Is your team Johari aware?

Posted by: Dan Prior | 06 June 2007

Recently, as part of a leadership course, 3 of my colleagues, who are also good friends, had the opportunity to fill a flip chart page with a list of my strengths and weaknesses whilst I was out of the room. Then after 15 minutes I was brought back into the room with each of them given the opportunity to explain one of the strengths and one of the weaknesses on the list.

This was new ground for us, and as expected started with suggestions of strengths to avoid confrontation. But we did get on to weaknesses which seemed as uncomfortable for them to say as it was for me to hear.

An important character strength in life is the ability to take criticism and learn from it, without taking offence. It is also an important leadership strength to be able to tell someone about an area where they are weak with the main motivation being for their benefit and their personal growth. Both giving and receiving criticism well, are much easier said than done. I don't think many people enjoy taking criticism, but a mature individual looks to the long term benefit rather than the short term discomfort. I was fortunate, in that the criticism I received was definitely from a position of my colleagues wanting to help me grow rather than knock me down.

In the leadership course all this stuff was under the heading of the Johari Window. The Johari Window is a concept which was created by Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham (get it?), and it is all about interpersonal relationships. See the diagram below.

Put simply there are four boxes. Top left is the box of things that are known to you and known to others - obvious stuff. Bottom left is for things that are known to you but not to others; they call this 'facade' and indicates things that could be shared. Top right is for things that are known to others but not known by you - your blind spots. Your spouse or partner can probably real off a whole list of these, but in work often people never share these things, unless you are on a leadership course with a big flip chart! Lastly the bottom right is for things that you are not aware of about yourself and the people around you are not aware of. Often this could be that people can notice a behaviour that is unusual (top right) but don't know what causes it (bottom right).

What I found most interesting through this process was that we found out so much more about each other; what makes us tick, what causes us to get stressed and what motivates us. This has had a number of benefits including making us able to support each other more. It has also quite clearly improved our team performance. So is your team Johari aware?

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