He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened.
- Lao Tzu

In last Sunday’s New York Times appeared a condensed and edited version of an interview by Adam Bryant with Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo. In response to Bryant’s question, “What should business schools teach more of, or less of?” Bartz replied:

I think there ought to be some classes for people to get more philosophical about who they are and what motivates them, and therefore why they act like they act.

Some of the most fantastic training I’ve had over the years is the tests and the feedback I’ve gotten on what drives me as a person, and to sort of face up to it. What’s important to me and therefore why would I make certain decisions?…Now you could say the dark side of that is maybe that would drive me to make risky decisions that I shouldn’t make. It actually drives me the other way. It drives me to be more conservative, so I’ve had to teach myself to get out of that conservative zone….What motivates you? What are you scared of? Knowing that will help inform how you lead, how you make choices, how you face the day. And I don’t think we do enough of that.

Shortly afterward I was reading Braden Kelley’s review of his day spent with Gary Hamel, the noted strategist and trusted advisor to many executives. In the review Hamel made several comments about the future of organizations:

…the biggest thing that may limit organizational success most going forward is our organization’s ability to evolve their management models. But an even bigger handicap to future success may be the fact that our management models were not built to manage innovation but precision, stability, discipline, and reliability.

The fact is, the future of improved designs for organization structures (including their systems and process models) is fundamentally grounded in the self-awareness of the individuals of which they are comprised. If we don’t know ourselves how can we help others to help us achieve our goals? When this principle is considered in light of an expanded need for innovation, not just in product and service development, but in the way we engage with our customers and markets, it is vital that self-awareness be an anchor tenet of our approach to improving team performance over time and our organizations in the long-term. We need new thinking to help us find a way out of our current economic circumstances and our old models, given that they got us here in the first place, will not apply.

Now this is not intended to devolve all consideration of organization psychology into an ego-centric examination. But the chaos that is wrought in organizations in which leaders don’t know who they are and what they need, demands that this be an early focus. Regardless of our overarching organization’s strategic and performance intent authenticity derived from self-awareness is essential. This focus leads us beyond our obsession with “conscious capacities” (like, IQ) as David Brooks described them, and may “give us a firmer understanding of the motivation, equilibrium, sensitivity and other unconscious capacities.” Which confirms why a CEO like Carol Bartz not only appreciates the insight derived self-examination, she understands that it is vital to her effective leadership of her organization. Without it, she might struggle to frame what she needs to be successful and jeopardize the performance of the company overall

At a lesser scale, in a product development or innovation-focused team, the need is no less important. One of the reasons for the need for self-awareness at this level is the fact that many teams in this space are drawn from a cross the organization. Where a stable team processing accounts in Finance has a common language and common set of established business practices to fall back on in order to smooth the way for effective communication and collaboration, a product development team does not. They may have practices such as project management, but even that approach is driven by the content of the project and its deliverables. To make up for the deficit in communication short cuts an increased degree of authenticity is required in order for the team to perform at a higher level.

Could they achieve success without individual self awareness? Possibly. They might even “fake it ’til they make it.” But they will not have created a foundation for enduring performance

For long-term success the product development team members need to strike a series of mutually beneficial agreements based on trust. That trust will be founded in an exchange of accountability, commitment and expectations and those require that a demonstrated capability and an ongoing credibility be foremost in the interpersonal relationships. Self-awareness, the state of being aware of oneself, including one’s proclivities, thought patterns, traits, feelings, and behaviors underpins all this. Without it, the challenge is twofold – creating something new while wrestling with what is hidden. Which is not a recipe for improved performance but will most likely produce chaos at best and a disaster at worst. So we must ask ourselves: