The Self-Awareness Paradox: Why the CIOs Who Need Honest Feedback Most Get It Least

A few years ago, a colleague of mine sat down with the results of his 360-degree feedback. He’d been leading for fifteen years. Two strong reviews in a row. Promotion conversations underway. He thought he knew where he stood.

He went quiet for a long time. Then he said something I haven’t forgotten.

“I thought I was being decisive. Turns out people experience me as dismissive. I thought I was being efficient. Turns out people feel rushed and unheard.”

He paused. “I don’t know if I want to know this.”

The Story Nobody Will Challenge

If you got promoted on technical excellence, that moment should make you uncomfortable.

You earned this role by being good at hard things. Fixing what other people couldn’t fix. Delivering projects when others slipped. Knowing more about the systems than anyone in the room. That track record built your confidence, and your confidence got you the title.

It also built a story about who you are as a leader. You’re decisive. You’re efficient. You move fast and get things done.

Now think about who, in your current job, would actually tell you that story is incomplete. Your team won’t. They report to you. Your peers won’t. They’re quietly competing for the same things you are. Your supervisor won’t, because they hired you to solve problems, not to be one. Even the people who genuinely care about you have a power dynamic to handle. They pick their words.

So the story keeps running, year after year. Nobody fact-checks it.

The Self-Awareness Paradox

I call this the self-awareness paradox: the people who most need honest feedback are usually the ones who get the least of it.

Tasha Eurich, the organizational psychologist, found that 95% of people think they’re self-aware. Only 10 to 15% actually are. For technical leaders, I’d guess the gap is wider. We spent twenty years getting rewarded for knowing the right answer, not for understanding our impact on people.

The position itself works against you. As a CIO, you sit at a table where almost everyone has a reason to manage their tone with you. Department heads need IT support. Vendors want contracts. Your direct reports are thinking about their next performance review. What you hear is the careful version. Not the real one.

Most CIOs I know never break out of that. They ride out their careers on the comfortable version of themselves, mistaking the absence of pushback for proof that everything’s fine. The blind spots widen. The team learns to work around them. The leader hears nothing and assumes that’s good news.

The 360 my colleague went through didn’t change who he was. It changed what he was able to see about himself. That’s harder than most people expect.

The Shadow Side of Your Strengths

Once you start looking honestly, you notice something most leaders miss. Every leadership strength you have has a shadow side. The longer you’ve been at it, the deeper that shadow gets.

Decisiveness, unchecked, becomes rigidity. Attention to detail becomes micromanagement. Drive for results becomes impatience that burns people out. The exact qualities that got you promoted are usually the ones quietly costing you now.

Most of us would rather not look at that. It’s easier to keep collecting evidence for the version of ourselves we already believe. Selective memory does the rest.

But when you do look, something useful happens. You stop being a hostage to your defaults. You feel the rigidity coming on in a tense meeting and choose flexibility on purpose. You catch yourself rewriting your director’s email and stop. You hear impatience in your voice and slow down before you speak again.

You give up the comfort of your own narrative. What you get back is real choice about how you operate, instead of being stuck in your old patterns.

That’s not a small trade.

What Your Team Actually Needs

The Team you lead doesn't need a CIO who has it all figured out. They never did. What they need is a leader whose effectiveness keeps growing, because government IT problems compound, and so do the leadership patterns that solve them or stall them out.

The CIOs I’ve watched build the longest, most useful careers all share one quality. They keep developing. They stay curious about their own blind spots rather than defensive about them. They sit with hard feedback long enough to actually hear it, instead of explaining it away in the moment.

Your Move This Quarter

Pick one person who knows your work and will tell you the truth. A peer CIO. A former boss. A coach. Someone outside your reporting line who has nothing to lose by being honest.

Take them to coffee and ask two questions:

What do you see as my biggest strength as a leader? And what’s the shadow side of that strength when I overuse it?

Then sit with the answer. Don’t argue. Don’t explain. Don’t fix it in the moment. Let it be true for a week and see what you notice in your own behavior.

That conversation will teach you more than any course, certification, or executive program you’ll do this year. It’s also the one most CIOs will keep finding reasons to put off.

The leaders who do it anyway are the ones worth following.