The self-other gap
The difference between how you judge your own abilities and how others view them.
Most people are reasonably confident at describing their own strengths. Research on feedback has been testing that confidence since the 1980s, and the findings are of interest to anyone eager to better understand their capabilities and how to most effectively develop them.
Two large reviews of the research, one in 1988 and one in 1997, compared how people rate their own capabilities with how the people who work beside them rate the same ones. What people think they do and what people observe are not the same thing. For example, in the 1988 study, a colleague and a manager rating the same person agree with each other almost twice as strongly as either of them agrees with the subject person (Harris & Schaubroeck 1988; Conway & Huffcutt 1997).
More recently, a 2018 meta-analysis of leadership research, covering studies published up to 2016, found the same moderate agreement between how people rate themselves and how those around them rate them; it held whether the other person was a manager, a peer, or someone who reported to them (Lee & Carpenter 2018).
Put three marks on the same scale: one from your manager, one from a colleague, one from you. The two that land nearest each other will tend to be theirs. Yours is the one sitting apart.
It's an uncomfortable finding. The divergence is unlikely to be the raters being unfair or inconsistent, because they are not diverging from each other. Something about the inside view is different.
Direction matters too. One study examining the gap for managers, found those who rated themselves higher than others rated them were judged less effective (Atwater & Yammarino 1992). Conversely, in another, those who under-rated themselves emerged as leaders more often than those who judged themselves accurately (Kass et al. 2024). On this evidence, over-confidence costs, modesty goes far.
Understanding your capabilities from others' perspectives isn't reachable by thinking harder. The better instrument for it is another person.
Every Edaith Pathway now includes the option to make the comparison. You nominate four to six people who have seen you work, each answers the same questions about you in about five minutes, and once at least three have replied their combined view sits beside yours, competency by competency. Individual answers are never shown, and written comments come back as themes, so the people you ask can be straightforward with you. Their information is deleted after the insights are compiled.
Every rater is centred on their own scale first, so a generous colleague and a cautious one produce the same picture of you.
References
Harris, M. M., & Schaubroeck, J. (1988). A meta-analysis of self-supervisor, self-peer, and peer-supervisor ratings. Personnel Psychology, 41(1), 43–62.
Conway, J. M., & Huffcutt, A. I. (1997). Psychometric properties of multisource performance ratings. Human Performance, 10(4), 331–360.
Atwater, L. E., & Yammarino, F. J. (1992). Does self-other agreement on leadership perceptions moderate the validity of leadership and performance predictions? Personnel Psychology, 45(1), 141–164.
Lee, A., & Carpenter, N. C. (2018). Seeing eye to eye: A meta-analysis of self-other agreement of leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 29(2), 253–275.
Kass, D., Kim, S., Rotenberry, P., & Bommer, W. (2024). Self–other rating accuracy and leadership emergence. Journal of Leadership Studies, 17(4), 5–26.