90 Days to Level Up Your Leadership

Week 4Developing Your Self-Awareness

Benchmark goal: Build your self-awareness.

Self-awareness is the foundation of authenticity. You develop it by exploring your life story and your crucible, and by understanding how these experiences shape you as a person and leader. You enhance it as you seek honest feedback from others. You refine it by adopting practices that help you remain mindful and aware, even amidst life's chaos.

When the Stanford Graduate School of Business surveyed its advisory council on the leader's most important quality, their answer was unanimous: self-awareness. It is the sine qua non of knowing your values, discerning your passions, staying balanced, and discovering your purpose. In Week 4, I show you how to become self-aware through mindfulness, honest feedback, and self-acceptance of yourself and compassion for yourself and others, which leads to self-actualization.

Satya Nadella: “Know-It-Alls” to “Learn-It-Alls”

When Satya Nadella took over as Microsoft CEO from Steve Ballmer in 2014, the company was suffering from a dysfunctional political culture that had missed every significant high-tech innovation in the past decade, including internet search, mobile phones, e-commerce, social media, and the cloud. In my own interactions with Steve, I found him abrasive, arrogant, and domineering. Satya observes, “People would walk around our campus thinking we are God's gift to mankind. Whether it's in ancient Greece or modern Silicon Valley, there's only one ...