Before we get into this month’s leadership letter content I want to ask how you did with the Action Step at the end of the last letter:
Find one recurring task that drains you. One thing that does not fit your design. And move it — intentionally, without apology — to someone better suited to carry it. Notice what shifts — for you, for them, and for the work itself.
If you did that, please respond in the comments or send me an email. I would love to hear about it.
Experience tells me that those of you who did that may have had to overcome shame, insecurity, even guilt. Regardless, once you followed through on delegating you had less stress and more energy and productivity. If you delegated well, the person who picked up the task experienced the same thing! Win-win.
That win-win is exactly where I want to pick up this month.
Never forget this: leadership is a relationship, not a task. This is why emotional intelligence is the strongest predictor of leadership success. If you want to be a successful leader, EQ is your ticket.
Emotional intelligence gets talked about like it’s one skill. It’s not. It’s a four-part process of skills.
1️⃣ Self-awareness comes first. Know your values, your strengths, your saboteurs.
2️⃣ Self-management comes second. Catching your saboteurs before they derail you and your team, by building the system, practicing the reps. Last month we went further: knowing what you are naturally designed to do and giving yourself permission to have limits. Delegating from design. It is worth mentioning that the best leaders delegate from their design to the design of others.
3️⃣ Other-awareness, today’s topic, comes third.
4️⃣ Relationship management comes fourth, and we’ll get there in a future letter. You can’t manage a relationship well until you can actually see the other person clearly. So today is about the seeing.
The Saboteur You Haven’t Caught Yet
Here’s something worth sitting with. You may have done real work on your own inner critic. You catch it faster than you used to. You pause before the harsh self-verdict.
Then someone on your team misses a deadline, and the same reflex fires — just aimed outward instead of in.
It shows up small. A flash of irritation before you’ve asked a single question. A story you start telling yourself about why someone fell short, assembled in a few seconds, and often wrong.
You’ve trained yourself out of that speed of self-judgment. The next stage of the work is training yourself out of judging others.
What Other-Awareness Actually Means
Other-awareness isn’t empathy in the soft, greeting-card sense. It’s an emotional skill — the ability to feel what others are feeling. Their motives, values, and emotions.
It involves noticing your own reaction in real time when someone underperforms or misses the mark — the irritation, the assumption, the quiet case you’re building against them — and choosing curiosity before you choose a verdict.
It means recognizing that the person in front of you has a different wiring than yours, and that their hesitation, their pace, their approach isn’t necessarily a character flaw. It might just be a different design. Remember, last month we learned that we don’t berate Ferraris for their inability to go off-road.
Think about someone on your team who processes things differently than you do. Maybe they need more time before they speak up in a meeting. Maybe they ask more questions than feels necessary to you. It’s easy to read that as reluctance, lack of readiness, lack of trust in you, even disrespect. It’s worth asking whether it’s actually a strength you don’t happen to share.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Notice the reaction before the response. There’s a gap of a second or two between what happens and what you feel. Widen that gap. That’s where the choice lives.
I often reference this Viktor Frankl quote in my training:
Ask before you conclude. Try replacing “why didn’t you finish this” with “what got in the way.” The first question delivers a verdict disguised as a question. The second one actually gathers information. Better yet, use what I call non-question questions — statements that show and promote curiosity: “Tell me about what happened.”
Look for design, not just performance. When someone struggles with a task, ask whether it fits how they’re wired before you ask whether they tried hard enough. Sometimes the task is the mismatch, not the person.
Name what you see in them. You’ve learned to name your own strengths without false modesty. Practice naming other people’s strengths out loud, specifically and often. Not generic praise — specific recognition. “I really respect your ability to stay calm when a room gets tense. I don’t have that as naturally. I need it from you.”
Why This Matters More Than It Sounds
Here’s what makes other-awareness different from the first two stages. Self-awareness gives you knowledge. Self-management changes your behavior. Other-awareness changes your relationships with team members — and since leadership is a relationship, it changes your leadership.
When you extend the same clarity and grace to others that you’ve learned to extend to yourself, something shifts in the room. People stop performing for your approval and start bringing you the truth, because they’ve watched you do the same with your own limits.
Great leaders stop judging others and choose curiosity instead.
Your Reflection and Next Step
Reflection: Think of the last time someone on your team fell short of what you expected. What was your very first internal reaction, before you said or did anything? Curiosity, or verdict?
Action step: This week, before you respond to someone’s mistake or shortfall, pause for that one- or two-second gap. Ask one question about what was going on for them before you say anything else. Notice what changes — in the conversation, and in what they bring you next time.
Self-awareness is where this work started. Other-awareness is where it starts to matter to everyone around you.
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