Invest in your leadership journey from Day 1
Developing self-awareness early on will give you a huge advantage in the long term
Last week, we wrote about developing core consulting skills. These are the skills that enable you to Deliver for your clients and firm. It’s understandable that, when faced with the sheer number of capabilities the job demands, most consultants don’t look past what’s required to do a great job on their current project.
However, the consulting pathway is laid out clearly before you. If you consistently and successfully Deliver, you will be expected to demonstrate increasing leadership responsibility. On our consulting skills competency framework, we are now looking to the areas of Manage and Lead.
These areas can present substantial hurdles. We’ll take a look at those, and consider how starting to develop self-awareness early in your career could pay dividends as you progress.

The hurdle into Managing
Your journey into leadership will start with Managing. This can be a scary step in any career. Suddenly, people are looking to you for direction and guidance, and you have a new weight of responsibility on your shoulders.
And that responsibility is two-fold. You have to manage the project so it delivers for your clients. And you have to manage the people on your team, considering their development opportunities, feedback, and performance.
At the start of your career you’ve had to develop the skills to manage yourself - making the best use of your time, being efficient and getting client-ready output done for your deadlines.
Pretty quickly you’ll start managing others. You may find yourself setting up the work plan at the start of the project, allocating out roles to each person, figuring out the critical path, and considering where there may be roadblocks. You will have to keep the project on track and bring your clients on the journey.
You will likely be required to provide coaching or development feedback to your team, write and deliver performance reviews, and perhaps support them on a more personal level.
This adds up to a big hurdle for new Managers.
When I was promoted to Manager at Bain & Company I was in the middle of a project. Initially nothing much changed - except I now had someone helping with my diary, so if anything it got easier!
Then I changed projects. New client. New team. A type of work I hadn’t done before. In a new country. That was a huge wake-up call and to be honest, I struggled. As the Manager I was responsible for the quality of my team’s output. This new team weren’t bringing me great work, and I pulled some long days (and nights) fixing it myself instead of coaching them. I learnt - the hard way - a lot about the importance of delegating and helping them develop.
The learning curve continues into Leading
The most competent Managers will continue to develop their skills and move into leading the firm. The expectations of a leader are different again, and demand you move along another learning curve.
Now you may find yourself responsible for aspects of how the firm operates, tracking key metrics and using them to drive decision making, and getting deeper into recruiting and developing a high-performance team. And, ultimately, you’ll reach a level where you are setting the vision, the strategy, and the culture for your business.
One of the unique challenges of leading in a professional services firm is the role of the Partner, which both client-facing and internally-facing. Most people at this leadership level in consulting will have a revenue line to win and deliver, clients to build relationships with, and a ton of effort being visible as an authority. Finding time to work on the business alongside all of that can be a struggle.
A rule of thumb for senior leaders is to spend no more than 25% of your time on delivery. If you are getting pulled into more than that then make it a priority to build capabilities that let you delegate. Common blockers are a lack of money to hire the right people, a lack of capability in your team, or a lack of trust that stops you delegating.
Be honest with yourself about what’s getting in the way of your leadership.
The power of developing self-awareness throughout your journey
You are probably able to identify a leader you admired and enjoyed working with. And, most likely, a leader who got it wrong. But have you considered and understood what they did differently? Do you know why they impacted you the way they did?
Much like becoming a parent forces you to reflect on your childhood, becoming a leader demands that you explore your experiences and ideals on a deeper level. What type of a leader do you want to be? What attributes and skills do you have that will support you? And crucially, what is lurking in your shadow that might get in your way?
In her book, Insight: How to succeed by seeing yourself clearly, Dr Tasha Eurich describes two types of self-awareness; internal and external.
Internal self-awareness represents how clearly we see our own values, passions, aspirations, fit with our environment, reactions (including thoughts, feelings, behaviours, strengths, and weaknesses), and impact on others. External self-awareness means understanding how other people view us, in terms of those same factors.
Good external self-awareness is correlated with more success at work. It enables you to understand how you come across, demonstrate empathy, and adapt how you behave in consideration of other people.
To develop good external self-awareness you need honest feedback. Not just on your performance, but on you. How you are showing up, how you impact other people, and how they feel about you. But here’s the rub…
External self-awareness is inversely correlated with power and status in the workplace.
The more senior you become, the more you feel that you’ve got it all figured out, and the less likely anyone else is going to risk telling you otherwise.
So, if you wait until you are a leader to start exploring what sort of leader you will be, you will have missed many golden opportunities to gather feedback and develop your external self-awareness. If you want to excel as a leader, start asking for feedback about how you are showing up from Day 1. At that stage, there will be many more people willing to tell you.
This article digs deeper into the 4 levels of self-awareness for consultants.
I co-host the Show Up! podcast, a space where we discuss conscious leadership including themes about self-awareness and curiosity. If you’re interested in this, then our very first episode is a great place to start: Exploring Self-awareness for Conscious Leaders.
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