Written by Tamara Kroeker, Founder and Lead Facilitator, EnneagramAWARE
5-minute read
What You Don’t See About Yourself Shapes Everything You Lead
Books, articles, and LinkedIn posts are full of tips and tricks to improve your skills as a leader: 15 ways to gain the trust of your team, 10 signs your workplace culture is heading for a crash. Thought leaders debate what makes a great leader, offering words like resilience, transparency, passion, and purpose.
Most of this advice focuses on what is visible.
What’s talked about far less is what sits under the surface. What is driving our desire to develop certain skills? Why do specific aspects of leadership seem to always elude us?
Delegation is a perfect example.
Every leader has tasks that feel easy to hand off and others that feel much harder. Why is that? Is it about competence or role clarity? Sometimes. But more often, it’s connected to internal controls, the invisible rules we carry about what feels important, risky, or unsafe to release.
Think about a moment when you were about to delegate something and instead your mind began to consider, “It would take too much time to explain,” “If I want this done right, I should just do it myself,” or “I don’t have time to hand this over today.”
In those moments, there’s something important to learn about yourself as a leader.
Beneath the surface of that decision is information about how you relate to control, trust, responsibility, and to your own personal values. All of these pieces quietly shape how you lead and can often be the unspoken limit on both yourself and your team.
The skill that is needed here is called self-observation.
Self-observation is one of the most crucial building blocks of self-awareness. It’s the ability to catch yourself in real time. It doesn’t rush to fix or justify. It simply notices: something is happening here.
Self-observation was a big part of what helped shift me out of my previous career and into this one. I used to be an elementary school teacher. I liked my job and I was good at it – recorders and Christmas concerts were my life! But what I started to notice was that even though nothing was “wrong” on the surface, I had started avoiding certain tasks and was lacking direction. And in general, everything made me feel like it wasn’t good enough.
Every new idea I tried left me feeling like I failed. I would try a new lesson, a new instrument, a new approach, and each one felt like it helped for a bit but didn’t shift this internal feeling of discomfort and frustration.
When I finally let myself listen to that internal feeling, I realized I had chosen this career because it felt like the right thing to do, not because it was the right thing for me to do.
The point of this post isn’t to tell you to quit your job. What we are talking about here is the skill of noticing what is under the surface. This starts with the practice of self-observation.
The next time you feel frustrated with something in your leadership, pause and ask yourself this question, “what am I not seeing?”
- Maybe you will notice fear or uncertainty.
- Maybe you will watch yourself search for an excuse or reason.
- Maybe you will try to avoid the question entirely.
Please know that NONE OF THESE ARE THE WRONG ANSWERS.
That’s the key to understanding self-observation. Everything that comes up when we are observing ourselves is information to show us more of who we really are, as a leader, a colleague and a human being navigating all the complex pieces of the world.
The practice of self-observation treats those uncomfortable moments as teachers and over time, those teachers expand your capacity as a leader.
This is the work of leadership. Not having all the answers or performing certainty, but developing the capacity to pause, even in a results-driven culture that rewards speed, output, and productivity.
When a leader can slow down long enough to notice what’s really happening in themselves, it changes how they show up. It shifts how they make decisions, how they handle tension, how they respond to mistakes, and in the kind of conversations they invite.
That pause becomes visible. And what becomes visible to a leader eventually becomes normal to a team. They build cultures where awareness is valued, reflection is safe, and personal growth and accountability is the norm.
Your ability to pause and notice raises the ceiling on what an entire organization is capable of because personal growth is organizational growth.
Tamara Kroeker is a coach, facilitator, and speaker specializing in self-awareness and relational intelligence in the workplace. Through the lens of the Enneagram, she helps individuals and teams understand their core motivations, improve communication, and strengthen collaboration.
At the core of her work is the belief that personal growth is organizational growth. Every shift in awareness strengthens not just the individual but the culture around them. Your strongest team starts with a better understanding of YOU.
