The Starting Point for CEO Leadership Development

Executive Summary

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Welcome back to The Kinetic Insight Newsletter. Thanks so much for your thoughtful replies and questions from our first edition, it makes me smile to hear from you 🙂 

Today we’ll cover:

• Why self-awareness is the foundation of CEO leadership development (and the problem with how most of us think about self-awareness).

• How to develop a deeper form of self-awareness for personal growth & business success.

Brain Food 🧠 🥗 

Why Self-Awareness is the Foundation of CEO Leadership Development 🔬 

The journey to effective leadership begins with a single step: self-awareness. It's a term that sounds cliche and perhaps overused, and yet it’s still the bedrock of personal and professional growth.

Self-awareness in leadership isn't just about introspection; it's about understanding how your inner life influences your actions and affects those around you.

For CEO’s, self-awareness isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s essential. Your decisions and actions influence not only your personal results, but your team’s performance, your organization’s success, and the ripple effects you have on the world. As I’ve said before:

Before we dive into the specifics…

A reminder on Insight > Truth 🤔 

In our inaugural issue, we went deep on the distinction between reading for truth and cultivating personal insight. This distinction is not just academic—it's a fundamental shift in how we approach knowledge and self-improvement, particularly in leadership.

Most people scan information looking for confirmation of their beliefs (see: confirmation bias). Instead, as a proactive member of the Kinetic Insight community, you've committed to a higher standard: using each piece of information as a mirror to reflect on your internal landscape and to challenge the boundaries of your existing leadership style.

As you read on, notice where you’re nodding your head in agreement, or shaking it in disagreement, and instead turn your attention towards your own experience to see where you can apply these insights.

You may be thinking to yourself… How could I not know myself? After all, I’ve been “Me” my whole life. It turns out, there’s more to “knowing thyself” than meets the eye.

The Problem With Self-Awareness 🫣 

Too often, we go through life on autopilot. We follow the motions without really being aware of what’s going on around us, and even less so of what’s going on within us.

Paying attention to those unique aspects of our identity, beliefs, assumptions, and behavior patterns allows us to be more intentional with our actions.

These parts of ourselves are usually taken for granted. We all make assumptions, but too often we’re not aware that we’ve made them. 

They become a lens through which we see and evaluate life, unintentionally coloring our perspective. Our beliefs often occur to us as “the way things are,” as though they were innate, objective qualities of the world around us. We aren’t aware how much of that is projection.

On top of this worldview which forms the stage of our lives, we play our role—following typical behavior patterns because “that’s the kind of person I am.”

In this way, we confuse what we do with who we are. This can lead to us getting stuck playing an old role, despite our best efforts at change because it’s become intertwined with whom we think of ourselves as, our identity.

When’s the last time that you’ve put these ideas under a microscope and studied them? My invitation is that you make it a regular practice to ask yourself:

• What assumptions am I making?

• What else is possible?

• What are my beliefs about this situation?

• Are they absolutely true?

• Who is the type of person I want to become?

This is a good starting point in becoming more aware of who you are--but it’s also missing a crucial piece. You can spend your whole life meditating in a cave in the pursuit of self-discovery but that won’t do you a whole lot of good when it comes to being CEO.

How That Holds Us Back ⛓️ 

Thinking of self-awareness in this way will stunt your growth and limit your effectiveness. 

It’s likely that you’ll find yourself butting heads with co-founders, or getting employees who do the bare minimum to go along. You might find yourself struggling to create effective team alignment. At worst, you’ll have people who are actively disengaged and working against you.

What’s Missing From Our Usual Way of Thinking 🧩 

Self-awareness doesn’t end with you--it only begins with you.

What’s missing is the impact you have on other people. As CEO’s, our job is to motivate others and help them be their best, and we’re responsible for the people we lead. That means that awareness of yourself is a starting point to understanding how you impact others.

An important distinction here is that it’s not just about your intentions and how you try to lead others; I trust that you mean well.

The problem is that despite our best intentions, we often end up having unintended consequences and a negative impact on others.

If we’re blind to this aspect of self-awareness, we can be like a bull in a china shop, bruising people left and right without even noticing.

What to Do Instead ✅ 

There are lots of different ways to get a better understanding of who you are, how you show up in the world, and the impact that you have as a leader. Here are a few to get you started, and I’d love for you to reply and tell me what I missed.

1. Working with a coach. There’s truly no better way of learning about yourself than in a committed developmental relationship with a leader who is “off the court” of your life, and therefore able to provide you with an objective perspective.

   A certified coach will help you improve your performance while discovering who you are (and if they aren’t, you should find a different coach—but that’s a different edition 😉). And by the way, if you’re curious about working with a coach, you can schedule your free coaching discovery session here.

2. Key stakeholder interviews. Who are the most important people that you impact? A coach can help you identify a well-rounded group of people and conduct interviews that will allow you to get a truly honest perspective (especially those things that would be difficult to say directly to your face).

   This will help you understand your strengths and weaknesses as a leader, and most importantly a 360-degree perspective of how you impact the people closest to you.

3. Asking for feedback directly. Although not quite as effective as stakeholder interviews, this is still a crucial piece of the puzzle! Working with a coach should be a supplement, not a replacement for doing this work yourself. When’s the last time you asked for feedback?

   Asking for, giving, and receiving feedback are challenging for most people (we’ll do a deep dive in our next edition). On either end, we are vulnerable and taking an emotional risk that likely feels uncomfortable. Research shows that leaders who take that risk, and do this well, are significantly more effective than their peers. Before you worry about how to do this “perfectly,” just take the first step and ask (and stay tuned for the next newsletter on how to do this skillfully).

4. Reflect on your experience. We don’t learn from experience itself, we learn from reflecting on our experience. Just like how going through life on auto-pilot won’t generate awareness, going through these experiences mindlessly won’t either.
   
   Coaching, as a reflective-inquiry process has this built-in. I encourage you to take some time to yourself and think about what feedback you’ve gotten recently. Rather than looking for if it’s true or not, try looking for how it might be true. Think about the ways in which you might contribute to other people having that perception of you, even if you don’t see it for yourself.
   
   And perhaps most importantly, think about who you are committed to being, and what you are committed to doing. This will help guide your decisions as to what, if anything, you change as a result of this feedback.

Ready for your next level of success, fulfillment, and impact? 🚀

If you’re curious to learn more or think you might benefit from this type of personal growth, I’ve opened up a few spots for Coaching Discovery Sessions. I’ll help you get crystal clear on your leadership blindspots, uncover your biggest developmental opportunities, and create an action plan to help you get there faster. If you’re interested in uncovering your own deeper self-awareness, click the link to schedule your time now.

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next time,

Kelby L. Kupersmid

^{Connect with me on LinkedIn}

Sneak Peak 👀 

Next week: you’ll learn how to ask for feedback—to actually hear the truth.

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