Using Metacognition:
The Foundation for Great Leadership Behavior
By Rick Gardner
Rene Descartes famously uttered the words “Cogito ergo sum”…”translated to English as “I think, therefore I am” or, in French…“je pense, donc je suis”.
Awareness that we can and do think is a beautiful part of the human experience.
As leaders, important beyond our awareness that we do indeed think, is reflecting on “how” we think…the power of Metacognition.
What is Metacognition? Quite simply, it is the ability to think about how we think about things.
This metacognitive ability separates us from virtually all other known life forms.*
In fact, we can even think about how we think about things…think about it!
As an Executive Coach, helping leaders practice internal self-examination with deeper self-reflection and metacognition is imperative and creates an essential foundation for consistently great leadership behavior.
The absence of such internal examination limits one’s ability to make the most effective behavioral choices, produces sub-optimal leadership behaviors and inhibits sustained positive organizational results.
To be clear, many of us are merely going through life every day with specific thinking and behavioral patterns that have worked for us at some level and enabled us to achieve the success we enjoy to date and/or placed us in circumstances which we currently face. We are simply using well-worn neural pathways in our brain without a great deal of conscious thought about these thinking and behavioral patterns.
So then, how do we break out of these patterns and reach new heights of personal and professional success?
Metacognition enables us to do so…along with understanding the context or circumstances in which our behavior is experienced.
Context and Metacognition are the two primary keys to greater success…
Context Matters
First, we must recognize the context in which we find ourselves. Context is the organizational environment and corporate culture or the setting and backdrop that surrounds us and determines in large measure how our behavior will be experienced and judged.
Often leaders bring only their historical thinking and behavioral patterns into new roles and organizations that are different than previous situations. I’ve often said to leaders that I coach:
“The same behavior that gets you promoted in one organization gets you fired in another!”
Why? Because context changes how a leader’s behavior is perceived and experienced. While the behavior is the same, the impact can be dramatically different.
Therefore, we must increase our awareness of the context in which we find ourselves and use our power of metacognition.
The good news: Metacognition can be developed!
How to Develop your Metacognition Skills
To become skilled at anything, we need to engage in regular practices that will help us develop the necessary thinking and behavior to achieve the level of skill we desire.
For developing your metacognitive abilities, here are some activities to begin adopting:
- Think of a specific business issue, opportunity or challenging situation. Next, begin asking yourself some questions. Here are some examples:
- What is the current environment I find myself in?
- How is this similar and/or different than my previous environment?
- What behaviors are recognized and rewarded?
- How am I currently thinking about this?
- How could I frame this differently?
- What judgements am I making about this situation?
- What would be different if I didn’t make these judgements?
- What assumption(s) do I have about this?
- What if the opposite assumption(s) were true?
- What do I need to think, say, or do to get the outcome I want?Have an open and curious mindset
- Have an open mind and curious mindset
- Engage in creative activities
- Do both short and long-term planning exercises
- Pretend you are an objective third person noticing your ways of thinking
- Meditate
- Be kind to yourself…and notice your thinking patterns regularly
I hope you find this information helpful in stimulating your own metacognitive powers…
In closing, I would love to hear what you are thinking about this subject and also “how” you are thinking about it!
* There is specific evidence from research conducted in 2013 by scientists at Georgia State University and the University of Buffalo and published in the Psychological Science Journal that chimpanzees have a similar ability.