Leadership Self Awareness: How to Use MBTI, DISC, and 360 Degree Feedback to Lead More Effectively

This post gives you three structured tools to close that gap: the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, the DISC model, and 360 degree feedback. Together they give you a diagnostic picture of how you think, how you behave, and how you are experienced by the people around you.

The video above covers the core ideas from Day 3 of the leadership series. What follows expands on each framework in detail and gives you a working approach you can apply straight away.

Why Self Awareness Matters for Finance Leaders

Finance and treasury professionals are trained to diagnose problems in numbers. A variance in the LCR, an unexpected movement in FTP curve assumptions, a gap in the ILAAP narrative: you find it, you understand it, you fix it. The same diagnostic discipline almost never gets applied to leadership behaviour. That is a problem.

The blind spots that derail finance leaders are rarely technical. They are behavioural. The head of treasury who shuts down challenge in a stress scenario review because she reads pushback as noise rather than signal. The FP&A manager who processes every decision slowly and carefully but whose team interpret that as avoidance. The risk analyst promoted into a team lead role who communicates in data and is baffled when people stop bringing him problems.

These patterns are predictable. They show up in high stakes moments: a regulatory change programme, a board presentation, a difficult performance conversation. And they are largely invisible to the person exhibiting them.

Before we look at the frameworks, it helps to understand the core problem they are solving. You intend to be direct because directness is efficient. Your team experience you as dismissive. You intend to give people autonomy because you believe in trusting professionals. Your team experience you as absent. You intend to be thorough because the numbers have to be right. Your team experience you as a bottleneck.

Intent is not impact. The gap between them is the most productive place to focus your development energy. The three frameworks below each illuminate that gap from a different angle.

Self awareness work is the diagnostic that tells you where your natural instincts serve you and where they work against you. It is not a personality quiz. It is structured evidence gathering about how you think, behave, and are experienced by the people around you.

The Myers Briggs Type Indicator: Mapping Your Preferences

The Myers Briggs Type Indicator is often dismissed as something for personality quizzes rather than serious professional development. That reputation is not entirely fair, but it does require qualification. Its test retest reliability is debated in the academic literature, so treat it as a prompt for reflection rather than a fixed label. Used with that caveat in mind, the four dimensions give you a useful map of your natural preferences: how you process information, how you make decisions, and how you tend to show up in interactions. It does not reliably predict how you will behave under pressure. That is what DISC is better suited to.

The Four Dimensions in Plain Terms

Extraversion versus Introversion. This is not about confidence or how sociable you are. It is about where you get your energy and how you process. An extravert thinks out loud and draws energy from interaction. An introvert processes internally and finds sustained social demand draining. In a finance context, this shows up in how you run meetings. An extraverted leader tends to talk through problems in real time and may inadvertently dominate the room. An introverted leader may process well but appear disengaged or inaccessible unless they work deliberately at visibility.

Sensing versus Intuition. Sensing types focus on what is concrete, present, and measurable. Intuitive types look for patterns, possibilities, and what is not yet visible. Treasury work rewards sensing. Strategic leadership often demands intuition. If you are a strong sensing type leading a team through a systems migration or a regulatory change programme, you may be excellent on the detail but resistant to the ambiguity that comes with programme level decisions. That resistance will slow things down.

Thinking versus Feeling. This dimension describes how you make decisions: via logic and objective criteria, or via values and the impact on people. Thinking types in finance leadership often mistake their preference for objectivity as a virtue. It can be. It can also mean your team feel like they are inputs to a model rather than people being led. Feeling types may be excellent at building team trust but find it harder to deliver difficult feedback cleanly.

Judging versus Perceiving. Judging types like closure. They plan, decide, and move on. Perceiving types stay open, adapt, and resist locking things down. A strong judging preference in a volatile environment can mean you close decisions too early. A strong perceiving preference can mean your team never quite know where you stand.

None of these is good or bad. Every one of them creates a strength and a corresponding risk.

