The Johari Window Model - A Powerful Exercise For Those Who Lead Others

Discover the Johari window model to boost your interpersonal skills as a leader. It's an amazing way to understand people.

It reveals insights on how to exploit the power of negative feedback to boost your leadership effectiveness and skills.

In some cases, you need a coach to guide you and facilitate the process. But, if you embrace the ideas shared in this video, you can pretty much turn the switch on yourself.

The Johari window has for quadrants or panes...

1- There is what is known to self and known to you. Those are the things you know about yourself and others know about you.

For example, if you are a good time manager, you know it and your team members know it. That's public knowledge.

2- There is what is unknown to you but known to others. There are many behaviors or things you say that you are not aware of.

They can irritate others. Your team members get annoyed with a certain behavior. But, they would never tell you about it. They are afraid of retaliation. Perhaps they might get fired.

That's not good for you as a manager or an executive. Often times, if you can work on those shortcomings, magic happens. The key is to spend a lot of time in quadrant #2. Why?

Well, the reality is, the important skills you will ever need to succeed as a leader are your interpersonal skills. Your ability to relate to others. Your ability to inspire and influence others to increase productivity.

Get together with the human resources department and let them know you are very interested in getting feedback from your team members. They can do a 360-degree feedback for you.

3- There is what is known to self and unknown to others. This is the area I call the dark chamber. You have a lot of secrets in that area. There are things you wish nobody would ever find out.

4- There is what is unknown to you and unknown to others. Most of the behaviors - good or bad - are triggered by the drives in quadrant four. For example: if you have never played tennis, there's no way for you to know you could be one of the world's best tennis players. Others would also never know.

There are key decisions you make in life. Those decisions are powerful drivers for the actions you take. As an example, let's say you were bullied by other kids in elementary school. You might make a decision to always play defensive in life. That causes you to shut off when it comes to feedback. You think others are out to get you. Do you see how that can be a problem for you?