Self-Awareness: Absolutely Fundamental, Often Overlooked

By Wael Barsoum, MD

Leadership development is not a new skill invented in business school. One of the Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin, was known to keep a balance sheet of both the assets and liabilities of his personal traits in order to assess whether the net worth of his character was growing over time. One could say Ben Franklin was a pioneer in the practice of self-awareness and that he recognized its value in enhancing his leadership skills.

How exactly does self-awareness impact leadership and how can we become adept at understanding our personality and character traits to determine how they hinder or contribute to our effectiveness as leaders?

Along with experience and vision, which are recognized elements of leadership, self-awareness is less cited, yet equally important. Leaders — and those who aspire to the role — need to have insight about who they are, how they lead, how others perceive them and how they can be most effective.

Self-reflection should be a key component of a leader’s own continuous improvement. Yet the mechanics of how we achieve this requires more clarification. How does self-awareness impact our effectiveness and how do we identify and implement best practices?

Creating physician leaders

The fundamental practice of evaluating who we are as leaders should start when our medical education begins. Yet, within the medical and nursing education fields, there is a scarcity of tools to guide students in the process of self-awareness. For this critical intersection where students become caregivers, the Arnold P. Gold Foundation is working to create a new paradigm. Their Humanism Assessment Tool (HAT) for medical and nursing students takes the Gold Foundation’s IE.CARES model of Integrity, Empathy, Compassion, Altruism, Respect, Resilience, Excellence and Service, and turns it into a tool that students can use to become self-reflective, compassionate, humanistic caregivers.

The Arnold P. Gold Foundation, which created the White Coat Ceremony, believes that physicians must expand their training to place emphasis on their growth as humanistic leaders. While the White Coat Ceremony has become a rite of passage, it also underscores the impact of engaging early-career physicians on an emotional level as part of their journey to become humanistic caregivers. The Foundation believes that at the important juncture where the new caregiver becomes empowered, the HAT can assist them in a simultaneous transformation from ambitious and determined student, to self-aware physician and leader. The HAT provides a keen evaluation of students’ psychological readiness and potential as leaders, which can serve as a foundation for future growth.

A key benefit of assessing your own strengths and challenges is that it can and will inspire your team to do the same. In this approach, there are several different levels of awareness:

• Intrapersonal (from within yourself);
• Interpersonal (how one interacts with others) and
• System (how the individual and teams function on behalf of the organization).

In essence, every interaction between provider and patient involves leadership and by default, self-awareness. It is possible to understand our personality traits as a precursor to the behavior that we exhibit.

Barriers to self-awareness

Self-awareness can be impeded by our own insecurities. It is important to understand that no one is perfect and different levels of energy are required to behave in certain ways. More education and data provide greater opportunities to create a culture of self-awareness and with that we gain greater insight into ourselves, our colleagues and our patients.

Today, we find leaders embracing the concept of self-awareness and using it as a tool to enhance our leadership skills and to encourage the growth of these skills in our healthcare teams. We are beginning to understand that the evolution from self-awareness to behavior creates leaders — and physicians — who are intuitive and inclusive. Ultimately, this evolution benefits everyone in the healthcare universe.

Learn to become a physician leader with Cleveland Clinic Global Executive Education programs, including The Cleveland Clinic Way: Intensives, Samson Global Leadership Academy and the Executive Visitors’ Program.

Dr. Barsoum is President of Cleveland Clinic Florida and staff in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery.