That's a significant blind spot. Because the quality of everything else in that review, the decisions, the strategy, the team performance, is directly shaped by the quality of the leader making them.
The question every senior leader should ask themselves once a year is simple: am I actually performing at the standard this role demands, or am I just busy?
At senior level, there is never a shortage of things to do. The diary fills. The demands are constant. The pressure is real. And in the absence of honest external challenge, leaders can remain extremely busy while quietly underperforming.
This isn't a character flaw. It's a structural problem. The feedback mechanisms that flag underperformance at lower levels of an organisation tend to atrophy at the top. Boards focus on outcomes. Teams adapt. The honest, direct input that would force a leader to confront the gap between their current performance and what the business actually needs becomes increasingly rare.
Most leaders have a strong sense of their effort. Far fewer have an accurate sense of their impact.
This is why self-awareness leadership training has become increasingly important for senior leaders looking to improve performance and decision-making.
Asking yourself whether you're performing well is not the same as honest self-assessment. If you're asking the question and answering it using the same assumptions and beliefs that shaped your behaviour over the past year, you'll almost certainly reach a flattering conclusion.
Genuine self-assessment, the kind that has commercial value, requires three things.
First, it requires the right question. Not "have I worked hard?" but "have I produced the right outcomes, in the right way, at the standard this business needs?" Those are very different questions.
Second, it requires external reference points. Not just your own evaluation, but structured insight into how others experience your leadership: your communication, your decision-making, your behaviour under pressure. At RSG, we use psychometric assessment as part of this process precisely because it introduces objectivity where self-perception tends to introduce bias.
Third, it requires honesty about the gaps. Not a plan to address every perceived weakness, but a clear-eyed view of where performance is strong, where it's adequate, and where the business is paying a cost it may not yet have named.
The behaviours that limit performance at senior level rarely appear overnight. They develop gradually, often from strengths that have simply been overused or left unchallenged.
The leader who made rapid decisions in a high-growth phase finds that same decisiveness is creating a bottleneck in a more complex environment. The collaborative leader who built strong teams finds that same collaborative instinct is now slowing execution when pace is what the business needs. The leader whose direct communication style built credibility in earlier roles finds that same directness is now experienced as dismissive at senior level.
None of these patterns are visible in a self-assessment that's grounded only in the leader's own perception. They become visible when there's structured external data, specifically when the gap between how a leader sees themselves and how others experience them is made measurable and explicit.
The value of this kind of structured self-assessment compounds over time. Leaders who do it annually don't just identify what needs to change. They track whether the changes they committed to last year have actually taken effect. They build an ongoing relationship with their own development rather than treating it as a one-off event.
That consistency matters. The demands on a CEO in year three of a business cycle are different from those in year one. The leadership behaviours that were exactly right for one phase may be exactly wrong for the next. Annual self-assessment creates the distance needed to see those shifts clearly, rather than being so immersed in the day-to-day that the pattern only becomes visible in retrospect.
This isn't about personal development for its own sake. Self-awareness in leadership has a direct commercial return.
Research consistently shows that leaders with higher levels of self-awareness make better decisions, manage more effective teams, and create stronger organisational cultures.
Self-awareness leadership training helps leaders develop these capabilities in a structured and measurable way. They're also more resilient under pressure because they understand their own patterns well enough to manage them deliberately.
The inverse is also true. Leaders who operate without accurate self-perception create blind spots that compound over time, in their teams, their culture, and their strategic decision-making.
One structured self-assessment, once a year, is not a significant investment. The cost of not doing it can be considerable.