The DISC Model: How You Behave When It Gets Difficult

Where the Myers Briggs Type Indicator describes your preferences, DISC describes how you behave, particularly under pressure. For leaders, that distinction matters because your behaviour in a calm one to one and your behaviour at the end of a quarter when a regulatory submission is at risk are not the same thing.

The Four DISC Profiles

Dominance. High D individuals move fast, decide fast, and focus on results. In a finance leadership context, this looks like drive and decisiveness. Under pressure it can look like steamrolling, intolerance for process, and a tendency to take control rather than lead. If your team stops telling you bad news, a high D profile is often the reason.

Influence. High I individuals are energetic, persuasive, and relationship focused. They bring enthusiasm and they communicate well. Under pressure they can avoid difficult conversations, overcommit, and lose focus on the detail. In treasury or risk, where the detail is often the point, an unchecked high I profile can create credibility problems.

Steadiness. High S individuals are consistent, patient, and loyal. They build stable team environments and they are trusted. Under pressure they resist change, avoid conflict, and may absorb stress silently until it becomes a problem. A regulatory change programme led by a high S profile without active self management tends to stall at the implementation stage.

Conscientiousness. High C individuals are precise, analytical, and systematic. This is extremely common in finance. The risk is analysis paralysis, perfectionism that slows delivery, and a communication style that is technically correct but interpersonally flat. If your team feedback is that you are hard to read or that you set impossibly high standards, a high C profile is the likely explanation.

Most people have a primary and secondary profile. What matters is understanding how your profile combination changes under pressure, because that is when your less helpful behaviours tend to amplify.

360 Degree Feedback: The View the Room Has of You

The Myers Briggs Type Indicator and DISC are self assessments. They tell you how you see yourself. A 360 degree feedback process tells you how others experience you. For most finance leaders, those two pictures do not match, and the gap between them is where the real development work sits.

A well designed 360 collects structured, anonymous input from your manager, your peers, and your direct reports. It asks specific behavioural questions rather than general ones. Not "is this person a good communicator" but "does this person create space for challenge in meetings" or "does this person follow through on commitments made in one to ones."

Anonymous input is often more accurate than self assessment for a straightforward reason. People will tell a process things they will not tell you directly. That is not disloyalty. It is a rational response to hierarchy and risk.

The most useful 360 results are not the ones that confirm what you already knew. They are the ones that show a pattern you did not see. Three separate people noting that you appear distracted in conversations is more useful than one person saying you are a great strategic thinker.

Building a Development Plan That Is Actually Specific

Vague intentions do not change behaviour. "I want to communicate better" is not a plan. "I will ask one open question before offering my view in every team meeting for the next four weeks" is a plan.

A useful personal development plan built from these frameworks has three components.

A small number of specific behaviours to change. Not a list of twenty things. Two or three at most. Choose the ones with the highest impact given your role and context.

A time bound commitment. "By the end of this quarter" or "in every fortnightly one to one for the next two months." Without a time boundary, development intentions drift.

A feedback loop. Tell someone what you are working on and ask them to tell you whether they notice a difference. This could be a line manager, a coach, or a trusted peer. The feedback loop is not optional. Without it, you have no way to know whether anything has changed.

Applying This in a Finance and Treasury Context

These frameworks are particularly useful in three specific scenarios that finance leaders encounter regularly.

Working across functions. Treasury leaders often need to influence colleagues in legal, technology, or the front office who do not share their analytical frame. Understanding your own DISC profile and theirs helps you adapt your communication style deliberately rather than defaulting to data and hoping for the best.

Managing upward. If your own leader has a high D or high I profile and you have a high C profile, your natural style (detailed, methodical, cautious about committing before analysis is complete) may read to them as hesitance or lack of confidence. Knowing this lets you adapt the packaging of your communication without compromising the rigour of the content.

Leading through change. A regulatory change programme, a system implementation, or a structural reorganisation puts every behavioural tendency under stress. The leader who has done the diagnostic work knows in advance where they are likely to overcorrect. The one who has not finds out the hard way, usually at the moment it is most costly.

Self awareness does not make leadership easier. Start with one tool, gather the data, and treat the results as diagnostic evidence rather than verdict.