My research focussed on self-awareness, leader effectiveness and leadership at all levels of the Welsh public service. I asked Welsh public service employees to complete a questionnaire and I carried out some interviews.
My findings told me that there was a relationship between self-awareness and leader effectiveness, and that leaders could be found at all levels of the Welsh public service. Generally, people who were thought of as effective leaders were also thought of as being more self-aware.
What I wasn’t expecting, was to find that people thought individuals working at the most strategic level of Welsh public service organisations had the least self-awareness, in comparison to others. This was in direct contrast to what the literature had been telling me: it generally links increased self-awareness and effective leadership with senior level people – but my research didn’t.
In exploring this further, people gave me examples of behaviour that they saw as demonstrating ineffective leadership, they told me about how they felt there was a detachment between strategic level employees and everybody else, and they told me how involvement in decision making could help bridge the gap.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll present my research findings in my Discovery Series