Most likely, there is a version of you that only other people can see.
That gap between self-perception and outer perception is the place where unrealized potential lives.
I'm Roman. I've been in tech for 20 years, from individual contributor to leading an entire engineering organization. I write High-Impact Engineering — a weekly newsletter for engineering managers, directors, and CTOs, built on firsthand experience rather than theory.
Today’s issue is about self-awareness and how to improve it.
I share a personal story about a surprising discovery of how people saw me, tools to challenge your self-perception, and why doing it is very hard.
The Perception Gap
Leaders who see themselves as visionary and bold might come across as blunt, insensitive, and self-centered.
Those who see themselves as leading from the front might look like they don’t trust their teams to make decisions.
Sometimes the gap is blindness to our weaknesses. Sometimes it is blindness to our strengths.
That was true for me for a long time, until I saw myself from another perspective.
A Lesson For a Senior Engineer
In the mid-2010s, the Belbin team roles assessment became popular in tech teams in Finland.
The idea is simple: people complete a self-assessment and also assess their teammates. Based on the results, each person gets a quirky-named role: Plant, Shaper, Implementer, Specialist, and so on.
The idea is to assess team composition and improve how the team works together. The improvement part usually did not happen, but that is another story.
On the self-assessment, I got the role “Specialist.” This role is about being an expert — someone who knows a specific technology deeply and becomes the go-to person in that area.
To my surprise, the role I got from the team was “Implementer.”
In a way, it is the opposite of Specialist. It describes someone who gets things done, pushes work forward, and does not obsess over every detail.
I stared at the result for a few minutes. How could that be?
But after discussing it with the team and reflecting on it, I realized they were right. Being a specialist was something I wanted, and it is how I saw myself: a person who knew the ins and outs of the tech, a hacker. In reality, I was a generalist with a strong drive to get to the goal.
That understanding changed what I optimized for and what I invested in. I stopped trying to keep up with every intricacy of programming languages and frameworks. I focused instead on delivering results. In other words, I started leaning into the thing I had already been doing well, but without understanding it.
Use Feedback To Close the Gap
In my experience, the managers who struggle the most are the ones who do not know themselves. Self-awareness is the foundation on which everything else is built.
When you close the gap between your self-image and how others experience you, you get a clearer picture of both your strengths and your weaknesses. And the simplest way to start is to ask people.
However, asking directly, “Tell me what I am not good at,” rarely produces anything useful. Be specific. For example:
When have I been most helpful to you?
What is one thing you wish I would stop doing?
What do you think I prioritize most?
Ask for a 360-degree review from your team, your peers, and your manager. Tell them it matters to you, and thank them in advance.
When you analyze the feedback, look for themes. If several people say the same thing, pay very close attention. Feedback from one person may still be worth considering, but it is often tied to a specific situation. Repeated patterns matter more.
Personality Assessment Tools
In addition to feedback, you can use personality assessment tools. For example, DiSC or Big Five.
Opinions on the validity of these tools are mixed, but I found them useful.
They gave me another point of reference. For example, they showed a mix of strong drive toward the goal and attention to detail. They also helped me to reassess my weaknesses — I often downplayed the emotional and people aspects of work.
When filling in the inventories, it is important to be honest. The more honest we are, the more useful the results.
Why Self-Awareness Is Difficult to Develop
Our self-image is shaped by previous experiences and the stories we tell ourselves. Those stories act like a lens through which we interpret events, conversations, and group dynamics. They distort reality.
It is also why self-awareness is difficult to develop. The contradiction between self-image and feedback is easy to disregard. To say that other people miss the point.
That happened to me with delegation. When I moved from individual contributor to leading the whole technical organization, I kept doing everything: managing teams, leading architecture, writing code. It worked fine — from my perspective.
My team leads saw it differently. The feedback was consistent: you do too much. I heard it several times in a row during performance discussions. Each time, I reframed it. Things were getting done. Doing too much felt like a strength, not a problem.
After the third time, I forced myself to delegate more, although I didn’t believe it was necessary. Things slipped. But then they got better. A lot better.
It took months to see that the feedback had been correct all along. I just couldn’t hear it because it contradicted how I saw myself.
The push to restore self-image is strong, but leaning into the uncomfortable is how we get better.
Putting It Into Practice
Once you identify the gap, double down on your strengths and find ways to compensate for your weaknesses.
One non-obvious way to compensate for weaknesses is delegation. You don’t need to do everything by yourself. Software engineering is a team sport.
Find someone on your team who is naturally good at the thing you are not, and share the responsibility with them. Besides compensating for your own weakness, it can be a real growth opportunity for the other person.
Sharing and delegating work is real leadership.
Start Here
Self-awareness is not a nice-to-have trait. It is the foundation for how you communicate, how you delegate, how you build trust, and how you grow.
If you want to become a better leader, lean into the uncomfortable. The signal is already there. It is up to you to really hear it.
You just spent a few minutes thinking about self-awareness. That puts you ahead of most leaders who never pause to consider it. If you want to keep that going, subscribe to High-Impact Engineering. After subscribing, you’ll immediately receive my free Process Experiment Template and a Coaching Guide for engineering leaders.
If someone on your team or in your network came to mind while reading this, share it with them.
I would suggest to anyone to get an executive coach.
The good ones act as an external mirror and force you to dig and do the work you suggest.
For me, it was tremendously valuable and a real awareness and growth accelerator.
The Belbin story really landed. In my experience, the most dangerous leaders aren't the ones who lack self-awareness. Instead, they're the ones who have just enough to feel confident they've figured themselves out.