UTS21440 Chap.1 Self Awareness and the Manager's Skill Set
Self Awareness and the Manager's Skill Set
Week 1 and Week 2 of University of Technology Sydney 21440 Management Skills open the subject by arguing that self awareness is a management capability with an evidence base, not a personal quality. The research the subject starts from sorts effective managerial skill into three clusters, personal, interpersonal and group, and places developing self awareness first in the first cluster.
The chapter works through the three areas the subject actually examines, values, character strengths and emotional intelligence, opens the first of them across its cultural, organisational and personal layers, and then teaches the four turn reflective structure, reporting, relating, reasoning and reconstructing, that every graded piece of writing in the subject is built on.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Three clusters of managerial skill, and why developing self awareness sits first
- 02
The stated case: you cannot improve a capability whose current level you cannot see
- 03
Three critical areas of self awareness: values, character strengths, emotional intelligence
- 04
Three layers of values: cultural, organisational and personal
- 05
Cultural values as a dimension framework, and the warning against stereotyping
- 06
Organisational value fit: productive and satisfying work against frustration and underperformance
- 07
The four turn reflective model, with its four tenses
- 08
Where the four turns map onto the Individual Report prompts
A finished four turn reflection on a values clash in a group task
- +1Report, in the past tense. In our first group meeting we agreed that whoever finished a section would post it to the shared folder. By the second week two of us had posted and two had not, and I found myself drafting a message about it late at night and then deleting it.
- +1Relate, across past and present. I have done exactly this in two previous group subjects: I notice the imbalance early, say nothing, absorb the work, and resent it later. One condition was different this time, which is that the subject had already made me write down individual accountability as a personal value.
- +1Reason, in the present tense, with the framework. The discomfort is not about a missing document. It is an organisational values mismatch in miniature: I treated the shared folder as a commitment and at least one other person treated it as a target. The framework predicts that this kind of inconsistency produces frustration and underperformance rather than an argument, which is what happened, because the value was never stated aloud and so could not be negotiated.
- +1Reconstruct, in the future tense. In the group training session I will put the expectation into the team charter in one sentence at the first meeting, and raise a missed deadline on the day it is missed rather than the week after. The aim is to make the value visible while it is still a working agreement rather than a grievance.
Key terms
- Self awareness
- The capacity to see your own current level of capability, values and effect on other people accurately enough to develop them. The subject treats it as the first personal managerial skill on the grounds that improvement is impossible without it, and that it also requires understanding and valuing the differences between yourself and others.
- Personal skills cluster
- The first of three clusters in the managerial skill research the subject opens with, containing developing self awareness, managing stress and wellbeing, and solving problems creatively. The other two clusters cover interpersonal and group skills.
- Cultural values
- Assumptions about what is right and normal that are absorbed from a cultural context before anything is chosen. The subject introduces them through a dimension framework and works the individualism and collectivism contrast in class.
- Organisational values
- What an employer states it stands for and what it actually rewards. A good fit with personal values is stated to produce productive and satisfying work, and an inconsistency to produce frustration, conflict and underperformance.
- Personal values
- The standards a person will not trade away. The subject notes that these are often invisible to the holder until something challenges them, which is why the subject ties them to how moral reasoning develops and to how ethical decisions get made.
- Reflective model
- The four turn structure the subject teaches for all reflective writing: report the experience in the past tense, relate it to your own knowledge and experience, reason about it in the present tense with reference to academic literature, and reconstruct your future practice.
- Reporting turn
- The first turn of the reflective model. It recounts what happened and in what context, and states where you stood before analysing it, using a specific incident rather than a summary.
- Reasoning turn
- The third turn of the reflective model, and the one that carries the marks. It identifies the factors that matter and why, relates them back to academic literature, and uses evidence rather than assertion.
- Reconstructing turn
- The final turn of the reflective model. It states the change in understanding or behaviour and the actions you will take in future professional practice, together with the reason for them.
Self Awareness and the Manager's Skill Set FAQ
Why does a management subject spend its first weeks on me rather than on managing people?
Because the subject argues that the two are sequential rather than separate. The skill research it opens with puts developing self awareness first in the personal cluster, and the stated reason is that you cannot raise a capability whose current level you cannot see.
The second reason is relational: self awareness is defined here as needing you to understand, and to value, the ways in which other people differ from you, which is what makes the interpersonal and group skills possible.
What is the difference between a reflection and a description?
A description reports what happened and stops. A reflection carries the experience through all four turns, and the two that matter most are relating it to knowledge you already hold and reasoning about why it happened with reference to literature. The practical test is simple: if a paragraph contains no theory term and no citation, it is doing no assessable work no matter how well it is written.
How do I write about values without sounding vague?
Name the layer. Saying that you felt uncomfortable is a report; saying that the activity treated a group mark as more important than individual contribution, and that you hold individual accountability as a value, names the personal layer and gives a marker something to assess. The three layers are cultural, organisational and personal, and most confusion comes from arguing about one while meaning another.
Is a cultural dimension framework a way of predicting what someone thinks?
No, and the lecture warns about this directly. A dimension model describes tendencies across a culture, and any individual can sit anywhere within it. Used well, it stops you from assuming your own default is universal. Used badly, it becomes a more sophisticated way of deciding what someone believes before they have spoken.
What should I do in the first week to make later assessments easier?
Start an evidence file and add one dated line per class: what the activity was, what you noticed, and which idea it touched. The individual report needs your own strengths data and the journal needs eleven weeks of recorded experience, and neither can be reconstructed at the end of session from memory.
Assessment move
Treat this chapter as the grammar for everything that follows rather than as content to memorise. Learn the three clusters well enough to say why self awareness sits first, learn the three layers of values well enough to name which one a situation touches, and then practise the four turn structure until it is automatic.
The highest return activity is writing one four turn paragraph a week from your own experience, because the structure is what the reflection criterion is scored against and it cannot be acquired quickly at the end. When you draft, read your own paragraph for tense alone: entirely past tense means you never reached the reasoning turn, and no future tense means you never reached the reconstructing turn.
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