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Written by the Speak Up! Team
Your performance review is mostly good. Projects shipped, numbers held, and nobody on your team quit or complained. Then, near the bottom, one line: "Needs to be more visible. Should speak up more in leadership meetings."
You read it twice on the way home. Is it about you, or about the room reading you?
That question sits at the center of self-awareness in leadership: the ability to see your own values, traits, and reactions clearly, and to understand how they land on the people you lead. Most advice on the subject assumes feedback works like a flat mirror. You ask, you listen, you adjust. For multicultural and immigrant leaders, the mirror is often bent, and real self-awareness means learning to see the bend as well as yourself.
The idea underneath this article is inside-out: you start from who you are, including the culture that shaped you, and build your leadership outward from there, which is the core of what cultural identity means at work.
What is self-awareness in leadership?
Self-awareness in leadership is knowing what you bring into a room and how it lands on the people in it. It covers your values, your habits under pressure, your reactions to conflict, and the effect all of those have on your team. For leaders who cross cultures, it also includes a third piece most definitions skip: knowing which cultural lens is doing the reading.
Every workplace has a default way of reading behavior: how loud confidence should sound, how fast a decision should come, how openly a junior person should disagree with a senior one. When your default differs from the room's, feedback stops being plain information about you. It becomes information about you, filtered through someone else's expectations.
The raw material for all of this is your character and personality traits. These are the patterns you bring into every room, such as how you handle pressure, how you show respect, and whether you think out loud or think first. Self-awareness does not change those traits. It tells you what they are, how they come across, and how they land in front of other people.
Why is self-awareness important in leadership?
Self-awareness matters because the people you lead are reading you all day, whether or not you are reading yourself. A leader who knows their own patterns can explain them, manage them, and use them on purpose. That leader doesn't leave the team guessing because guessing is exhausting.
The everyday benefits are concrete. A leader who knows they get short-tempered when a deadline slips can name it before the status meeting instead of letting it leak into their tone. A leader who knows they go quiet when they disagree can tell the team that silence means "still thinking," not "yes." Neither leader changed who they are. Both made themselves easier to read.
Think about the best manager you have had. Chances are you knew how they would react to bad news, which meant your attention went to the work rather than to reading the boss.
The cost of managing identity instead of work
When self-awareness is missing at the cultural layer, people often start managing how they are read instead. Legal scholar Kenji Yoshino calls this "covering": downplaying a known part of your identity so it fades into the background at work. In a 2013 study he co-wrote with Deloitte, 61% of workers reported covering. When Deloitte repeated the research a decade later, the number had barely moved: 60% of US workers said they had covered at work in the previous 12 months, according to Deloitte's report Uncovering culture: A call to action for leaders.
Catalyst's research on Black professionals describes a related burden it calls emotional tax: the heightened experience of feeling different from peers because of gender, race, or ethnicity, along with its effects on health, well-being, and the ability to thrive at work. The report found that emotional tax can make employees feel they must stay "on guard," disrupt their sleep, reduce their sense of psychological safety, and diminish their ability to contribute at work.
Neither study measured self-awareness directly. In my view, they show what is at stake when you lack it. If you cannot name a trait and where it came from, the easiest move is to hide it, and hiding has costs that both bodies of research document.
Self-awareness matters for the team as much as for the leader. When you can say, "I was raised to wait my turn before disagreeing, so tell me if I seem to be holding back," you allow the space to discuss differences. Treating your background as information rather than a defect, in front of your team, is the opposite of covering.
How does culture change what self-awareness means?
Culture changes self-awareness because the same behavior can read as confident in one setting and rude in another. Real self-awareness includes knowing your own default and the room's default, so you can tell whether a reaction is about you or about the gap between two sets of rules.
Geert Hofstede's research, summarized in his paper "Dimensionalizing Cultures: The Hofstede Model in Context," describes power distance as the degree to which people with less power accept and expect that power is distributed unequally. These are tendencies across societies, not rules for individuals. They still shape what feels natural to you when your manager walks into the room.
A leader raised with higher power distance may wait to be invited before disagreeing with someone senior. That restraint is a form of respect, and it often comes with careful preparation and strong listening. In a lower power distance room, though, the same restraint can be read as having no opinion at all.
The reverse happens too. A leader whose directness was a sign of honesty and care at home may find it read as abrasive in a workplace where disagreement is softened and wrapped in questions. Neither style is the "correct" one. Each is a strength in the setting that built it, and each can be misread in the other.
Researchers from the GLOBE project studied what societies around the world expect from leaders. In a 1999 paper in The Leadership Quarterly, Deanne Den Hartog and colleagues reported that some attributes, such as being trustworthy, just, and honest, were endorsed across cultures, while others depended on the culture doing the judging. For you, that means part of your leadership is read through a lens you did not choose and may not even see.
When feedback is about the trait and when it is about the lens
Some feedback describes the real impact of your behavior, and some describes your distance from an unspoken template. Telling the two apart is what makes self-awareness culturally aware rather than simply compliant.
Go back to the review that says you are "not visible enough" in leadership meetings, with no example attached. Feedback about impact usually connects to a result: a risk raised late, a decision that stalled, a person who left a meeting confused. Feedback about a (cultural) behavior names a style and stops there.
The two call for different responses. Impact is something you own, whatever its origin. A behavior is something you can understand, and sometimes question, without concluding that you are the problem.
