If you want to be successful, the first step is not to know yourself very well.
For years the emotional intelligence movement has been telling us the reverse — that self-knowledge is vital to get anywhere at all. There has never been much evidence to back this up, but it sounds good, and so everyone takes it on trust. However, even the most casual acquaintance with the world of business suggests otherwise. Over the past three decades I’ve met large numbers of senior business people, and can’t help noticing that the only thing most of them have in common is that they don’t seem to know themselves at all.
Last week I came across some research that backs up my hunch that self-knowledge is not all it’s cracked up to be. Zenger Folkman, a leadership consultancy, has conducted a large piece of research in which it compared what 69,000 leaders think of themselves to what their teams — 750,000 people altogether — think of them. It found little correlation between how managers rate their own abilities and how others rate them, which is precisely what I would have expected.