People with high self-awareness are more drawn to self-improvement and more eager to understand themselves and the world around them. Among all the metrics an L&D strategy can track in a leadership program, this is the one I would choose if I could choose only one. Here is how we measure it, and what years of data say about it.
Two kinds of self-awareness
Most approaches to self-awareness rely on questionnaires and 360-degree reviews. We measure it inside the conversation, and we distinguish two kinds, following Tasha Eurich's work:
- Internal self-awareness: how clearly we evaluate the impact of our own actions, thoughts, behaviors, strengths and weaknesses.
- External self-awareness: how well we understand the way other people see us on those same factors.
Leaders need both, and cannot develop one while ignoring the other.
Measuring it in a digital role play
For internal self-awareness, the trainee rates their own performance. The rating is deliberately intuitive, a slider with no numbers, so that instinct prevails over calculation. For external self-awareness, the trainee answers a few questions about how they think the character perceived specific moments of the conversation.
We then compare each self-assessment with the objective evaluation of the same performance produced by the analysis of what the trainee said. The distance between the two, expressed as a percentage, is the self-awareness measure: the smaller the distance, the higher the self-awareness, with 100% meaning perfect alignment. Overall self-awareness is a weighted average of the internal and external components. Nothing in this measure comes from the trainee's voice, face or state: it compares two judgments about the same words.
The critical threshold
Two programs taught us how self-awareness and performance relate. The first was for a health system with eight hospitals: around 200 leaders, one simulated conversation a week for twenty weeks, about 1,500 hours of practice in total. The second was for a bank: 1,200 managers, one role play a week over twelve months.
In both, performance in critical conversations, what we call quality of the strategy, grew slowly at first. Then self-awareness crossed a threshold, 65% in the first program after about seven weeks, 72% in the second after about eight, and performance started to grow much faster.
We see this pattern frequently in our data. Performance depends on learning agility, and learning agility depends on self-awareness. Until people are sufficiently aware of the impact of their own behavior, they have little reason to change it. When self-awareness clicks and the blind spot becomes visible, they realize new behaviors are necessary for the results they want, and they start to change for real. The exact threshold varies from person to person; what matters is that it exists, and that it is high.
Where leaders start
The problem is that almost nobody starts at their threshold. Across more than six million simulated conversations played on the platform and over 500,000 professionals, the distribution of self-awareness at the first session looks like this:
| Level | Self-awareness | Share of population |
|---|---|---|
| Very low | below 35% | 12% |
| Low | 35% to 50% | 24% |
| Intermediate | 50% to 60% | 48% |
| High | 60% to 80% | 12% |
| Very high | above 80% | 4% |
Eighty-four percent of leaders enter with low or intermediate self-awareness, well below the threshold at which performance accelerates. A considerable part of any program is therefore spent raising self-awareness before the faster gains in performance can appear. Skipping that part does not save time; it wastes it.
One more finding: self-awareness tends to decrease with seniority. Experience seems to produce a false sense of confidence, and long-tenured leaders are often the most overconfident about their own effectiveness.
Practicing conversations to build self-awareness
There are many ways to develop self-awareness, and few are as efficient as practicing critical conversations. The scope is specific, of course: a digital role play addresses the self-awareness connected to conversational behaviors, in a given type of conversation, with given objectives, counterparts and styles. It does not claim to address every aspect of a person's self-knowledge. Within that scope, the impact is high.
The reason is that people fear confrontation, and confrontation is the moment when the inner conversation with oneself begins. A digital role play is the safest way to make that confrontation happen, and the character's account of the meeting, delivered in first person and with specific examples, is a powerful accelerator of that inner conversation.
What triggers it most
Our method uses four triggers that stimulate self-awareness: self-evaluation during and after the conversation; the character's feedback on how they lived it; objective metrics on the outcome; and the analysis of each behavior and its effect, available when the trainee reviews the conversation with an AI coach.
Over the years we tested which triggers work best. The two emotional ones, self-evaluation and the character's account, are by far the most effective at bringing attention to the present situation and creating the need for a more focused self-evaluation. The two rational ones add precision. The maximum effect comes when all four act together, engaging both sides of the brain.
If you build a leadership program and have to pick one number to watch, pick this one. Everything else accelerates once it moves.