--- title: Leadership blind spots - Linus Murphy description: What a leadership blind spot is, the patterns that show up most often, and how to take them off the road. url: https://linusmurphy.com/guide/leadership-blind-spots/ language: en-GB type: article author: Linus Murphy author_url: https://linusmurphy.com/about/ --- [The Leadership Guide · Chapter 2](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/) # Leadership blind spots: define them, spot them, remove them By [Linus Murphy](https://linusmurphy.com/about/) • 16 min read Focus areas 3, 4, 5: Define leadership blind spots; Common leadership blind spots; Remove leadership blind spots. ![Car wing mirror on an empty wet road at dusk, skyline out of focus](https://linusmurphy.com/images/guide/ch02-hero.webp) The Johari window. Blind spots live in the pane you cannot see and others will not name until you make it safe. Blind spots leak profit and trust. You will not find yours alone. That sentence is the whole brief, and most senior people still try to negotiate it. They will buy strategy work, talent work, even presence work, and leave the one thing the organisation can already see sitting in the middle of the table unnamed. I do not find that vain, exactly. I find it human. Power edits the feedback you receive. Success gives you cover. The story that got you here feels like evidence that the story is complete. This chapter is three moves that belong together. **Define leadership blind spots** so you are not using a foggy word for every discomfort. **Name the common ones** so you can recognise a pattern without waiting to be special. **Remove them** so the work does not die as insight. Insight without a trip-wire is a dinner conversation. It sits next to [leadership from the inside out](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/leadership-from-the-inside-out/) because awareness is the willingness to look, and a blind spot is a specific pane you still cannot see. It sits next to [why successful leaders stall](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/why-successful-leaders-stall/) because the stall often starts as a strength you will not update. I have a shorter field note on [why defining blind spots is mission-critical](https://linusmurphy.com/articles/why-defining-blind-spots-is-mission-critical/). What follows is the longer treatment I use when the live problem is the thing everyone else can already describe. Tasha Eurich’s finding still does the unkind useful job: [95 per cent of people think they are self-aware, and only 10–15 per cent are](https://hbr.org/2018/10/working-with-people-who-arent-self-aware). If you hold a heavy seat, assume you are in the larger number until the room has proved otherwise. That is not self-attack. It is how you stay employable as an instrument. ## Define leadership blind spots A leadership blind spot is a repeated pattern of behaviour whose impact is visible to other people and invisible, or unacceptable, to you. Three parts, all required. It is **repeated**. A bad week is a miss. A miss that keeps arriving in different clothes is a pattern. It is **behavioural**. Not a label, not a type, not “I am just intense”. Something a colleague could timestamp: the interruption, the joke that lands on the person, the optimism that skips the downside, the loyalty that will not name a miss. It is **costing the system**. If nobody pays, it is a quirk. When decisions reopen, talent leaves, or the real meeting happens in the corridor, the organisation is invoicing you. I am precise about this because the phrase gets used as a soft synonym for “thing I do not like about myself”. That is therapy language wandering into an operating job. A known weakness you can already describe — and manage — is not a blind spot. A temptation you can see and still feed is not a blind spot either; that is a choice. The pane that matters is the one you cannot see, or will not let anyone light. ![Frosted glass conference wall](https://linusmurphy.com/images/guide/ch02-body-1.webp) *Frosted glass. The room is there. You only get shape and light until someone opens the door.* ### What it is not It is not a personality profile. Profiles can be useful cameras. They are not the thing. I have watched people hide inside a type — “that is my style” — and call the hiding authenticity. It is not a secret crime. Most blind spots started as strengths. Pace, loyalty, optimism, intellectual horsepower, the ability to hold a room. The organisation promoted them. Then the context changed and the strength did not get a new job description. It is not always yours alone. A table that punishes dissent will manufacture late truth. That is a [safety problem at the executive table](https://linusmurphy.com/articles/psychological-safety-at-the-executive-table/), and it still belongs to the chief executive to redesign. Defining the blind spot includes asking whether the pattern lives in you, in the meeting design, or in both. If you only look inward you become precious. If you only look at “culture” you become a commentator. Gallup’s engagement work belongs here as context, not as a personality score. [Seventy per cent of the variance in a team’s engagement is related to