a few of them, I find out that what they really wanted was to be in on the change from the very beginning so they could have input into the development. These are the kinds of situations that often come back to bite us. Reading the room and depending on our gut feel might work about 50% of the time. Research on emotional aperture, which is the ability to size up a group of people in an attempt to understand how they are feeling, shows that while some leaders are skilled at detecting nonverbal emotional cues, this ability does not always translate to accurately reading the overall sentiment of a large group. Frankly, these situations can be frustrating to both sides and can make things feel tense and stressful. And then there are the surveys. In fact, the survey methodology can create what is called feedback bottleneck, where leaders receive outdated information. They struggle to identify specific areas for improvement, and they face harsh comments due to a lack of ongoing constructive dialogue. To make things even worse, this type of feedback is usually validated by organizations as worthwhile, mostly because it's their only source of hearing from employees in any given period of time. Not only that, but in some organizations, this type of feedback is even held up to leaders as an indictment of poor leadership performance. Well, you got some troubling feedback, John. What are you going to do to fix this? It sure seems as if we're taking on water when it comes to some of these methods of gaining leadership feedback. We could probably just use a bigger boat or at least a boat with fewer holes.

SPEAKER_00 7:19

Yeah, absolutely. And I don't know about you, but I've noticed with leaders that I've worked with, you know, the higher you go up in an organization, the less feedback you receive. And the more feedback that you receive that is affirming of what you're doing, as opposed to that really constructive pushback and things that we really need to make sure that we're doing the best work. So such critical work here. And that means that we need to go where many of us would probably rather not go in terms of being proactive about gaining external self-awareness by developing an actual strategy to ask for feedback. Getting that valid feedback from employees is really a three-step process. First, you need to cast a large net by asking your entire team to provide feedback in a valid survey tool or questionnaire. And the valid part's important. Second, you need to put together a smaller group of people that you believe will provide insightful feedback on the feedback, if you will. And third, take meaningful action on the feedback and report back to the team the changes you're making. I would argue that's probably the most crucial step. But by taking these structured steps, research shows that you can create a culture of continuous feedback, which increases employee engagement and reduces turnover. So let's take these ideas and make them very practical. Step one was all about casting that large net to capture the thoughts and feelings of the entire team by using a valid, easy-to-navigate survey. When you ask the whole team the same set of questions, you get a broad, more representative picture than you'll ever get from guessing what people think or listening only to the loudest voices. And this is where leaders sometimes tend to overcomplicate things. You don't need a 60 question annual survey that shows up once a year like a report card. That's not necessarily going to be the best tool. What you need and what can be really effective is a quick pulse survey, right? Around 10 questions, something that you can run regularly that measures a few clear specific behaviors and experiences. That way the feedback is fresh and you can actually connect it to what's been happening on the team. With those, it's a good idea to ask about a few things that you genuinely want to improve. Maybe it's communication clarity or decision making, responsiveness, the number of meetings you have, whatever matters most in your context. Keep it tight enough that people can answer thoughtfully in just a few minutes. So this doesn't become some big thing that they have to set aside time out of their day to do. Here's a few examples of things that you might ask about. So for clarity and communication, you could focus on things like I understand the team's priorities for the next 30 to 60 days. My leader communicates decisions clearly in terms of what, why, and what happens next. When priorities change, my leader explains the reason and the impact. Those all get us to that idea around clarity and communication. For trust and psychological safety, you can ask about things like I feel safe raising concerns or dissenting opinions with my leader. Or my leader follows through on commitments or communicates early when plans change. When it comes to supporting your team and providing development opportunities, you may want to include things like, my leader removes obstacles that slow down our work. I receive the right amount of guidance, enough support without micromanagement, or my leader provides useful feedback and coaching that helps me improve. Those questions are all really good at getting to that support and development piece of things. To explore things like inclusion and respect, you could ask questions like different perspectives are invited and taken seriously on this team, or my leader treats people consistently and respectfully. And then you can also include no more than two open-ended prompts, such as, what's one thing my leader could stop, start, or continue doing to make my work easier? Or what's one recent example where my leader's leadership style helped or got in the way? You don't need to ask for names here, but those open-ended questions can really provide some great insight to support the quantitative questions that you asked earlier. Surveys like this work because they lower the pressure. Not everyone is comfortable giving direct feedback in a meeting, especially to someone who has positional authority. A short, consistent survey gives every person a voice without putting them on the spot. But also, these short surveys avoid that grab bag approach of an employee opinion survey, where leader feedback is about one of 20 other things that the organization is trying to measure. Just the sheer scope of a full-blown survey can make employees and leaders a little bit cranky. And one more thing, John, and this is really huge, I think, you have to remember to protect anonymity. If there's any doubt about whether a survey is truly anonymous, people will either hold back or they'll write in code, meaning they'll be vague, maybe even a little cagey. Getting valid feedback requires psychological safety, and anonymity is often the bridge until trust is stronger.

