I used to assume that the higher someone climbed, the more self-aware they became. It felt logical. You don’t get promoted five times by accident. I assumed that surely somewhere along the way, you learn to read yourself as well, as you read a room.
I recently sat with that assumption in ISB’s organizational behavior class and watched it fall apart.
Here’s the uncomfortable version: Seniority and self-awareness aren’t linked. Sometimes they run in opposite directions. And once you see why, you can’t unsee it in every workplace you’ve ever been part of. It surprised me when I connected the dots.
Promotions reward output, not insight
Nobody gets promoted for asking themselves why they snapped in a meeting. They get promoted for hitting targets, making decisions fast, and looking confident while doing it. Technical mastery, decisiveness, results, that’s the scorecard. Self-knowledge was never on it.
So a person can climb for twenty years on pure output and never once be forced to sit with the question – ‘why did I just react that way?’ Nothing in the system asks them to. The system only asks whether the numbers were good, whether it resulted in a business outcome or not, if Yes, how much? That’s it, success and achievement gets defined there itself.
That’s the first quiet fracture in the assumption. Competence and self-knowledge were never actually the same skill. We just filed them together because we wanted to believe good performance meant a whole, well-adjusted person underneath.
The feedback that builds self-awareness disappears with rank
Here’s the part that made this click for me. Self-awareness isn’t something people generate alone in a room. Most of it comes from outside — a colleague who tells you honestly that you came across as dismissive, a peer who pushes back before something becomes a habit. That kind of blunt, corrective feedback is how people learn to see their own blind spots.
Now think about what happens to that feedback as someone rises. A junior employee gets corrected constantly, by managers, by peers, by the sheer number of people willing to say something when they’re still close enough in rank to say it safely. A senior leader gets almost none of that. Subordinates rarely tell a superior ‘you seemed reactive in that meeting. We know, it’s not safe to say, and most people won’t risk saying it either.
So the exact mechanism that might build self-awareness lower down in an organization — peers correcting you, blunt feedback, low-stakes honesty — weakens at precisely the level where the cost of low self-awareness gets maximized. Power doesn’t just fail to build self-awareness. It actively removes the conditions that would have built it.
That’s not a minor gap. That’s a structural problem.
Why we keep the assumption anyway?
If you’re wondering why this isn’t obvious to everyone, I think it’s because seniority looks like maturity from the outside. Someone speaks with authority, makes big decisions, doesn’t seem rattled under pressure. And we read all of that as emotional intelligence.
Composure and self-awareness are not the same thing. A leader can be composed and still have zero insight into why they’re anxious, defensive, or short with people under pressure. Composure is what you show. Self-awareness is what you actually understand about what’s lying underneath it. Nobody’s job title tells you which one you’re looking at.
What this actually costs an organization?
This isn’t just an interesting classroom observation. It has a real, compounding cost on the business as well.
A senior leader with low self-awareness doesn’t just have a personal blind spot — they have a blind spot with leverage. Their reactions set the emotional tone for a whole team. Their unexamined defensiveness becomes the reason good feedback stops flowing upward at all, which only deepens the isolation that caused the problem in the first place. It’s a loop, and it tightens the higher it goes.
And because nobody around them is likely to say anything, the loop mostly stays invisible — until it shows up as attrition, a toxic pocket of a team, or a decision made from ego rather than judgment, and by then it’s expensive to unwind.
What actually breaks the pattern
If self-awareness doesn’t develop naturally with rank, it has to be built deliberately — which means organizations can’t just assume leadership matures on its own. A few things actually work:
- 360-degree feedback that’s genuinely anonymous and genuinely used. Not a formality once a year, but something that actually reaches the person and gets acted on
- Coaching, specifically for senior people. Not as a remedial measure, but as standard practice, because they’re the ones least likely to get honest feedback any other way
- Rewarding self-correction publicly. When a senior leader visibly says “I got that wrong, here’s what I missed,” it should be treated as strength, not weakness, because it signals to everyone below them what honesty is
- Designing safety into the feedback itself. Most people won’t volunteer hard truths to someone who can affect their career. The system has to make it safe, because good intentions alone won’t.
None of this happens by accident. It has to be built the same way any other leadership capability is built, deliberately, and with real accountability behind it.
Where I landed
I walked into that this OB class assuming self-awareness was something people simply accumulated with experience. I walked out with a much less comfortable idea: It’s something that has to be protected against the very forces that come with success, Title, status, authority, and the silence that grows around it.
Seniority buys someone a bigger room and a louder voice in it. It doesn’t buy them insight into themselves. If anything, it makes that insight harder to come by, right when the stakes of not having it get higher.
That’s the gap worth watching for — in the people above you, and honestly, in yourself, as you climb upward.