management](https://www.gallup.com/workplace/266822/engaged-employees-differently.aspx). [Managers account for at least 70 per cent of the variance in engagement scores](https://www.gallup.com/workplace/236570/employees-lot-managers.aspx), and [one in two adults in a study of 7,272 people had left a job to get away from their manager](https://www.gallup.com/workplace/236570/employees-lot-managers.aspx). A blind spot in the chief executive role is not a private inconvenience. It is a retention event waiting for a date. Where this comes from Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham, in 1955, offered a simple window that still earns its keep in a boardroom. Four panes. Open: known to you and to others. Hidden: known to you, not to others. Blind: known to others, not to you. Unknown: not yet known to anyone. The leadership job is not to perform vulnerability until the hidden pane is empty. The job is to shrink the blind pane until the organisation is no longer running on information you refuse. You shrink it by asking, and by making the asking cheap. You shrink the hidden pane only as far as the work requires — disclosure in service of the decision, not as a personality exhibition. I keep the window because it is plain. Blind is not mysterious. It is the pane other people are already looking through. ### How you know you are in the blind pane The signals are ordinary. You are surprised by feedback that does not surprise anyone else. The same collision arrives with a new cast. People agree in the room and stall afterwards. Humour lands on the person who spoke, not on the issue. You hear about the miss on Friday. You leave a meeting thinking it was clean, and two versions of it are already running. Take an example. Imagine a founder-CEO who is genuinely gifted at seeing the next product. In their own telling, they “keep the organisation ambitious”. Direct reports experience the same gift as last quarter’s plan being reopened whenever a new idea arrives. Nobody needs a psychologist. They need a definition: this is not vision. This is a blind spot about closure. Until it is named that way, every new process will fail, because the process is trying to contain a person who has not agreed to be contained. The definition I want in the first session is one sentence a non-executive could repeat. “I close discussion before the downside is in the minutes.” “I protect people I like past the point the system can afford.” “I treat disagreement as disloyalty.” If you need a paragraph, you are still touring. If you need a diagnostic brand name, you are still hiding. | Test | If yes, you likely have a definition | If no, you still have fog | | --- | --- | --- | | Can you say it as a behaviour, with a timestamp? | “I interrupted the downside at 14 minutes.” | “I am too passionate.” | | Would three colleagues use similar words? | The sentence matches without a briefing | Only your coach can see it | | Can you point to a cost — time, talent, trust, cash? | A reopened decision, an exit, a late miss | “It might be limiting my potential” | | Does success still cover it? | Yes, which is why it survived | You only notice it when you are already in trouble | | Is it unknown to you, or known and still chosen? | Unknown: blind pane. Known and chosen: a different conversation | You are using “blind spot” as cover for a preference | Defining is not the same as confessing. Confession without a trip-wire is how clever people stay unchanged. The next two sections are the rest of the job: recognise the usual shapes, then take them off the road. ## Common leadership blind spots I do not believe your pattern is unique. That is good news. It means we do not have to wait for a novel diagnosis. The shapes I see most often in heavy seats are ordinary, expensive, and usually born as strengths. The Center for Creative Leadership has studied derailment since the 1980s. Their public account of [how careers go off track](https://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-articles/5-ways-avoid-derailing-career/) is blunt. The five problems that most often stall people who were once seen as high potential: difficulty adapting to change; difficulty building and leading a team; failure to deliver results; a missing strategic orientation; and problems with interpersonal relationships. On that last one they are explicit. [An inability to form strong interpersonal relationships](https://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-articles/5-ways-avoid-derailing-career/) is one of the most common characteristics of people who derail. Intelligence will not save you from that pane. Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, looking at 360 data on more than 450 Fortune 500 executives — 31 of whom were fired — and at some 11,000 leaders in the bottom 10 per cent, described [ten fatal flaws that derail leaders](https://hbr.org/2009/06/ten-fatal-flaws-that-derail-leaders). I do not recite their list as a parlour game. I use the design of the study. The people around you can already see the pattern. The people who derail are often the last to accept it. Interpersonal failure, the refusal to develop others, the gap between talk and walk — these are not exotic. They are common, and they are fatal when the cover of performance thins. What follows is my working list for the coaching room, not a claim that research has ranked these in this order. Treat them as examples you can test against your last quarter. ### Patterns I ask people to test **Optimism that skips the downside.