SPEAKER_01 12:35

Yeah, cagey is probably not a word that you want to associate with employee feedback.

SPEAKER_00 12:40

Yeah, not at all.

SPEAKER_01 12:41

Yeah. So step two is where you make the survey results usable by getting feedback about the feedback. In other words, once you see the themes from the team survey, you might want to consider meeting with a smaller subset group to understand the story behind the scores. This is the part leaders sometimes tend to skip and they get stuck without more specific data. For example, the team survey might tell you through lower scores that communication is a problem, but those low scores won't necessarily tell you which communication in what moments and what people actually need instead. If structured correctly, a small group conversation can give you the why behind the scores. A simple approach would be to meet with six to ten people and talk through the big themes from the larger group survey. No fishing for who said what, just curiosity. When you say clarity is low, what does that look like day to day? Where are we getting stuck? And if you're worried people won't be candid, or you know there's a history about a particular topic, bring in a neutral third party to facilitate. That one move can dramatically increase honesty because employees aren't wondering how will this be used against me later? Essentially, what you're creating here is a safe space for meaning making. The larger team survey gives you the map, the small group helps you read the terrain, and that's how feedback becomes actionable instead of just well, noisy. And Allie, I think we both have worked in situations where a lot of the data that is received looks noisy.

SPEAKER_00 14:25

Yes, absolutely we have. And really that noisy data kind of just loops you back to square one because it's not something that you can actually do something about. So once you've done these smaller kind of focus groups, I call them, step three of this process is the step that determines whether people will ever bother giving you feedback again, right? Do you actually do something with the information you've received by taking meaningful action and reporting back? Because feedback without follow-through is worse than no feedback. People learn really quickly whether we want your input is real or whether it's just a slogan. And closing the loop is how you build that trust. Practically, what this looks like is you pick two or three items that you can act on: real behaviors, real choices, not 10 vague intentions. For example, you might say, I heard you say that our meetings are unclear about what exactly we need to accomplish. Thank you for that feedback. Starting with our next meeting, I'm going to send the agenda to the team 24 hours in advance, or I'm going to confirm decisions made and their rationale at the end of each meeting. Notice the process here. You report back transparently what you heard, what you're going to change, and perhaps most importantly, what you're not changing and why. That clarity really helps prevent cynicism and helps people understand your constraints and your priorities. When employees can see a straight line from their input to your behavior, engagement goes up. People feel respected, relationships strengthen, and the quality of feedback improves the next time around. It's this kind of continuous loop. And when you put these three steps together, that broad input, deeper context, and visible follow-through, you're not just collecting feedback. You're building a continuous feedback culture.

SPEAKER_01 16:17

It's true. And you know what begins to happen here, Allie, is that this process begins to normalize feedback as a regular low drama part of work, not something that only appears when there's a problem. And a quarterly cadence is a sweet spot for many teams, frequent enough that the information is current, but not so frequent that people get survey fatigue. And it helps you catch small issues before they become big ones, before resentment builds, before misunderstandings calcify, before a leader is blindsided by once-a-year survey score. Ultimately, the goal is for feedback to feel normal, safe enough that people can be honest and structured enough that you can actually use it. And when that happens, external self-awareness stops being a guessing game and becomes a leadership practice. Now, we've purposely stayed away from one issue that you're almost certainly going to deal with. We wanted to talk about this issue outside of the actual feedback loop process because it really is a separate issue, and that's how you deal emotionally with the feedback that you receive. Here's a fact negative feedback just doesn't land in your inbox, it lands in your nervous system. Asking for behavioral feedback is tricky because it forces us to become vulnerable, and for some leaders, can even trigger a threat response in the brain where personal criticism feels like a direct attack on self-worth. Remember our discussions about the amygdala hijack? Leaders need to expect that some kind of threat response is going to happen. Even when 90% of the feedback they receive is positive, your brain is likely going to focus on the 10% that it doesn't like. Remember, even when you proactively ask for feedback and you know you're going to get it, your amygdala is still necessarily not going to like what it hears. So, all of that to say, we need to prepare ourselves for the jolt of some of the feedback we might receive. That means distilling our emotions so that we are clear-headed enough to frame up feedback for helpful action planning.

