Takeaways:

• Helping your team cultivate their self-awareness is a necessary skill for them to develop, to accelerate their learning and development.

• Supporting your team members to help them reflect on their performance will help boost their self-awareness. 

• Reflection is an important step to enable individuals to connect new information with their existing mental models. 

• Providing feedback like a “coach” will help increase the awareness of the individual to gaps in their skills or performance. 

Self-awareness is a foundational skill that individuals must develop to accelerate their learning. Self-awareness allows people to recognise their strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement. As managers, supporting your team members to gain more self-awareness is key to helping them accelerate their learning and personal development. 

Use 1-on-1s to support self-reflection 

Your 1-on-1s with your team members are a great way to help support self-awareness by asking questions about how they are doing. Ask questions like "How did you do on X ?", "How do you feel you are going with Y? ", "How well did the process/task work?" and "What was your thinking on Z?". 

Helping them reflect on their thoughts, emotions, and actions can help them better understand how to improve or adjust their behaviours. You want your team members to learn to recognise patterns and identify areas for improvement. Journaling is a simple way that many people find helpful to track how they are doing over the breadth of their work. For the team members that use journaling, it makes tracking their personal development or growth much simpler. Team members might share journal excerpts with their manager at 1-on-1 meetings.

Reflection as a tool to accelerate learning

Neuro-science has discovered that reflection is how your brain connects new information to existing mental models. Every individual has their own mental model that is built up based on their own experience. Reflection enables the brain to connect the new information you are learning with existing knowledge. One of the best ways to help your team have more "lightbulb" moments is to suggest that they create regular calendar time for self-reflection. This is a simple and easy tool for your team to focus on how they learn and adjust their learning style to maximise results. A good time to schedule this might be prior to a regular 1-on-1 with your manager.

Understanding how they learn

Every individual has a different learning and working style. The level of self-awareness of your team members on how they operate and the impact of environmental factors can affect their learning/working speed. Factors like time of day, energy levels/caffeination, and the type of learning can influence their ability to be more effective. For example, some people do their best work first thing in the morning or prefer reading at a particular time to help their understanding. 

This is a common practice of professional coaches to help people understand how to create the right environment and help create the right state of mind for "peak performance". These routines or habits help the performance and effectiveness of an individual's work. As a manager, supporting this level of self-awareness and your team member's knowledge of how they learn, can accelerate their progress and achieve goals faster.

Feedback like a coach

Feedback is a critical part of self-awareness and learning. Think of your role as a manager as a coach to provide feedback to help them learn more about themselves and how to improve. Providing different perspectives on their work is vital to understanding how they can improve. It's essential to have trust with your team members so that you have the right candour and can be constructive and honest with your feedback. Also, setting the proper context for the feedback is vital to ensure that your team members understand the "why" and are able to connect your feedback to a specific goal. 

Habits fuelled by self-awareness

"Atomic Habits" by James Clear is a great book to help with self-development. The book explains the mechanics of how habits work. In the workplace, we talk about outcomes. In the book, the author describes the connection of personal outcomes with our own inputs "outcomes are a compound effect of our behaviours and habits." 

Underlying the ability to create habits and influence behaviours is self-awareness. Self-awareness is a superpower your team members must develop to accelerate their ability, and work more productively with your team. 

Further reading / Resources

Books

• Atomic Habits by James Clear

• Find out your strengths using  the Strengthsfinder test

Web

• Reflection as a tool for learning

• Self-awareness is the #1 Superpower to develop

• Self-awareness and curiosity are secret weapons

• More about “Learning and Mental Models" and how they have thinking and making decisions”

Podcasts / Videos

• Using self-talk and self-awareness to unlock confidence

• Why Self-awareness is a super power