Self-Awareness: The Key to Unlocking Employee Excellence

How Cultivating Self-Awareness Drives Emotional Intelligence, Resilience, and Personal Growth for Organizational Success

Upon identifying outstanding employees, organizations can assess them based on their qualities. Among all the crucial qualities outstanding employees must have, one is a vital trait that profoundly impacts employees’ personal and professional growth, which is self-awareness. This trait is essential as it involves recognizing one’s strengths, weaknesses, emotions, and values, leading to improved emotional intelligence, resilience, and interpersonal relationships. Our research at AMBIZ sheds light on the significance of self-awareness in the workplace.

1. Improved Emotional Intelligence

Self-aware employees exhibit a high level of emotional intelligence, enabling them to manage their emotions effectively. This heightened emotional intelligence correlates strongly (effect size of 60%) with improved interpersonal relationships and reduced conflicts in the workplace.

2. Higher Emotional Resilience

Through our internal research, we observed that self-aware individuals display greater emotional resilience. They exhibit a 22.9% increase in perseverance and a 26.4% inclination towards positive thinking when facing setbacks.

3. Better Interpersonal Relationships

Self-awareness fosters empathy, as employees better understand the impact of their actions on others. This ability to empathize is predicted by self-awareness with a significant effect size of 35.5%. Additionally, their self-awareness also enables them to influence others effectively, with an effect size of 55.1%.

4. Personal Growth and Development

Employees with self-awareness proactively seek opportunities for personal growth and development. Our research shows that they experience a 30.6% improvement in performance due to continuous improvement efforts.

5. Enhanced Purpose-Value Internalization and Job Enjoyment

Our research findings indicate that self-awareness plays a crucial role in purpose-value internalization, with a substantial effect size of 14.4%. Furthermore, when employees can connect with the purpose of their work and contribute to it within their teams (effect size of 25.6%), they experience a greater sense of fulfilment and job satisfaction (effect size of 15%).

There are a few ways organizations can do to promote self-awareness. For starters, you can employ Personality and Strengths Assessments to help your employees understand their unique traits and identify areas for personal and professional growth. Afterward, to encourage self-awareness among employees, you can conduct workshops and training sessions on emotional intelligence, self-assessment, and self-reflection. Not stopping there, organizations should aid their people in their self-awareness journey by implementing a comprehensive feedback system where employees receive input from their peers, supervisors, and subordinates and offering personalized coaching and mentoring programs.

There are many qualities that make an employee become an outstanding performer, with self-awareness as one of the highlighted qualities. Organizations may find that not all of their people own this trait, but it doesn’t mean there is nothing that can be done about it. Organizations can promote self-awareness through a few organizational strategies such as employing suitable assessments, conducting training, implementing 360-feedback, and offering coaching programs. By promoting this quality, organizations will build a better team as their employees have developed this vital quality.