Great Leadership Starts With Self-Awareness By: Chinwe Esimai Self-awareness has been cited as the most important capability for leaders to develop, according to the authors of “How To Become a Better Leader,” which was published in the MIT Sloan Management Review. Successful leaders know where their natural inclinations lie and use this knowledge to boost those inclinations or compensate for them. A study also found that self-awareness impacts companies’ bottom line. In a study of the stock performance of 486 publicly traded companies, Korn/Ferry International found that companies with strong financial performance tend to have employees with higher levels of self-awareness than poorly performing companies. Yet self-awareness seems to be in short supply among leaders. While women in executive-level management positions tend to exhibit