What can you do to become aware of your Leadership Blind Spots?

From my experience as an Executive Leadership Coach for 25 years supporting C-Suite Leaders in discovering their leadership impact, it starts by having them realize a simple and profound truth, “You can’t change what you can’t see!” Once a leader is willing to be open and willing to expand their awareness to noticing their Leadership Blind Spots that are impacting their Leadership Effectiveness, performance and results will not change. Once a leader takes responsibility for their Leadership Impact, they begin to notice the impact of their Leadership Presence – being Forceful vs Powerful.

The impact of a Powerful Leadership Presence has this impact on others, we open others up causing them to become:

• engaged in collaborative conversations with you.
• open and vulnerable with you.
• engaged with you through thoughtful questions.
• open to being challenged and to challenge you.
• open to receiving and in giving you quality feedback.
• open to sharing themselves authentically with you – like their key learnings from the mistakes they made that is allowing them to move a project or initiative forward.
• open to being held accountable & to holding you accountable to key promises.
• open to experimenting collaboratively with you about their ideas to generate action and results.

What is a Leadership Blind Spot?

Leadership Blind Spots are unrecognized weaknesses or threats that can impact a leader’s effectiveness.

Examples of Leadership Blind Spots are:

• Going it alone (being afraid to ask for support).
• Being unaware of your Leadership Impact on others when you close them down in a conversation.
• Being unaware of your Listening Intention before entering a conversation
  • I am unaware that I am always Listening to Fix others.
  • I am unaware that I am always Listening to Win others over when they express concerns to an issue and you say, “Don’t worry about that Susan, I know you will deliver a great presentation to the Board, like you always do.”
    Vs
  • I am listening to Connect to learn and understand what is important to other people before I share my thoughts in a conversation.

• Being unaware that they are avoiding having Courageous Conversations with team members who are not being accountable to their commitments.
• Being unaware that the only time others get feedback is when they are doing something wrong. They don’t acknowledge others for their contributions and the impact to the organization for their contributions. They also don’t make time to celebrate wins with the team.
• Being unaware when they have missed a deadline or performance target and how quickly they are willing to blame others or circumstances, give an excuse or justified why they did not deliver on their promise. They are unwilling to admit their mistake or being wrong.
• Not willing to be open and vulnerable with team members about the learning that I am experiencing as a result of the breakdowns I am having that are impacting my performance.
• Not willing to sharing their emotional state with team members – They are always Stoic at work leaving their team members to guess how to engage with their leader conversations.
• Not willing to be open to exploring others ideas or opinions on an issue because I know what to do and I am right about what we need to do causing them to shut others down.
• Unaware of the impact your position or role has when you speak first on an important issue with your team with strong conviction and then they are frustrated when others are giving them automatic responses.
• Being unaware that they spend the majority of their time managing operational issues and not making time for Strategic Thinking and Design to support the future of the business.
  
  

Four Key Ways to Become Aware of Your Leadership Blind Spots:

Being supported by 2 to 3 quality Accountability Partners.

An “Accountability Partner” is someone you trust to be open and vulnerable with, when you need support at dealing with your leadership challenges that are causing you to get stuck (no action is occurring, which is impacting your promises you have made to others). A true “Accountability Partner” is generated through a clear agreement which entails a clear request and a real promise.

• Your request: when you are feeling stuck you can call your Accountability Partner and get support to get back into action.
• Their promise: they will listen to you without getting drawn into the issue. They will listen with the intention to support understanding the context of the issue you are struggling with. Along with allowing you to vent your frustration for a few minutes without making you feel small, wrong or judged by your actions. Once they have a context of your issue their responsibility is to put you into action by asking you one question, “What is one action you can now take that will allow you to move forward?”
  • Another option for a quality Accountability Partner is to invest in working with a Leadership Coach.
  • Explore Potential Blind Spots: Every time you get stuck take a moment to write down in your daily journal your answer to the following question, “What was the resistance that got you stuck?” This is an area to explore potential Blind Spots that are impacting you being an Effective Leader.
    
    

Being Open To Receiving Constructive Feedback from Team Members

When a leader is willing and open to receiving constructive feedback from their peers or staff members, they can begin to see their Leadership Blind Spots.

• Feedback reveals your Way of Being
• Feedback always reveals Blind Spots.
• Feedback generates Awareness.
• Revealing Blind Spots generates possibilities.
• Giving and receiving feedback is a daily practice – an interdependence way of being
  • What practices are you using to give and receive feedback on a daily basis.
  • Feedback is always present in your space.

What are the ways that you can see and hear feedback coming to you?

• Can you let go of taking feedback personally?
• Feedback can be pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.
• How are you leading without quality feedback.
• Revealing Blind Spots generates possibilities.
• Are we aware of all the ways that the environment is giving us feedback.
  
  

Practicing Daily Reflection

Capture your learnings from your experiences through daily journaling. Here are a few core questions to start exploring with, to help you identify a potential Leadership Blind Spot.

• Three Accomplishments from today
• Write about experiences where you got emotionally triggered and the outcome it created with others.
• Share experiences of you noticing your Leadership Impact during your day:
  • When did my impact open people up?
  • When did my impact close people down?
• Over time you will learn to notice Patterns and Trends from your today performances as a leader and Blind Spots will be one of those Patterns and Trends that will surface.
  
  

Conducting a formal 360 Feedback Assessment on yourself by hiring a company to conduct the process.

My final thought: An approach I use in my one-on-one coaching sessions that is generating effective results for my clients to shifting a Leadership Blind Spot into a Leadership Competency is:

1. Mindset – embrace a Learner mindset by being open and curious to use the four tools to identify a leadership Blind Spot and then being open to generating a learning plan to transform your leadership Blind Spot into a leadership competency.
2. Commitment – to practicing the new leadership competency so that you can generate new results that will support you in being a more Effective Leader for others.
   
   

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Author’s Profile:

As an Executive Leadership Coach with 25 years supporting Executive Leaders and Executive Leadership Teams to think differently, to listen differently and lead differently to delivering results that matter.

References:

1. “Overcoming Leadership Blind Spots” by Jose Ruiz (Article May 8^th, 2020).
2. “The Top 10 Leadership Blind Spots, and 5 Ways to Turn Them Into Strengths” by Tammy Jersey (Article 16^th, 2021).
3. “Learning From Our Blind Spots” by Tony Zampella (Article April 12^th, 2016).
4. “Revealing leaders’ blind spots” by Joan Shafer, Adam Bryant & David Reimer (Article in Strategy + Business April 29^th, 2020).