SHAPING AWARENESS

Shaping awareness skills are about our ability to notice and understand the significance of what is happening around us at work, and see the impacts of what we do in our job. As we become more experienced it can include sharing our awareness-shaping skills with other staff members to raise their levels awareness.

Spotlight identifies three forms of shaping awareness:

A1. Sensing contexts or situations – capacity to notice and understand the significance of work contexts or changed workplace situations

A2. Monitoring and guiding reactions – capacity to monitor and guide your own reactions and those of others and to manage situations where awareness levels vary

A3. Judging impacts – capacity to evaluate the impacts of your own or the work group’s actions in the workplace and on clients or community

Points to note when thinking about shaping awareness:

• Awareness includes the capacity to see things from another person’s perspective
• Guiding another person’s awareness can be informal: for example modelling good practice and sharing experiences.
• Job contexts may include past events that still affect the organisation, as well as present contexts. They can include external contexts (for example the current government’s policies that affect demand or funding for the service you provide) or contexts inside the work unit, such as your manager’s preferred ways of working.
• Job-holders need to be aware of their own perspectives and what impact they are having on other people.