SPEAKER_00 18:29

I love that you use the word distill because it implies that you don't deny the emotion, you separate it. Take out the heat out of it so that you can work with what's left. One way to prepare for the emotional dissonance of potentially negative feedback is to proactively manage your self-talk. It's a good idea to remind yourself my amygdala is going to flare up and it's going to take me right to the place that I'm a bad leader, I'm terrible, I'm the worst, or that uh feedback is about behavior and impact, not as your worth as the person, right? This is feedback about the impact I'm having. It doesn't necessarily mean I'm a bad person. Managing that self-talk is really helpful. And you can also set a few rules for yourself in advance. So maybe you say that once you get the feedback and read through it, you're not going to make any same-day conclusions. You're just going to look through it to start with. You're not going to start firing off emails or explanations or defensiveness or promises. Give yourself 24 to 48 hours before you decide what it means or what you're going to do with that information. I actually encourage people like read through it, set it aside, walk away for a little while, maybe a day or two, come back, read through it again with fresh eyes, see if the same things stand out to you, and then start to move forward with what does this mean? What do I want to do with that?

SPEAKER_01 19:50

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 19:52

And it can also be helpful for you to prepare a script of sorts so that when you're activated, you're not improvising. That doesn't sound like a great uh recipe for success. So you might think about something like, thank you so much for the feedback. I'm going to sit with this, look for all the themes. And once I've had a chance to digest it, I'll come back with what I've heard and what I'm going to do. And the key thing then is actually coming back with what you've heard and what you're going to do.

SPEAKER_01 20:21

That's true. Yeah, you have to do that. You know, I think another idea is to develop some kind of a quick sorting methodology for the feedback so you don't catastrophize. Okay. Yeah, that's true. Um, as you read the results, mentally bucket things into categories such as repeated themes, one-off experiences, and pure venting. And you're going to get probably that whole gamut of things, especially if you have a larger team. The goal isn't to dismiss any of that feedback, but it's to keep your brain from turning one sharp comment into a global story about you. And you can build that into a two-read process, like Ali just mentioned. First pass only underlying themes, no action planning. Second pass, a day later, translate themes into behaviors you can actually change. That separation alone lowers defensiveness. And don't feel like you need to do this alone. Have a feedback partner, a coach, someone from HR, a mentor, or a trusted peer, someone who can help you name what stings, slow you down, and pull you back to what's usable. Because the emotional traps are predictable. Defensiveness. Well, they don't get it. Shame. I'm terrible. Anger. That's unfair. Rumination. Replaying a single sentence for three days. If you get to know and understand your default responses to feedback, you can decide ahead of time what you'll do. Take a walk, journal, call your feedback partnership. Partner, anything that helps you regulate before you respond.

SPEAKER_00 22:04

And one more thing I would add to that, John, it may be a good idea to consider drafting your closing the loop message while you're calm, maybe even before you get any results back from asking from the survey. A simple template like, here's what I heard, here's the themes, and here's when I'm going to come back with actions can be really helpful so that you're not writing in the middle of that amygdala hijack. And that's really the point of all of this. Regulate first, then evaluate.

SPEAKER_01 22:31

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 22:32

Once you've distilled the emotion, you can look for those patterns. You can choose a couple of meaningful actions and report back in a way that builds trust instead of burning it.

SPEAKER_01 22:41

Yeah, that's a great idea. So, Allie, in episode seven, we focused on internal self-awareness or self-discovery, understanding your values and triggers and asking the tough questions about whether your attitudes, words, and behaviors match who you want to be as a leader. And in this episode, we've been digging into external self-awareness, what other people actually experience from you, what they perceive you to be, and whether that perception matches their expectations. What we really want to do at the end of the day is to get both of these perspectives working together. The leadership sweet spot is integrating both, like two lenses on the same camera. Internal self-awareness helps you get grounded in what's true for you. External self-awareness keeps you honest about what's true for everyone else. Here's a simple way to think about the integration. Internal self-awareness gives you the language for intent, what you were trying to do and why. External self-awareness gives you evidence of impact, what actually landed on other people. That pairing is what turns the jihari window from a concept into a helpful tool. Look at every feedback cycle as an opportunity to shrink the blind spot area, that upper right hand corner, or shrink any misunderstandings in the arena area, that upper left-hand corner, by comparing what you intended with what others experienced. Then trace the gap back to the appropriate place. Sometimes it will trace back to your origin story, your triggers, assumptions, and default moves under stress. When that's the case, those areas need to be fixed or adjusted by you through immediate exercises or behavior change or an appropriate action plan. However, and this is really important for leaders to realize, sometimes the gap in understanding is on the other side with the feedback givers due to their own personal misunderstanding, biases, or negativity, especially when feedback stems from an outlier or two projecting personal issues that don't reflect the collective consensus of the feedback group as a whole. To determine if the feedback is accurate or imagined or even fabricated by others, leaders should rely on consistent perception check-ins across the whole team, rather than reacting to a single loud outlier.

SPEAKER_00 25:16

Yeah. And that's also where a feedback partner can help you get some clarity as well. Absolutely. So another effective way to integrate these internal and external self-awareness pieces is through shorter kind of microfeedback activities, such as weekly or bi-weekly calibration exercise. This allows you to clarify what you're trying to signal as a leader through words and behaviors, and then check in with people to see what signal they're actually receiving from those words and behaviors. And you can do this without adding a big new workload or something else to do on your to-do list. The key is to intentionally start small. Pick one leadership behavior to focus on for a couple of weeks, something observable that your team can experience. Start with your intent. What's the reason behind the behavior? Let's use the example of team meetings that we mentioned earlier. You start with your intent. I want to make sure our meetings are more informative and value-driven. So now you choose a behavior. From now on, I'm going to summarize decisions and next steps at the end of each meeting so we're all on the same page. And then try it out for a little while and check to see if the intention and behavior is calibrated with impact on the team. And you can do that very simply by asking a couple of people for their impressions. Hey, here's what I'm trying to do from your perspective. What's your experience been? Is that how you've received this adjustment? Asking a couple of people a specific question tied to that behavior can also be really helpful. Was this decision at the end of that meeting clear? Or did you feel like there was space to disagree? You're not asking for a performance review here, but you it's a great opportunity to collect a quick read on intention versus impact. And this integration gives you both a steady inner compass and a reliable external mirror. The goal really is simple. Calibrate the compass, check the mirror, and make one or two small adjustments that your team can actually feel.

SPEAKER_01 27:14

Yeah, that's right, Ellie. And notice what that does, it makes external self-awareness low drama instead of a once-a-year emotional event. It becomes a normal leadership practice. Your quarterly pulse survey still matters for big patterns, but this frequent external mirror keeps you calibrated in between. The bottom line is if you don't integrate internal self-awareness and external self-awareness, you will drift aimlessly and frustratingly between the two. Some leaders are aware internally but still get blindsided externally. Other leaders chase external opinions with no internal anchor and end up performing instead of leading. And so, Allie, I think that's where that integration comes in, is using both of the processes, right? And bringing them together to find out what the total picture is.

SPEAKER_00 28:08

Yeah. And because you're building the muscle of receiving that micro feedback, the threat response is smaller when the bigger feedback arrives. You you've practiced regulating that dang amygdala, responding without defensiveness. So you're not starting from zero when the stakes feel high.

SPEAKER_01 28:24

Yeah. You know, and also, Ellie, I think it's not only building the muscles of receiving microfeedback, but I think it's building muscles in your team's thinking as well, right? I mean, they look at it as not a big deal. This is a part of your leadership protocol. And you're just interested. You're interested in finding out what they have to say. So I think being very transparent with all of these processes to your team, kind of before, during, and after you do them is really what's going to make this something that feels comfortable for everybody.

SPEAKER_00 28:57

Yes. I mean, think about it from your employee's perspective. If all of a sudden you start showing up really differently than how you ever have before, and you don't explain to them what's going on, that's not going to help you create psychological safety. They're going to be like, what have what is going on with them? What's changed? Why are they doing this? This is weird. I think being transparent about what you're trying to do and why can go a long way for a leader.

SPEAKER_01 29:22

Yeah, agree. So that's internal and external self-awareness. And we definitely covered a lot of ground here today. But the good news is good news about podcasts is that you can go back anytime and listen a second or third time just to make sure that you're in a good spot. And I think we have set ourselves up well to move to the next two elements of self-management, self-reflection and self-discipline, which is we're going to go in episode nine. So, Allie, as we close this episode, let's make sure everyone knows how to reach out to you at Move Air Coaching.

SPEAKER_00 29:57

Yes, absolutely. You can find us online at www.moveaircoaching.com, also on LinkedIn, Instagram, and now TikTok. That's the latest ad.

SPEAKER_01 30:08

Ah.

unknown 30:09

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 30:10

There's always more. And just a reminder to everybody that everything we've talked about in this episode and every episode of the Presence Podcast is covered in our Presence Leadership Development program. For more information on that, be sure to head out to the Institute for Optimal Leadership Presence website at Iolp.net. And let us know if you'd like to get together and chat about that program, our coaching program, or how to explore how we can present at a retreat or a conference. And be sure to join us for our next episode of the Presence Podcast. Until then, take care of yourself and leave.