** The inner story is pace and belief. The system receives a plan with no pre-mortem and a chair who looks bored when risk is named. Useful in a turnaround’s first fortnight. Expensive as a permanent climate. **Pace that closes the room.** You cut through noise. They experience a decision that arrived before they had finished the sentence. Related to [presence as a decision discipline](https://linusmurphy.com/articles/executive-presence-is-a-decision-discipline/): if you fill silence, people stop using it. **Loyalty that will not name a miss.** You are proud of standing by your people. The organisation learns that performance is negotiable if you are liked. Kindness without a standard is how cultures rot in place. **Intellectual dominance.** You are often right, and you arrive pre-loaded. The table stops bringing you half-formed truth because they cannot survive the first five minutes. You then conclude, sincerely, that the table is thin. **Harmony over truth.** Nice meetings. Late misses. The real conversation is in the corridor. This is the cousin of a safety failure: people can read what happened to the last person who spoke. **Heroics as a system.** You pick up what others drop. You are admired for it. The organisation never grows the muscle you keep substituting. Then you are tired, and there is nobody behind you. **Distance dressed as composure.** You think you are holding the room. They think you are unreachable. Isolation is part of the job; [unexamined isolation](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/leadership-from-the-inside-out/) becomes a pane. People stop bringing you load because they cannot tell whether you can hold it. **The unupdated strength.** The move that won the last seat. Directness, control, personal grip on the product, the founder’s instinct. A frozen story about “who I am” belongs here even when nobody says the word authentic: you are loyal to a tactic and calling it identity. None of these make you a villain. They make you expensive if they stay in the blind pane. ![Wooden jigsaw with a missing piece](https://linusmurphy.com/images/guide/ch02-body-2.webp) *A wooden jigsaw with a piece missing. The picture is almost whole, which is how the gap survives.* | Pattern (example) | Inner story | What the system pays | Early signal | Trip-wire to test | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Optimism skips the downside | “I keep us moving.” | Rework, surprise misses | Risk is a mood, not a page | Pre-mortem on every major capital request | | Pace closes the room | “I hate waste.” | Silence, then corridor dissent | People ask you to repeat the ask | Two questions before any approval | | Loyalty protects a miss | “I look after my own.” | Drift, quiet exits of your best | The same name is never on the problem list | A public standard that applies to people you like | | Intellectual dominance | “I raise the quality.” | Thin input, late truth | The room waits for your thesis | You speak last on one live decision a week | | Harmony over truth | “We are a tight team.” | Slow bad news | Humour lands on the dissenter | Open with “What could derail us?” | | Heroics as system | “I will not let it fail.” | Bottleneck, your exhaustion | Nothing moves when you are away | Name an owner who is not you, with a date | | Distance as composure | “I stay above the noise.” | Isolation, unread load | You hear the miss on Friday | One standing 15 minutes that is not operational | | Unupdated strength | “This is just who I am.” | A seat you have outgrown | New context, old tactic | Practise the foreign behaviour for 30 days | If several rows sting, do not collect them all. Pick the one that cost you in the last 90 days. Common does not mean you have all of them. It means you should not need a poet to describe yours. And if the live problem is not a pane but a stall after a win — comfort, the fatal flaw, the cultural pitfall — that is [why successful leaders stall](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/why-successful-leaders-stall/). Blind spots are the unseen pattern. The stall is what happens when success gives the pattern cover. ## Remove leadership blind spots Removal is a mechanical word on purpose. I do not want a journey. I want the pattern off the road. You will not delete a human tendency. You will make it expensive for the old move to run, and cheap for the new one. The sequence I use is short. Name it in one sentence. Attach it to a live decision, not to a workshop. Install a trip-wire other people can see. Inspect it after the next real meeting. If it did not fire, you do not have a system. You have an intention. ### Make it safe to say, then make it expensive not to Candour without design is a request for bravery. Most tables will not volunteer that, and they are not cowards for it. They have watched what happened to the last person. If you want the