Remove leadership blind spots: a weekly loop, a small test and a scoreboard

The most expensive moment in blind-spot work is the one that feels like success. The feedback has landed. The leader has seen the pattern, named it in a sentence and thanked everyone for their honesty. There is a sense of relief in the room. Then the quarter gets busy, and six weeks later the old move is back in the same meeting, wearing the same clothes.

Awareness without action is trivia. I say that to almost every senior leader I coach, usually in the session after the big insight. Seeing a blind spot is necessary, but it does not remove anything. The habit that built the blind spot was rehearsed for years. A single moment of clarity is no match for it.

Here is my claim. A blind spot comes off the road when the insight becomes a weekly loop: one small behaviour test written as an if–then rule, a short feedback question to the same few colleagues, and a scoreboard the team can see. Run that loop for at least twelve weeks, and you have a fair chance of changing what the room experiences. Skip it, and you will have a good story about your blind spot and the same blind spot.

This article goes deeper on the last move in the chapter on leadership blind spots. It assumes you have already defined your blind spot as one sentence, and ideally checked it against the common leadership blind spots I see most often.

Why insight alone does not remove anything

Two pieces of research explain why the session that produces the insight is the start of the work, not the end.

The first is about feedback itself. Kluger and DeNisi’s meta-analysis of 607 effect sizes found that feedback improved performance on average, but that over one-third of feedback interventions decreased performance. Their explanation matters for senior leaders: feedback became less effective the more it pulled attention away from the task and towards the self. A blind-spot conversation that ends in this is who you are tends to produce defensiveness or rumination. One that ends in this is the next meeting, and here is the move tends to produce change.

The second is about what happens afterwards. Marshall Goldsmith and Howard Morgan reviewed leadership development at eight large companies, drawing on more than 86,000 mini-survey responses for 11,480 managers. One variable stood out: whether leaders discussed their improvement priorities with colleagues and then regularly followed up. Those who did showed striking improvement, as judged by their co-workers. Those who did not showed improvement that barely exceeded random chance, whether or not they had a coach and whatever programme they attended.

Read those two findings together and the design almost writes itself. Keep the feedback on behaviour, not identity. Then go back to the same people, again and again.

The weekly loop

The loop has five steps. The first happens once. The other four happen every week.

1. Name. One blind spot, written as one sentence. You did this in the define stage.
2. Test. One small behaviour, written as an if–then rule, tried in live meetings.
3. Ask. One short question to the same three to five colleagues at the end of the week.
4. Score. One number that moves when the behaviour changes, written down weekly.
5. Adjust. Keep the test, tighten it, or swap it, then go round again.

It is deliberately small. A leader running a business does not have time for a development project. They do have time for one rule, one question and one number.

Write the test as an if–then rule

The most reliable way I know to turn an intention into a behaviour is to tie it to a specific trigger. Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran’s meta-analysis of implementation intentions, plans that spell out the when, where and how in advance, found across 94 independent tests a positive effect of medium-to-large size on goal attainment (d = .65). The format is simple: if situation Y arises, then I will do X.

For a blind spot, the situation is the condition you found when you defined it. The behaviour is the cue.

• If a number is proposed in a board meeting, then I ask finance what would make it wrong before I agree.
• If someone brings me a problem, then I ask what they would do before I say anything.
• If I feel the urge to close the discussion, then I ask whether anyone has not spoken yet.

Notice what these rules do not say. They do not say be a better listener or delegate more. They name a moment you will recognise and an action you can take in under a minute. That is the practical behaviour.

Ask the same few people every week

The feedback part of the loop is a single question, sent at the end of the week to the same small group. I use variations of: On a scale of one to five, how often did you see me do the new behaviour this week, and what is one thing I could do better next week?

Two rules make this work. Keep the group stable, so you can compare week to week. And say thank you, then nothing else. The moment you explain or defend, the next week’s answers get politer and less useful.

The cadence matters as much as the content. Gallup’s research on fast feedback found that 80% of employees who say they have received meaningful feedback in the past week are fully engaged. Leaders tend to apply that insight to their teams and forget it applies to them too. Weekly is close enough to the behaviour to remember it. Quarterly is a history lesson.

This is how I run the Trusted Feedback Loop with leaders: a small inner circle, a standing question, a behaviour to start or stop, and a date to look again.

