You Thought You Were Self-Aware. Your Team Knew Something You Didn't.

A few years ago, Tasha Eurich published research showing that while 95% of leaders believe they're self-aware, only 10–15% actually are. The finding spread quickly. It made a lot of coaches and HR leaders feel vindicated.

Here's what the research doesn't explain.

The leader I'm thinking of had done the work. Therapy, coaching, 360s, the whole stack. He could tell you his triggers, his blind spots, his default under pressure. By any self-awareness standard, he was in the top quartile.

Possibly higher.

And he had no idea what he was doing to his team. Not because he lacked insight. Because the pattern was invisible as a pattern. He would get close. Intensely involved, attentive, checking in daily, micromanaging the details. Then something would shift. He'd pull back. Go quiet. The team would feel him withdraw and start reading the weather: Is he disappointed? Are we in trouble? What did we miss?

Then he'd come back warm. The cycle would repeat. His team wasn't performing to a standard. They were managing his temperature.

This is the Hot–Cold Leader, one of the eight leadership archetypes I've mapped across two decades of coaching founders. The core belief running underneath it: if they stay slightly off-balance, I stay in control. It's not a conscious strategy. It's a protection pattern. One that once worked, probably in an environment where unpredictability meant survival. Now it runs automatically, long after the original threat is gone.

The cost isn't dramatic. There's no blowup, no resignation letter, no obvious crisis. The cost is quieter: trust that never quite builds. A team that learns to wait instead of move. A culture where people read the leader instead of reading the work.

Here's where Eurich's research ends, and the real problem begins.

Self-awareness tells you who you are. It doesn't tell you which loop you're running. How long you've been in it. What triggers the shift, or what it's costing the people who work closest to you. Those are different questions. They require a different instrument.

My client didn't know he was a Hot–Cold Leader until we named it. Once he had the name, something changed. Not immediately in his behavior, but in his noticing.

A few weeks later, he sat in his car in the parking lot before a difficult team meeting. He could feel the familiar pull to withdraw. He wanted to stay in the car, to delay, to let the cold come. And for the first time, he recognized it for what it was. Not caution. Not strategy. The loop.

He walked in. He stayed in the middle. Not micromanaging, not disappearing.

Just present.

He told me later: "I couldn't have made that choice without the name. I didn't know what I was choosing between."

That's what naming a pattern does. It doesn't fix the behavior. It creates the moment between the impulse and the action where a choice becomes possible.

Most leadership development skips this step entirely. It moves straight from you have blind spots to here are the skills. But if you don't know which archetype you're running under pressure. Or which loop is protecting you at the cost of your team, the skills land on top of the pattern without ever disturbing it.

The Leadership Avoidance Diagnostic is designed to surface exactly this. Not your communication style. Not a personality type. The specific protection pattern that's shaping your decisions, your delays, and the conversations you keep almost having.

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If you want to know which archetype you're running and what it's costing you, take the diagnostic here: quiz.keitademming.com

Awareness tells you who you are. The loop tells you what you're doing. They're not the same thing, and only one of them is costing you.

In all that we do, let us seek wisdom, discipline, courage & justice.

Be well,

Keita

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