Episode
#77: Most Leaders Rate Their Self-Awareness a 9. Their Team Would Say 3. (Here's How to Fix It)
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- Sep 21, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1772
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Summary
Most leaders believe they're highly self-aware. The data says otherwise. When leadership assessors put executives through real evaluation, the average self-awareness score comes in at a 2, 3, or 4, nowhere close to the 8, 9, or 10 most leaders confidently give themselves before the test. That gap isn't just a fun statistic. It's often the single biggest predictor of whether a leader will build trust or quietly destroy it. In this episode of the MPWR Podcast, Eric Pfeiffer and Dawn Neldon break down the EQ Matrix, a practical framework built on one core idea: your ability to lead others is directly connected to your ability to lead yourself. They walk through the four quadrants every leader operates in every single day, self-awareness, self-leadership, others-awareness, and others-leadership, and explain why so many leaders get this order backwards. Instead of starting with themselves, they jump straight to trying to fix, manage, or control the people and circumstances around them. The result? Teams that feel micromanaged, unsafe, and unheard, and leaders who can't understand why no one wants to follow them. Eric and Dawn also unpack the difference between managing your emotions and being managed by them, using the metaphor of a swan gliding calmly across water while paddling furiously underneath. That's what real self-leadership looks like: composure on the surface, discipline underneath. Through the true story of "Bob," a brilliant, numbers-driven executive who was indispensable to his company in its early years but became a bottleneck as the team grew, Eric and Dawn illustrate exactly what happens when competence isn't matched by character. Bob's team felt condescended to, micromanaged, and afraid to speak up. When confronted, Bob's response was simple: "That's their…