The lens does not explain everything, and this is where the idea has limits. If your own team says you interrupt, or that your silence leaves them guessing, that is impact, wherever the habit came from. Treating every critique as bias is its own kind of misreading, and a self-aware leader keeps both possibilities open.
Role stress makes the sorting harder. Many multicultural leaders carry a double pressure: family or community expectations of modesty and duty on one side, and corporate expectations of self-promotion on the other. You can be praised at home for exactly the humility that a review marks down.
Other professionals live a version of this as well. An LGBTQ+ leader may weigh, in every round of small talk, whether to mention their partner. A leader with a hearing disability may find that asking people to repeat themselves gets read as inattention rather than as a reasonable need. In each case, part of the feedback is about the person, and part is about the room's assumptions.
If you want the longer argument about whose template leadership presence is measured against, the behavior critique in this executive presence comparison goes into it in depth.
What gets in the way of self-awareness for leaders?
The higher you rise, the fewer people tend to tell you something unwelcome. A peer will push back on a bad idea. A direct report weighing their next promotion may not. Leaders outside the default can find the feedback they do get vaguer still, when colleagues worry about saying something culturally clumsy.
The familiar blockers apply to everyone. Busyness crowds out reflection. Defensiveness turns every critique into a threat, so you stop hearing the useful part. Success can be a blocker too, because a strategy that worked for years is hard to question even after the setting changes.
Multicultural and immigrant leaders face additional ones. Filtered feedback is the first: comments like "be more visible" or "work on your presence" give you a verdict without a fact. Covering is the second, because if you hide a trait at work, the feedback you receive describes the mask, not you.
Imposter doubt is the third. When you already suspect you do not belong, every critique feels like proof, and you lose the ability to separate a real gap from a mismatched lens. If that voice is loud for you, my explainer on impostor syndrome at work looks at where it comes from.
Sometimes the blocker sits deeper. If you are unsure which of your traits are truly yours and which you picked up to fit in, feedback has nothing stable to land on. Every comment becomes a vote on whether to change, rather than information about a trait you already understand.
How do leaders become more self-aware?
Leaders become more self-aware by paying attention to patterns rather than single moments, and by learning the rules of the room as clearly as they know their own. One tense meeting tells you little. The same reaction across ten meetings tells you a great deal.
It starts from the inside. Self-awareness holds up under pressure when it rests on your own traits rather than on other people's reactions. When you know how you handle stress, how you show respect, and how you prefer to think through a problem, a critique stops landing as a verdict on who you are. It becomes a question about one behavior in one setting, which is a question you can actually answer.
Then it moves outward. The most useful feedback is specific: what you did, in which meeting, and what happened next. Vague feedback is common for multicultural leaders, so it often falls on you to ask for the example behind the label. Over time, you also learn the room's unspoken defaults, such as who speaks first, how disagreement is signaled, and what "visible" actually means in this company. Once you can see the room's rules, you can decide which ones to follow, which ones to explain your way around, and which ones to question.
Self-awareness also gives you something to say. Once you can name a trait and where it came from, you can explain it to your team, and that explanation becomes part of your leadership story. My book, Speak Up! Tell Your Story to Influence Others, is built on that idea: your background is the material your leadership is made from. If you are curious how a popular storytelling approach compares with building from your own background, this summary and comparison walks through the difference.
Go back to that review one more time. "Needs to be more visible" is still a verdict without a fact. But a self-aware leader reads it differently. You know your traits, you know the room's template, and you can ask the one question that sorts them: visible in what way, and what happened when I wasn't?
Download Your Story Bank, our free worksheet for this topic. It gives you prompts for each of the four pillars to remember, capture and shape the leadership stories your background gave you.
FAQ
What are examples of self-awareness in leadership?
Self-awareness shows up in small, observable choices. A leader who notices they explain less under stress and sends a short written recap after tense meetings is using what they know about themselves. So is a leader who knows their humor leans on cultural references and checks that a new team is in on the joke.
What are the signs of low self-awareness in a leader?
The clearest sign is surprise: a leader who is repeatedly caught off guard by how a decision or a comment landed. Others include hearing the same criticism in several reviews without changing anything, blaming every misunderstanding on the other person, and being unable to describe their own reaction to stress. Low self-awareness is rarely a character flaw. More often, the leader has simply never taken the opportunity to reflect on it, taking the differences at face value and blaming themselves for the lack thereof.
Is self-awareness the same as confidence?
No. Confidence is how sure you feel; self-awareness is how accurately you see yourself and your effect on others. A self-aware leader can feel unsure in a new culture and still know exactly which traits are their strengths and which settings tend to misread them.
Can you be too self-aware?
Self-awareness itself is not the problem, but constant self-monitoring can be. Self-awareness is knowing your patterns and choosing how to use them. Self-monitoring is watching yourself so closely, out of fear of how you are read, that you stop being present in the conversation. If you are spending more energy watching yourself than leading, you are closer to covering than to self-awareness.
Why do multicultural leaders often get vague feedback?
Colleagues may soften feedback when they worry about saying something culturally clumsy, and the result can be comments like "work on your presence" that give a verdict without a fact. Vague feedback makes it harder to tell real impact from a mismatched template. Asking for one specific example behind the label is often the fastest way to find out which one you are dealing with.
Your own story is the strongest source of self-awareness you have, and my book and site are where I help you start finding it.
Edited with AI