blind pane lit, you have to lower the cost of lighting it. Open a meeting with the question, not the update. “What am I missing?” is useful if you can survive the first answer without a ten-minute defence. “What could derail us?” is often cleaner, because it is about the work. Reward the first person who uses it. Reward means you change the decision, or you thank them in the minutes, or you give them the next mandate — not a speech about culture six weeks later. If the table still cannot put a downside down, stop buying assessments. You have a [safety problem](https://linusmurphy.com/articles/psychological-safety-at-the-executive-table/), and the camera will only photograph the performance. Coach the team, not only the chief executive, when the politics are the constraint. A 1:1 can prepare you. It cannot watch the room. ### Trip-wires, not insights Pair the named pattern with a cue and a public guard-rail. If optimism skips the downside, the pre-mortem is mandatory on the next capital request, even when you feel sure. Especially then. If pace closes the room, you do not speak a decision until two other people have asked a question. You will hate the slowness. That hatred is data. If loyalty protects a miss, the person you like is on the same dashboard as everyone else, and you are not allowed to narrate their miss in private while the public story stays warm. If you speak first and hardest, you speak last on one agenda item a week. Not as a trick. As training. Write the trip-wire where other people can point at it. A private resolution is how the 95 per cent stays intact. I want a colleague to be able to say, in the meeting, “this is the moment your rule said you would wait”, without it being an act of war. ### Inspect, then retire After the meeting, do the small loop from the previous chapter. What do you think they heard. Ask one person. The gap is the remaining pane. Attach a number so this does not become a personality hobby. Decision cycle time. How often a call is reopened. Who speaks after you. Whether bad news still arrives on Friday. When the number moves, say so. Visible movement is how a table learns that truth is rewarded. Silent improvement is how you stay the only person who knows you are working. Thirty days is enough to know whether the trip-wire is real. It is not enough to declare yourself cured. Blind spots return when the week gets tight, which is why removal is a practice, not an event. The Trusted Feedback Loop I use with people is exactly this: a small inner circle, a standing question, a behaviour to start or stop, a date to look again. Athletes would not wait a year to find out whether the interval session worked. Neither should you. > You do not remove a blind spot by understanding it. You remove it by making the old move expensive in a live meeting. If the pattern is load rather than perception — exhaustion, cynicism, a standard you can no longer meet — do not dress burnout as a pane. Get it seen as stamina and cost. The stall chapter and the price-tag work are the honest cousins. Coaching is not care, and a 360 will not sleep for you. The argument **Common objection.** “If I invite this much candour I will lose authority. The organisation needs a chair who looks certain. Naming a blind spot in front of the team will slow us down and make me look unfinished.” **Counter-argument.** You are already slow. Late truth is the most expensive kind. The room has the information; you are paying interest on not using it. Authority that cannot survive a named pattern is costume. Boards and teams lose confidence in surprises, not in a leader who can say “this is the move I make under load, and here is the rule that stops it”. CCL’s derailment work is not a poem about humility. Interpersonal failure and the refusal to adapt are how once-promising careers go off the road. **When the opposite is true.** A genuine emergency week — cash, safety, a public miss — is not the moment for a 360 or a group excavation. Stabilise, then come back. And some “blind spots” are not panes at all. They are choices, or they are load. If you can already see the behaviour and you still run it, do not hide inside the metaphor. If you are spent, do not ask the table to light a pattern you cannot physically hold. Removal requires a usable nervous system. Takeaways - A blind spot is a repeated behaviour others can see and you cannot — not a type, not a mood, not a known weakness you are already managing. - Most of them started as strengths. Success gives them cover. The room is not waiting for a novel diagnosis. - Derailment research keeps returning to the same neighbourhood: relationships, adaptation, the gap between talk and walk. - Removal is a trip-wire on a live decision, inspected in the same week. Insight without a cue is a dinner conversation. - If the table cannot say it, you have a safety problem, not an assessment gap. If you already see it and still run it, you have a choice. ## Questions to sit with Write these so a trusted colleague could recognise the meeting you mean. 1. What have three different people tried to tell me in the last year, in different words, about the same ten minutes? 