Self-Awareness
One of the key components of ensuring you have an emotionally intelligent team is ensuring individual self-awareness. Self-awareness is the ability to recognize one’s own emotions and accurately recognize how we are perceived by others. When it comes to building relationships with others and responding to stressful situations, employees and managers with high self-awareness are much more effective and adaptable.
Benefits of Self-Awareness
Employees with low self-awareness may be highly skilled and multi-talented, but their inability to recognize how their attitudes and actions impact others can seriously undermine collaboration and prevent them from developing the resilience required to bounce back from stressful situations and difficulties. A person with high self-awareness, on the other hand, is not only more likely to see how their emotions are impacting their own actions and influencing those around them, but they’re also more likely to quickly correct those problems when they occur. This leads to far less interpersonal conflict, better team communication and collaboration, and enhanced critical thinking.
Self-Awareness and the Selection Process
For all the emphasis on finding the right set of hard skills for a position, today’s hiring managers should recognize that finding a candidate with high self-awareness is just as important, considering the true reasons people tend to fail.
When research tracked 20,000 new hires, 46% of them failed within 18 months. But even more surprising than the failure rate, was that when new hires failed, 89% of the time it was for attitudinal reasons and only 11% of the time for a lack of skill. The attitudinal deficits that doomed these failed hires included a lack of coachability, low levels of emotional intelligence, motivation and temperament.
Beyond those numbers, 30 percent of HR managers don’t think employers put enough emphasis on emotional intelligence characteristics during the hiring process. A good hiring process should emphasize self-awareness assessment. Do candidates understand what emotions influence their personal decisions? Do they recognize how others may perceive them? Do they hold themselves personally accountable for their actions or do they transfer blame when things don’t go as planned?
Here at Peak, we offer assessments to help employers have full insight into their candidates - for hire, transition, or promotion.