How Working on your Own Self-Awareness can Boost Team Performance

If you ever lead a team before, one of the first things you’ll realize is that people generally think and act differently. In other words, you’ll have to deal with different personalities and characters while ensuring that the team meets its objectives. The same thing happens in the workplace.

Every team lead, manager, or business owner must possess the skills required to manage the various personalities of employees to ensure high productivity and frictionless workflow. Unfortunately, managing different personalities in the workplace is not as straightforward as it sounds.

But did you know that becoming a more self-aware person can boost your team cohesion and performance despite conflicting personalities?

This article shares insight into working on your self-awareness can help you boost your team’s productivity. You’ll also find valuable tips on how to manage different personalities in the workplace.

What Does Self-Awareness Mean?

Self-awareness describes a conscious knowledge of your behavior, character, and emotions. In other words, it is the ability to focus on yourself to identify how your actions, feelings, and thoughts align with your personal standards.

As a self-aware person, you can evaluate yourself objectively, better manage your emotions, and ensure your actions are in line with your value system. But more importantly, you’ll be a better judge of what other people especially your employees think about you.

However, the sad reality is that many lack self-awareness as a skill. Instead, they rely on emotions to interpret and evaluate their actions and situations.

On the other hand, a self-aware leader or business owner can easily assess the growth and effectiveness of themselves and their team members and switch things up when necessary.

Before we explore how self-awareness can help you boost your team performance, here are six essential qualities of a self-aware leader:

• Humility
• A growth mindset with a willingness to learn
• Ability to forgive mistakes
• A strong sense of accountability
• Adapatability
• Patience and empathy

How your Self-Awareness can Improve Team Performance

A lack of self-awareness as a leader may not only limit you, but it can also hold your team back. Here are five ways working on your self-awareness can help you boost team productivity:

Helps you Know when you Need to Learn

As a team leader or business owner, you’ll likely be the one to make several critical decisions that concern your company. However, the truth is you can’t know everything there is to know about everything. Sometimes, you’ll need to learn and pick up some information from your team members if you’ll make the best decisions. Unfortunately, many leaders can be quite rigid in situations like this.

Thankfully, a critical part of self-awareness is recognizing when you don’t have all the answers and need to seek more information. Of course, a leader that’s willing to learn and step out of their comfort zone can prove instrumental in a team’s growth and speed of achieving set goals.

Helps your Team Understand How to Benefit from your Management

Understanding one another is a critical aspect of the success of any team. However, if you don’t even know yourself, helping your team get to know you better becomes more even challenging.

However, self-awareness means that you have a very objective understanding of yourself and your value system. As a result, it becomes much easier to guide your team towards knowing and getting the best work relationship and benefits out of your management.

For instance, you maybe be a bit snappy until you’ve had your second cup of coffee in the morning. Knowing this about yourself means you can give your team members a heads-up and help them navigate the waters of interacting with you early in the morning.

Besides, understanding yourself first can be the insight you need into managing different personalities in the workplace.

Helps you Counter your Decision-Making Biases

While we all like to think of ourselves as without bias, the reality is that we all have one.

For instance, when it comes to making decisions, you may prefer a more head-on approach rather than deliberating with team members. Maybe you’re more cautious and prefer to take your time before reaching a conclusion or you’re an enthusiastic leader that makes decisions on a whim.

Either way, self-awareness helps you identify these biases. Then, you can take steps to counter them, ensuring that you always put the good of the team and its objectives first whenever you’re making decisions.

Sometimes, this may mean leaving your comfort zone or fighting your instinctive actions. But, developing tactics to counter your biases means that your team can enjoy better decisions and improved productivity.

Helps you Identify when you’re Playing Favorites

Generally, a manager playing favorites in the workplace is never a good move. However, we’re all human and we may not be able to help to prefer or favor one team member over another.

Maybe they tell the best jokes or they deliver their assignments with great speed. Either playing favorites is bad for team cohesion and business as it makes other employees feel left out or less valued.

Remember, one essential tip on how to manage different personalities in the workplace is not picking a favorite.

Thankfully, self-awareness can help you quickly spot when you’re favoring one team member over others. Then, you can take deliberate steps to call yourself back to order.

Helps you Know when your Team Needs to Relax and Destress

Many managers go out of their way to deny and repress their stress. However, while this may keep you going for a while, it may have some adverse effects on efficiency and productivity in the long run.

Thankfully, self-awareness and knowing your triggers can help you identify when you’re becoming stressed out. More importantly, if you’re feeling stressed, chances are your team feels the same way.

So, that may be a signal to take things slow even if the team hasn’t achieved its goal yet. Remember, taking time to rest and destress can have a tremendous effect on productivity.

Bringing it Together

You’re more likely to implement various strategies that benefit your team if you deliberately work on your self-awareness. More importantly, you’ll encourage a culture of openness, acceptance, and adaptability that builds team spirit and ensures high productivity. Hopefully, this article has helped you learn how prioritizing your self-awareness can help you boost your team’s performance. Remember, focusing on becoming more self-aware not only empowers you but your entire team too.