Your Team Can Already See Your Blind Spot. Can You?

The engagement survey results arrive. The manager scrolls through the numbers. Nothing alarming. Communication looks fine. The team seems fine.

One floor down, people are telling a different story. They just aren’t telling it to the manager.

Every leader has blind spots. That part is normal. The dangerous ones are the blind spots we are sure we don’t have. In this article, we look at why leadership blind spots grow as you move up, what research says about power and confidence, and three steps any leader can use to see what their team already sees.

How big can the gap get?

In one engagement survey we ran, staff and managers answered the same questions. One statement asked whether employee suggestions tend to get ignored.

Same company. Same questions. Very different pictures.

Was anyone lying? Probably not. From the top, it simply looked fine. The managers were not hiding anything. They were seeing what their seat let them see.

That is what makes a blind spot hard to catch. It does not feel like missing information. It feels like knowing.

Can this happen to smart, successful companies?

It can, and it has.

Between 2005 and 2010, Nokia, then the world’s biggest phone maker, lost its lead in the smartphone race. Researchers Timo Vuori and Quy Huy interviewed dozens of Nokia managers and engineers to understand what happened inside (Vuori & Huy, 2016).

Part of what they found was a problem of information travelling up. Many people closer to the technology knew it was falling behind. But a climate of fear made it risky to deliver bad news, so the messages that reached the top were more optimistic than the reality. Top leaders kept making decisions based on that picture.

Smart people. Real signals on the ground. And a top that heard good news.

Nokia’s story has many causes, and no single one explains it. But this part is worth sitting with. The truth existed inside the company. It just did not reach the people making the biggest decisions.

Why do leaders miss what everyone else can see?

Back in 1955, two psychologists, Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham, drew a simple model of how we see ourselves and how others see us. They called it the Johari Window (Luft & Ingham, 1955). It has four panes:

• Open: known to you, known to others.
• Blind: known to others, not to you.
• Hidden: known to you, kept from others.
• Unknown: known to no one, yet.

The Blind window is the one in the title. Your team sees it every day: the meeting habit that shuts people down, the decision that keeps getting reopened, the idea that never gets a real hearing.

And the Blind window mostly shrinks one way. Someone has to tell you, and you have to actually take it in.

Here is the catch. The higher you sit, the harder both of those become.

Does more power make it worse?

Researchers have tested a version of that. Kelly See, Elizabeth Morrison and colleagues ran four studies in which people made estimates and could use advice from others (See et al., 2011).

The pattern was clear. The more powerful people felt, the more confident they became in their own judgment, and the less advice they took. The result was that their final answers were less accurate.

This does not mean leaders are arrogant. It means that power quietly changes how much we listen, often without us noticing. Add the fact that people below us are careful about what they say upwards, and the gap grows from both sides.

More sure. Less right.

So should leaders just try to feel less sure? Not quite.

Having a blind spot is not the problem. Everyone has one. The problem is asking only one person about it, or no one at all.

How do you shrink your leadership blind spots?

At Incendio, we put this into three steps. We call it Shrink the Blind Window.

1. Ask wide

Do not only ask the people closest to you. They often see the same things you see, or have learned what you like to hear.

A light 360 is enough. Three questions, six people: two peers, two from your team, and two from one level further down.

• What should I keep doing?
• What should I stop doing?
• What do you see that I might not?

Make it anonymous and in writing, and read the answers grouped together so no single reply can be traced. When people can be identified, the scores stay polite and the honest views go quiet.

This is not about going around your managers. It is about making sure no single person has to carry the whole truth to you.

But asking is the easy part. The hard part comes when they answer.

2. Don’t defend

The first honest answer you get is a test. Not for them, but for you.

If you explain it away, justify it, or try to work out who wrote it, everyone learns what happens to the truth around you. Next time, the answers will be safer and less useful.

Listen to the end. Say “tell me more” before “but actually.”

And then comes the step most leaders skip.

3. Show what changed

Feedback that disappears teaches people to stop giving it.

In a five-year study of more than 250 managers, Alan Walker and James Smither found that managers who met with their team to talk through their upward feedback improved more over time than those who did not (Walker & Smither, 1999).

People keep telling you the truth when they see it used.

So close the loop. Tell people what you heard, what you will change, what you won’t change, and why.

What can you try on Monday?

You do not need a big program to start. Here are four small steps.

None of this needs a consultant or a budget. It needs a few hours and the willingness to hear the answer.

Who can already see it?

You will not find your blind spot by being more sure. Only by asking wider.

The people who can show it to you are already around you. They see it in meetings, in decisions and in the ideas that never come back.

So let’s stop asking “Do I have a blind spot?” and start asking “Who can already see it?”

Want to Think This Through for Your Team? Let’s Talk →

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References

• Luft, J., & Ingham, H. (1955). The Johari window, a graphic model of interpersonal awareness. In Proceedings of the Western Training Laboratory in Group Development. University of California, Los Angeles.
• See, K. E., Morrison, E. W., Rothman, N. B., & Soll, J. B. (2011). The detrimental effects of power on confidence, advice taking, and accuracy. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 116(2), 272–285.
• Vuori, T. O., & Huy, Q. N. (2016). Distributed attention and shared emotions in the innovation process: How Nokia lost the smartphone battle. Administrative Science Quarterly, 61(1), 9–51.
• Walker, A. G., & Smither, J. W. (1999). A five-year study of upward feedback: What managers do with their results matters. Personnel Psychology, 52(2), 393–423.