Common leadership blind spots: selective listening, silo loyalty and hero syndrome

When a chief executive tells me their blind spot must be unusual, I am quietly relieved. It almost never is. The patterns that cost senior leaders the most are familiar, which is good news, because familiar patterns have familiar signs and familiar fixes. You do not need a novel diagnosis. You need to recognise the shape early.

Three shapes come up more than any others in the seats I work with. Selective listening, where you hear the parts of a conversation that confirm what you already think. Silo loyalty, where you defend your own function so well that the company pays at the boundary. Hero syndrome, where you rescue the work so often that the organisation never builds the muscle to do it without you.

Here is my claim. Each of these three has a tell-tale sign you can spot within a week, and a counter-routine you can run in an ordinary working week. Name the pattern, watch for the sign, run the routine, and you catch the blind spot before it punches a hole in your quarter.

This article goes deeper on the middle move in the chapter on leadership blind spots. If you have not yet written your own blind spot as one sentence, start with define leadership blind spots, where I treat most blind spots as strengths past their edge. All three patterns below fit that description.

Why the familiar patterns are the dangerous ones

Familiar does not mean harmless. The Center for Creative Leadership has studied derailment since 1983, and its summary is blunt: derailment is often highly predictable by co-workers, and sometimes a surprise to the executives themselves, who are usually unaware of, or unwilling to address, the problems that caused it. Among the five causes CCL lists are difficulty building and leading a team and problems with interpersonal relationships. Those are the neighbourhoods where all three of my patterns live.

Zenger and Folkman’s 360-degree work points the same way. Comparing more than 450 Fortune 500 executives, 31 of whom were fired, with the least effective 10 per cent of more than 11,000 leaders, they identified ten common shortcomings and found that every bad leader had at least one, and most had several. Two of their ten are close cousins of what follows: resisting new ideas from subordinates and peers, and failing to develop others.

The pattern is not that these leaders were careless. It is that their blind spot had been rewarded for a long time. Focus, loyalty and ownership are all promotable. The bill arrives later, and it arrives at someone else’s desk first.

Selective listening

The inner story: I am focused. I know what matters and I do not waste the room’s time.

Selective listening is not ignoring people. It is hearing them through a filter. You catch the data that supports the plan and lose the caveat at the end of the sentence. You listen for the error in someone’s logic so you can correct it. You are already composing your reply while they finish.

Zenger and Folkman studied 3,492 managers in a development programme, comparing the top 5 per cent of listeners, as rated by colleagues, with everyone else. The best listeners asked questions that promoted discovery. The poor ones were seen as competitive, listening only to identify errors in reasoning or logic and using their silence to prepare their next response. That description fits many very bright chief executives I know. It is intelligence used as a filter.

The tell-tale sign: people repeat themselves to you. They restate the risk twice, or send a follow-up email after the meeting to say what they had already said in it. The second, quieter sign is that bad news starts arriving through a third party.

The counter-routine: before you respond to anything that matters, summarise the other person’s point, including the part you disagree with, and ask whether you have it right. Then ask one question before you give one view. It feels slow. It is far faster than the reforecast.

Silo loyalty

The inner story: I look after my people. My function delivers, whatever the rest of the business does.

Silo loyalty is a virtue at one level and a tax at the next. A strong functional leader protects headcount, budget and reputation. Repeated across an executive team, that protection turns every cross-functional decision into a negotiation between sovereign states.

Behnam Tabrizi’s study of 95 teams in 25 large corporations found that nearly 75% of cross-functional teams were dysfunctional, failing on at least three of five criteria, including budget, schedule and alignment with corporate goals. He describes a $100 million development project spanning three divisions that most of the team, and some executives, knew was a dead end two years before the company finally stopped it. Nobody was willing to say so, because saying so meant giving up their own people and their own budget.

The tell-tale sign: cross-functional work stalls at your boundary, and your team’s updates explain why the delay belongs to someone else. In executive meetings you speak for your function before you speak for the company.

The counter-routine: in every executive meeting, take one agenda item and argue it from the company’s point of view, out loud, before you say what it means for your function. Once a quarter, offer something your team owns, such as a person, a budget line or a deadline, to a peer’s priority. The test of an executive team is whether its members can lose a little locally to win more overall.

Hero syndrome

The inner story: I will not let it fail. When it matters, I step in.

