That our levels of self-awareness are generally pretty awful is quite well known, and the illusory superiority bias is something I’ve touched on many times on this blog over the years.  This paucity of awareness is largely what makes the feedback process so useful, as it gives us insight on how other people see us.

Harvard’s Sheila Heen suggests that these blindspots we have are also, coincidentally, things that we tend to see really well in other people. She believes that there are three main blindspot ‘amplifiers’ that cause the gap between how we see ourselves and how others see us to grow.

1. The emotional amplifier – emotions are obviously a big part of how we judge people, whether ourselves or others.  The thing is, we often subtract emotions from our self-perception, but those same emotions are often amplified by others when they judge us.  For instance, you may not see the anger you display in a particular circumstance, but your colleagues most certainly will.
2. The situational amplifier – do you remember when you have a bad time and blow up?  We convince ourselves that this was purely down to the circumstances.  Others however are more likely to view that behaviour as central to our character.
3. The impact amplifier – the final main trap we fall into is confusing intention with outcome.  When we view our own behaviour, we tend to look at the intention of our actions.  Others however, are much more likely to view the impact of our actions as key.

These three things tend to result in us having an unusually positive opinion of ourselves, as we tend to shut out and ignore the bad stuff that other people will spot in an instance.

It’s why having strong feedback mechanisms is so important, especially as you get higher up the organization.  The folks at INSEAD Global Leadership Centre believe they’ve made a breakthrough in this regard with the development of their Global Executive Leadership Mirror.

The aim is to provide leaders with a tool that gives them an accurate and realistic perspective on their personal behaviour.  The tool is broadly speaking a 360-degree survey that requires between 7-15 colleagues/clients/etc. to fill in.

The survey comes in three main parts:

1. The first part focuses on 12 leadership dimensions (shown in the diagram below).  INSEAD believe these 12 dimensions are key to understanding whether someone is a good leader or not.
2. The second part then looks at things such as stress and wellbeing.  It identifies whether the executive has a balanced and happy life, taking in both their personal as well as their professional life.  It’s designed to test how well they cope with pressure.
3. The last part provides an overall effectiveness score for that executive.  This covers the perceptions of that leader by their peers, with a particular focus on their vision and empowerment skills on one hand, and their strategic and structural skills on the other.

The aim of the tool is to close the gap between how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us.  Suffice to say, this isn’t the only tool that aims to do this, and a plethora of social tools have entered the marketplace in recent years that have attempted to provide a frequency of feedback that we’re more usually familiar with when buying things online.

Whilst the feedback provided by the tool outlined above may be good, I do wonder how timely it can be when the trigger is an annual process.  Of course, the application of such a tool may go some way towards building the kind of culture whereby leaders can be given feedback on a regular basis, and in that sense it may be useful, but I think that, ultimately, there are better options on the market.