I've sat in enough leadership rooms to recognise a particular type. They drift from team to team. Every few years, they land somewhere new. Wherever they land, the story is always the same: the previous team was useless, the new team shows promise but keeps letting them down, and it's only a matter of time before the idiots ruin this one too.
Frustrating? Yes. They're often smart people. Experienced. Well-intentioned.
And completely blind to themselves.
The Stat Worth Sitting With
Dr. Tasha Eurich spent years researching self-awareness. Her finding? 95% of people believe they're self-aware. According to her research, cited in Forbes, only 10-15% truly are.
Think about it. Nearly everyone you work with believes they're seeing themselves clearly. Statistically, most of them aren't. Statistically, this includes you. It includes me.
Not a comfortable thing to sit with. But sit with it anyway.
Self-awareness matters more than most leaders admit. When a leader lacks it, they make decisions based on an inaccurate picture of themselves and their impact. They interpret honest feedback as an attack. They read their team's frustration as a performance problem. They keep arriving at the same dead end and keep concluding the road was wrong.
The Common Denominator
Thomas Erikson wrote Surrounded by Idiots because he kept hearing the same complaint: "I'm perfectly reasonable, but the people around me are impossible to work with."
His answer was blunt. When you're the one constant in every situation where everyone else seems like an idiot... the problem isn't the people. It's your perception of people who think differently from you.
I've been on the receiving end of this. Early in my career, I had a manager who ran on fast-paced decisions and big-picture thinking. He'd set direction at 9am, change his mind by 11am, and wonder why the team seemed slow to catch up. He read their confusion as incompetence. He was looking at a team of careful, detail-oriented people who needed context and consistency before they moved.
They weren't slow. He wasn't giving them what they needed.
He left eventually, convinced the team had failed him. The team was fine. They're still there.
The team didn't need a new member. They needed a different kind of leader.
Four Types, Four Completely Different Worlds
Erikson's model divides people into four behavioral styles, often represented as colors. These aren't rigid boxes... most people blend two or more. But as a thinking tool, they're useful.
Red people are decisive, results-driven, impatient. They want the headline, not the footnote. They move fast and expect others to keep up.
Yellow people are optimistic, energetic, social. They love possibilities and get bored with details. They're the ones who get a room buzzing with ideas.
Green people are steady, reliable, loyal. They process slowly and move deliberately. They hate conflict and need stability to perform at their best.
Blue people are analytical, precise, rule-following. They want data. They want to get it right. They'll ask questions a Red reads as obstruction but a Blue sees as essential due diligence.
Here's where it goes wrong. Most leaders lean heavily into one style. And when someone shows up wired differently, it reads as friction. As incompetence. As an attitude problem.
A fast-moving Red dismisses a careful Blue as "overthinking it." A detail-focused Blue writes off an enthusiastic Yellow as "not serious enough." A people-first Green frustrates a result-driven Red who reads warmth as weakness.
Nobody's wrong. Everyone's different. The person with the most power in the room... usually the leader... gets to define what "normal" looks like. When your default becomes the standard, everyone else looks like a deviation.
This is how entire teams get written off. Not because they're bad teams. Because the leader never learned to speak their language.
The Moment I Had to Check the Mirror
I spent years thinking I was a good communicator. I'm direct. I say what I mean. I move quickly. I find long meetings painful and make no secret of it.
What I was slower to understand: my version of "direct" landed as "abrasive" for people wired differently. My pace felt like chaos to people who needed structure. My obvious impatience in meetings made some people afraid to raise issues.
Not malicious. Not intentionally difficult. But I was causing real damage, and I was mostly oblivious to it.
The mirror moment came from a 360 review. I asked the team to tell me, anonymously, what I did to make their work harder. The answers were uncomfortable. They were consistent.
I'd been reading my team's hesitation as lack of confidence. It was their response to me not creating enough space for them to contribute.
Sits with me still.
The Test Worth Running
If you've had a string of difficult teams, difficult colleagues, difficult bosses... ask yourself honestly: what's the common thread?
I'm not saying every problem is yours to own. Bad organisations exist. Toxic cultures exist. There are genuinely difficult people out there.
But if it's everywhere, every time? You're the thread.
A few questions worth sitting with:
- When did you last ask your team what you do to make their work harder... and listen without defending yourself?
- Do you adjust how you communicate based on who you're talking to, or do you use one style and expect everyone to adapt?
- When someone frustrates you, do you lead with curiosity... why would a reasonable person behave this way?... or do you go straight to a verdict?
- Are you open to feedback, or do you collect it and then explain why it's wrong?
The last one is sneaky. A lot of leaders think they're open to feedback because they don't yell. But if every piece of hard feedback produces a counter-argument... you're not open to feedback. You're tolerating it.
What "Why" Gets Wrong
Here's a useful piece from Eurich's research. When most people try to build self-awareness, they ask themselves "why." Why did I react this way? Why does this situation bother me?
The problem: "why" questions invite rationalisation. Your brain finds an answer... some story you already believe about yourself... and stops there. You feel like you've reflected. You haven't.
"What" questions work better. What was I feeling in the moment? What did I want to happen? What did my behaviour communicate to the other person?
"What" keeps you in the facts. "Why" keeps you in the story.
I'm not a psychology researcher. I'm a leader who's made enough mistakes to know the difference. When I ask myself "why did I get frustrated with them," I get self-justification. When I ask "what did I do to make them shut down," I get something useful.
What Self-Awareness Looks Like
Real self-awareness isn't about being humble or soft. It's about being accurate.
It means knowing your defaults and recognising when they're creating problems. It means seeing your own blind spots... not perfectly, but enough to ask better questions.
It means being willing to update your view of yourself based on evidence, not intention.
Your intentions don't land on people. Your behaviour does.
The leader who always meant well while building frustrated, disengaged teams is not a good leader who was unlucky. They're a leader who never connected the dots between what they meant to do and what they did.
The Payoff Is Real
I'm not asking you to become someone else. I'm asking you to understand yourself well enough to stop accidentally making everyone around you smaller.
When you stop reading "different from me" as "worse than me," your team gets better. Not because they changed. Because you stopped fighting them.
The best leaders I've worked with all had one thing in common. They knew what they looked like from the outside. They'd done the work of finding out. They kept checking.
95% of people think they're doing this. Most aren't.
The question isn't whether you're self-aware. The question is: are you willing to find out?
And if every team you've ever been part of has been full of idiots... you already have your answer.