Find Your Blind Spot Before It Finds You

Invisible Lessons + The Updraft

Intro

The standard hierarchy of teams and corporate structures puts leaders in a spot beyond feedback and awareness.

For so long have we treated leaders as individuals beyond critique that we’ve built entire institutions around protecting their decisions, their character, their ego.

You’re not like that.

You are a leader who is open to growth and the uncomfortable truth that maybe you don’t have all the answers. Maybe you’re not perfect.

And in that imperfection we find beauty and invitations to greatness.

Tanu and I met on Substack and have become fast friends bonding over our shared love of leadership.

This is an article about how you can find your blind spots and how you can train to become better.

A blind spot cannot be seen directly from the inside. Leaders have to look for its effects, scan the horizon for patterns, and notice what their own perspective may be quietly filling in. Image generated with ChatGPT, based on my notes.

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Tanu - Invisible Lessons

Seven Ways to Catch What You Can’t See

Cover your left eye. Hold a pen at arm’s length, fix your right eye on something across the room, and drift the pen slowly toward your nose. At a certain point the tip disappears, not into a smudge, but into nothing. The wall simply closes over the place where it used to be.

That’s the spot where the optic nerve exits the retina, a patch with no light-sensing cells. By rights you should walk around with a hole in your vision. You don’t, because the brain studies the surrounding texture and paints the gap in to match, the same cream as the wall, the same grain of the floor. The missing information gets replaced with a confident guess so seamless you never notice the seam.

This is the uncomfortable truth about a blind spot, the literal one and the career-ending kind: it has never once felt like ignorance from the inside. It feels like a finished picture. You can’t stare it down, the eye is built to keep it from you. But you can learn the conditions under which yours tends to surface.

Here are the seven ways to identify your own leadership blind spots.

1. Follow the heat. The fastest way to identify is your own defensiveness. Notice the topic where your pulse jumps before the sentence is even finished, the rebuttal or reaction that comes up in your head while the person is still talking. We don’t get defensive about things that are false. We get defensive about things that are true and unwelcome. The flush of irritation is not noise to manage; it’s the signal of something deeper that needs to be surfaced.

2. Triangulate the repetition. One person calling you “intense” is their opinion. The same word surfacing from a peer in 2019, a direct report in 2022, and your spouse last Tuesday is data. Blind spots travel with you across teams and jobs precisely because the common factor is you. Listen for the criticism that keeps finding you in different rooms, in different decades, from people who’ve never met.

3. Audit the silence. What has your team stopped saying? Not what they say but what’s gone quiet. The pushback that used to come and doesn’t, the questions that dried up, the meeting where everyone nods a little too easily. Silence creeps in slowly and it can be hard to notice when you are chasing targets. The response to pressure situations might be well-intended and not malicious. But people learn every time you do things like show impatience, make decisions alone, loop in someone less, all in the interest of time. Pretty soon you’ve got a room that agrees with you, and it feels like alignment when it’s often an echo chamber you built without meaning to. The trouble with an echo chamber is that from the inside, it just sounds like being right.

4. Read your dismissals. Open the mental file where you’ve written someone off with “they just don’t get it.” Check who’s in it? The colleague you don’t trust, the team member whose concerns you’ve decided are really about something else, the peer you’ve quietly labeled as difficult. That file is less a record of people who are wrong and more a record of feedback you’ve found a reason not to hear. Reopen one case. Argue the other side as if you had to win it.

5. Interrogate your strengths, not your weaknesses. A blind spot almost never shows up as a flaw. It disguises itself as the trait you’re proudest of. Decisiveness reads as “doesn’t listen.” High standards that suck the life out of people meant to meet them. Take the quality you’d put at the top of your own strengths list and ask what it costs the people downstream of it. Every overused asset casts a shadow, and the shadow always falls on someone else.

6. Mind the gap between intent and impact. You know what you meant. Your team only ever experiences what you did. Pick one recent moment, maybe a terse reply or a decision made fast, and ask how it likely landed. Hard to strip off the generous intention only you can see but what you intend and how it is perceived is the distance where the blind spot could be festering.

7. Think of your last surprise. When did someone last tell you something about yourself that genuinely surprised you…not flattered you, surprised you? If you have to reach back years, that’s not evidence you’ve run out of blind spots. It’s evidence that you might not be as approachable as you think and people around you have stopped communicating with honesty.

The first step in finding a leadership blind spot is learning where to look: defensiveness, repeated feedback, silence, dismissals, overused strengths, intent-impact gaps, and the absence of surprise. Image generated with ChatGPT, based on my notes.

Worth Sitting With

You’ll notice none of these asks you to see the blind spot directly. They ask you to watch for its effects, the heat, the silence, the surprise that never comes. Raising consciousness was never about seeing everything at once. It’s about no longer trusting the parts of the picture that feel a little too smooth.

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Dan - The Updraft

A Bias for Action

Early in my career a mentor pushed me to approach problems with a bias for action. The phrase comes from Peters and Waterman’s In Search of Excellence, the first trait they found in companies that executed instead of studying themselves to death. Peters’ own gloss: don’t just stand there, do something.

There’s a line in science, usually credited to the chemist Frank Westheimer: a couple of months in the lab can save you a couple of hours in the library. It’s sarcasm. A dig at people who rush to experiment before they’ve done their reading. My problem was the exact inverse. I’d spend the hours in the library and never get to the lab. I’d perseverate, think and refine and refine, and not trust myself enough to put the idea into an actual experiment. And the reality is that if you never apply what you’re learning, you can burn a week reading when a thirty minute experiment would have told you everything you needed to know.

Your blind spots work the same way. Tanu’s list is your hour in the library. It’s necessary. Write down the feedback and the areas you think you could be better, then go run the experiments.

Here’s one of mine. I get frustrated in ineffective meetings. Every time, lol. My blind spot is that people read it on my face instantly, and the sarcasm is obvious the second I open my mouth. So I ran an experiment. Now I take physical notes on what’s happening and what I’m thinking. I put my brain to work on the arguments, the risks, the decisions, what’s actually at stake for me. It slows me down, drops me into active listening, and makes me think critically about the room and respect the people in it, instead of being an insufferable bitch about it.

That it’s a small experiment matters. Amy Edmondson studied failure for years and concluded that “fail fast, fail often” misses the point. A failure is only worth anything when it’s what she calls an intelligent failure: you’re in new territory, chasing a real goal, testing a genuine hypothesis, and you’ve kept the experiment as small as it can be while still teaching you something. That’s the bar. Not reckless failing. Small, deliberate bets on yourself.

Everyone’s blind spots and everyone’s experiments look different. They share one thing. If you don’t run the experiment, nothing changes. So devise a few ideas and test them. Fail as fast and as small as you can. Through intelligent failure you learn the thing the library was never going to teach you, and you iterate toward better fast.

Leadership blind spots do not change through reflection alone. Once you identify the pattern, you have to run small, deliberate experiments, test your assumptions, learn from the result, and iterate. Image generated with ChatGPT, based on my notes.

Swords Have Two Sides

Tanu’s fifth point told you to interrogate your strengths instead of your weaknesses. This is what to do next once you find one.

Your biggest professional strength is usually your biggest weakness too. Robert Kaplan and Robert Kaiser have a name for what happens when you forget that. They call it lopsided leadership, and after running a 360 assessment on thousands of managers they found we reliably overdo the behaviors tied to our strengths and underdo the opposing ones that would balance them. They even named the tension most of us live inside: forceful versus enabling. The more forceful a leader is, the less enabling they tend to be. One side of the sword, sharpened until the other side rusts.

So be careful. If you set out to cover your weakness and push too far, you dull your strength and lose your edge.

Find a mentor you trust. Someone who knows you and sees the best in you. Someone who will give you the hard truth and you think “yeah, they’re right,” not “well, fuck you too, Brenda.”

Tasha Eurich studied how people actually become more self-aware and found it almost always runs through one kind of relationship. She calls them loving critics: people who have your interests at heart and are still willing to tell you the truth. That’s who you’re looking for. Not a cheerleader, not a critic. Both at once.

Prioritize a mentor who is great at your weakness and understands your strength. That combination is what lets you sharpen both sides of the sword without grinding one of them down.

Here’s mine. I’m confrontational and direct. It serves me. I resolve problems, I say what I think, I move toward action. It also costs me. I struggle to move fast without making the people around me pay a relational price for my speed. So I look for mentors who can hold relationships together inside chaos and tension. I stay action oriented, I use my directness to get shit done, and I pick up tools for keeping the people around me intact while I do it.

Overcompensate and you dull the strength. You stop getting shit done. Under-compensate and you never cover the liability the strength carries.

The work is the balance, and you can’t see your own balance from the inside. That’s what the mentor is for.

The sword doesn’t get safer when you blunt it.

It just gets useless.

~ d

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The Authors

Tanu Tiwari is a leadership strategist, certified coach, and founder of The Conscious Leader Co., with more than 18 years corporate experience across Fortune 500 companies, global organizations, and high-growth startups. Her forthcoming book, Disengaged, makes the case that checked-out teams are an environment problem rather than a people problem, and she writes about the invisible leadership patterns that shape how people show up at work, with Invisible Lessons.

Dan Korus is the founder of Kestryl Edge, a leadership development practice that trains emotional intelligence for operations-heavy teams in high consequence environments. He hosts the Kestryl Edge podcast and writes The Updraft, a newsletter on evidence-grounded leadership without the corporate filler.

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References

• Edmondson, Amy C. Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well. New York: Atria Books, 2023. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Right-Kind-of-Wrong/Amy-C-Edmondson/9781982195069

• Eurich, Tasha. “What Self-Awareness Really Is (and How to Cultivate It).” Harvard Business Review, January 4, 2018. https://hbr.org/2018/01/what-self-awareness-really-is-and-how-to-cultivate-it

• Kaplan, Robert E., and Robert B. Kaiser. Fear Your Strengths: What You Are Best at Could Be Your Biggest Problem. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2013. https://kaiserleadership.com/big-ideas/article/fear-your-strengths

• Kaplan, Robert E., and Robert B. Kaiser. “Stop Overdoing Your Strengths.” Harvard Business Review 87, no. 2 (February 2009): 100–103. https://hbr.org/2009/02/stop-overdoing-your-strengths

• Peters, Thomas J., and Robert H. Waterman Jr. In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_Excellence

• Westheimer, Frank H. “A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple of hours in the library.” Widely attributed aphorism. “Frank Westheimer,” Wikiquote. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Frank_Westheimer