Employee Development via Strategic Self-Awareness

Every developmental training effort should begin with a competent personality assessment.

If you want to improve your tennis game, you should visit a tennis pro who will ask you to hit some balls, after which he/she will give you feedback on your performance. You can then use this feedback to improve your game.

If you want to improve your golf game, you should visit a golf pro who will ask you to hit some balls, after which he/she will give you feedback on your performance. You can then use this feedback to improve your game.

But what should you do if you want to improve your life game, or your career game? Drawing on an analogy with golf and tennis, you should visit a life or career pro. A competent career pro (typically a licensed psychologist) will ask you to complete a professionally developed assessment and use the results to give you feedback on your performance.

The success of such a developmental training effort (i.e., how much you subsequently change) will depend on four major factors:

1. Success will depend on the statistical quality of the personality assessment process; this involves technical issues in psychometrics, test development and test validation. The important point is: not all personality assessments are equally valid.
2. Success will depend on the talent and experience of the career pro. Not all psychologists are equally competent.
3. Success will depend on whether you want to improve your life or career game. People who are self-satisfied and complacent rarely change.
4. Finally, success will depend on your willingness to be coached on your flexibility. Not all athletes can be coached, and not all working adults can be coached either.

The psychological principle that facilitates personal development is self-insight; self-insight is what enables self-development. But self-insight is not as simple as it seems. In old-fashioned psychiatry and clinical psychology, self-insight concerned learning about your unconscious motives, impulses, and desires. Research shows that this psychiatric version of self-insight is unrelated to self- or career development.

The most appropriate way to think about self-insight is in terms of understanding how other people see you. How you think about yourself is not very useful information if you are concerned about self-development. What matters is how others think about you. Most people are not very insightful about how others perceive them, or they simply don't care. However, other people's perceptions of you are the basis of most important career events - whether you get hired, promoted, transferred or terminated depends on how others evaluate your performance.

What this means is that the basis of a competent personality assessment process involves learning how a person is perceived and evaluated by his/her bosses, co-workers, and/or subordinates. We refer to this as "strategic self-awareness."