Hero syndrome is the most admired blind spot I know. The leader picks up what others drop, rescues the customer, rewrites the board paper at midnight, and is thanked for it. The organisation learns that the escalation route is faster than the ownership route. Then the leader is tired, and nobody behind them has done the work.

Rob Cross, Reb Rebele and Adam Grant found that the time managers and employees spend on collaborative work had ballooned by 50% or more over two decades, and that in most cases 20% to 35% of value-added collaborations come from only 3% to 5% of employees. Senior heroes sit at the top of that skew. Every request they accept is time they are not spending on the work only they can do.

Cycling has a plain version of this. In a team time trial, the rider who stays on the front too long because they feel strong will blow up, and the team finishes slower than if everyone had taken a measured turn. It is one reason I write about elite sport and the boardroom as a practical comparison. Even the most dominant riders had to learn that their own strength does not build a system. Eddy Merckx’s second career is a good example: dominance is not a factory, and he needed teachers.

The tell-tale sign: nothing important moves when you are away for a week. Your direct reports bring you problems rather than recommendations. Your diary has no white space after six o’clock.

The counter-routine: when a problem lands on your desk, ask the person who brought it what they would do, and let them do it unless the risk is genuinely unacceptable. Name an owner who is not you, with a date, in the minutes. Track how many escalations reach you each week and aim to see the number fall.

The three patterns side by side

The last column matters most. A counter-routine without a count tends to fade within a fortnight. With a count, you have the start of the scoreboard I describe in the next part.

Arguments

The case for

Naming common patterns saves time and lowers the temperature. A leader who hears this looks like hero syndrome can recognise a shape many capable people share, rather than feeling singled out. The research supports the approach: CCL’s derailment work and Zenger and Folkman’s 360 data both show that the patterns which end senior careers repeat across people and companies, and that colleagues see them long before the leader does. If the shapes repeat, a short list with clear signs and routines is a reasonable place to start.

The case against

The strongest objection is that labels flatten people. Call a leader a hero and you may miss that they are carrying a genuinely under-resourced function, or covering for a weak hire someone else made. Call a leader a selective listener and you may miss that they are hearing the same unhelpful point for the fifth time. Patterns can become a lazy shorthand that replaces observation.

There is also a fair case for each behaviour at the right moment. In a genuine crisis, the hero who steps in may save the company. A new chief executive inheriting a failing function should be loyal to it while they fix it. Some meetings do need a leader who filters hard and moves on.

Where I stand

I use the three patterns as hypotheses to test, never as verdicts. The label earns its place only when the tell-tale sign shows up in your own week and at least two colleagues recognise it. When the context truly calls for heroics or a hard filter, I would rather you chose the behaviour openly, for a set period, than ran it by default.

In my 7-step coaching process, this sits across step 2, Awareness, where the pattern is surfaced, and step 3, Challenges, where we rank it by business impact and decide whether it is one of the vital few to work on in the next 90 days. Silo loyalty in particular is rarely one person’s problem, which is why I often take it into executive team coaching rather than one-to-one work.

Try this

A one-week audit. It needs a notebook and two honest colleagues.

1. Read the three tell-tale signs and mark the one you think is least like you. Be suspicious of that choice.
2. Ask two colleagues which of the three signs they see most often in you, and in which meeting. Do not argue with the answer.
3. Pick one pattern based on their answer, not your preference.
4. Count for a week. Use the measure in the last column of the table. Write the number down each day.
5. Run the counter-routine from the second week and keep counting.
6. Compare the two weeks with the same two colleagues. Ask whether they noticed the change before you tell them about it.

Then reflect:

• Which of the three would my most junior direct report say I have?
• When did I last give up something my function owned for a company priority?
• What would stop if I disappeared for ten working days?
• Whose point have I heard more than once this month without acting on it?
• Which of these behaviours am I proudest of, and what is it costing someone else?

Where to go next

Spotting a pattern is not the same as removing it. In remove leadership blind spots I set out the weekly loop, behaviour tests and scoreboard that turn a counter-routine into a new default. If you suspect the issue starts further in, with how you see yourself, inside-out leadership is the foundation. And if you want a regular, structured read on how you and your team land, so the next pattern shows up sooner, see self and team awareness.

If one of these patterns is costing you now, I can help you work on it in live meetings rather than in theory. That is the heart of my business coaching for founders and chief executives. Book a 30-minute strategy call and bring the tell-tale sign you recognised first.