2. Which of my strengths is the organisation now paying for as a tax — and who pays first? 3. When did bad news last arrive late, and what about my behaviour made the end of the week safer than the start? 4. What trip-wire would have changed the last decision I regret, and who else would have been allowed to pull it? 5. If this is not a pane I cannot see, but a move I will not stop, what am I calling it to stay comfortable? If you want the foundation under this chapter, read [leadership from the inside out](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/leadership-from-the-inside-out/). If you want the stall that follows a win, read [why successful leaders stall](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/why-successful-leaders-stall/). The shorter operational note remains [why defining blind spots is mission-critical](https://linusmurphy.com/articles/why-defining-blind-spots-is-mission-critical/). I will not pretend a pattern disappears because we named it once. I will work with you until the old move is expensive in the room that counts. [Book a confidential 30-minute conversation](https://linusmurphy.com/contact/) and bring the last meeting where everyone else saw it first. We will start with one sentence, then a trip-wire, not a cloud of adjectives. The series 1. Part 3 of 30[Define leadership blind spots](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/leadership-blind-spots/define-leadership-blind-spots/) 2. Part 4 of 30[Common leadership blind spots](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/leadership-blind-spots/common-leadership-blind-spots/) 3. Part 5 of 30[Remove leadership blind spots](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/leadership-blind-spots/remove-leadership-blind-spots/) One in-depth article per focus area. [See all 30 parts](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/#series). ## Questions I am asked **What is a leadership blind spot in plain English?** It is a pattern other people can already see, and you cannot — or will not. It is not a secret vice and it is not a personality type. It is the repeated behaviour that taxes decisions, trust or talent while your own story still calls it a strength. **Can a 360 replace this work?** A 360 is a camera, not a repair. Used well, it collapses debate about what the room already knows. Used as theatre, it produces a cloud of adjectives and a quiet agreement to change nothing. I would rather you named one pattern in a sentence and installed a trip-wire this week than collected another report. **Won’t naming this weaken me in front of the board?** Boards lose confidence in surprises, not in self-knowledge. What weakens you is the miss everyone else saw coming. Naming a blind spot with a trip-wire looks like control; pretending you do not have one looks like weather. I have seen directors punished for arriving late, not for seeing clearly. **How is a blind spot different from a flaw I already know?** If you can already describe it, and the table can too, it may be a known weakness you are managing — or a temptation you are feeding. A blind spot is specifically the pane you cannot see. The work starts by making it visible, then it becomes ordinary discipline. Do not use “blind spot” as a softer word for a behaviour you are choosing. **What if the real problem is the team, not me?** Sometimes it is. A table that punishes dissent will manufacture late truth no matter how self-aware the chief executive is, and that safety problem is still yours to redesign. Start by asking whether people can put a downside down without paying with status. If they cannot, do not buy another assessment. **When should I start removing one?** As soon as you can say it in one sentence and point to a meeting where it cost you. Do not wait for a programme window. Install a visible trip-wire on the next live decision. If the organisation is in a genuine emergency, stabilise first — then come back to the pattern before the next quiet week buries it. ## Sources 1. [Working with People Who Aren't Self-Aware](https://hbr.org/2018/10/working-with-people-who-arent-self-aware) (2018) 2. [What Engaged Employees Do Differently](https://www.gallup.com/workplace/266822/engaged-employees-differently.aspx) (2019) 3. [Employees Want a Lot More From Their Managers](https://www.gallup.com/workplace/236570/employees-lot-managers.aspx) (2015) 4. [Ten Fatal Flaws That Derail Leaders](https://hbr.org/2009/06/ten-fatal-flaws-that-derail-leaders) (2009) 5. [How to Keep Your Career On Track and Prevent Derailment](https://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-articles/5-ways-avoid-derailing-career/) (2020) ![Portrait of Linus Murphy](https://linusmurphy.com/images/portraits/linus-headshot.jpg) **[Linus Murphy](https://linusmurphy.com/about/)** Elite executive coach [Book a 30-minute strategy call](https://linusmurphy.com/contact/) In this guide: [Chapter 1: Leadership from the inside out](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/leadership-from-the-inside-out/); [Chapter 4: Why successful leaders stall](https://linusmurphy.com/guide/why-successful-leaders-stall/). ## Bring the live problem into the room [Book a 30-minute strategy call](https://linusmurphy.com/contact/)