This Harvard Business Review collection opens by establishing self-awareness — the accurate perception of one's own strengths, weaknesses, emotional patterns, and impact on others — as the foundational skill underlying all other emotional intelligence competencies.

Why the collection positions self-awareness as foundational:

• Without accurate self-perception, leaders cannot reliably identify which of their behaviors need adjustment, making other emotional intelligence skills (empathy, self-regulation, relationship management) considerably harder to develop effectively
• Self-awareness provides the necessary baseline understanding from which genuine, targeted improvement becomes possible, rather than leaders attempting to develop skills without clarity about their actual current starting point
• The curated essays collectively argue that leadership development programs frequently underinvest in this foundational skill, jumping instead to more visible competencies without first ensuring accurate self-perception

This framing sets up the collection's central practical concern: not simply defining self-awareness abstractly, but providing concrete, research-backed methods for actually building it, given how difficult accurate self-perception proves in practice.