Keep a scoreboard the team can see

The scoreboard is what turns a private resolution into a visible commitment. It needs one number per blind spot, close enough to the behaviour that it moves within a few weeks.

Share the number with the people in the loop, and ideally with the wider leadership team. Visible movement teaches the room that truth is rewarded. Silent improvement leaves you as the only person who knows you are working on it.

Plan for twelve weeks, and expect to slip

Leaders like to know how long this takes. The honest answer is that it varies widely. In Phillippa Lally and colleagues’ study of habit formation, the time it took participants to reach 95% of their maximum automaticity ranged from 18 to 254 days. That was for simple eating, drinking or exercise behaviours, carried out daily in the same context, such as after breakfast. A leadership behaviour in a pressured meeting is unlikely to be faster.

The same study offers a more encouraging finding: missing one opportunity to perform the behaviour did not materially affect the habit formation process. That matters, because senior leaders tend to treat one bad meeting as proof that the change has failed. It has not. Note it, run the rule in the next meeting, and keep counting.

So I plan for twelve weeks of the loop before we judge whether a test is working, and I expect the old pattern to reappear when the week is tight. Removal does not mean the tendency disappears. It means the new behaviour becomes the default, and the old one gets caught early when it returns.

Athletes understand this better than most executives. In cycling, nobody judges an interval block by how it felt on one wet training day. They look at the training log over weeks and adjust. That is the same discipline I describe in what elite sport teaches the boardroom, applied to behaviour instead of watts.

Arguments

The case for

The loop works because it addresses the two reasons blind-spot work usually fails. Kluger and DeNisi show that feedback can backfire when it drifts towards the self; the if–then test keeps attention on a specific moment and action. Goldsmith and Morgan show that improvement depends on follow-up; the weekly question builds follow-up into the diary. Gollwitzer and Sheeran’s work suggests that tying a behaviour to a trigger makes it far more likely to happen at all. And the scoreboard makes change visible to the people whose experience you are trying to change.

The case against

The strongest objection is that this turns leadership into a spreadsheet. Weekly scores and if–then rules can feel mechanical, even a little performative, and some colleagues will find a weekly survey from the chief executive awkward. There is a real risk of chasing the number rather than the change, for example avoiding escalations by making yourself unavailable rather than by building ownership.

A second objection is that some blind spots are not behavioural. If the pattern comes from exhaustion, a broken team structure or a board that rewards the wrong things, a personal loop will not fix it. A third is time. In a genuine crisis, a twelve-week behaviour programme is not the priority.

Where I stand

I take all three objections seriously, and none of them changes my view that removal needs a loop. The answer to the spreadsheet worry is to keep the loop tiny and to check the number against the weekly comments, which will tell you if you are gaming it. The answer to structural causes is to treat them as structural. If the pattern lives in how the team is built, the work belongs in the team. And in a crisis, stabilise first, then restart the loop the week things settle.

This is the core of step 5, Improvement, in my 7-step coaching process: observe, adjust, advance, in live situations. Step 6, Impact, adds the scoreboard and connects it to the measures the board cares about, such as decision speed. Step 7, Results, codifies what worked so that the next layer of leaders can use it. When the work is personal rather than organisational, I usually run it through personal development coaching.

Try this

A twelve-week plan for one blind spot.

1. Week 0: set up. Write your blind spot in one sentence. Write one if–then rule. Choose three to five colleagues and tell them what you are working on.
2. Week 0: pick the number. Choose one scoreboard measure from the table above, or one of your own, and record a baseline for the past fortnight if you can.
3. Weeks 1–12: run the loop. Use the rule in live meetings. On Friday, send the same question to the same people. Record their scores and the number.
4. Every fourth week: adjust. If nothing has moved, tighten the rule or the measure. If something has moved, tell the people in the loop.
5. Week 12: review. Ask your group whether the old move still shows up, and when. Decide whether to keep running the loop, lighten it, or start on the next blind spot.

Then reflect:

• What is the one meeting in my week where the old move is most likely to appear?
• Which three to five people would notice first if I changed?
• What number would convince me, rather than just reassure me?
• How will I respond the first time I slip?
• What would I need to hand back to the team for this to stick?

Where to go next

If you are not yet sure which blind spot to work on, go back to define leadership blind spots. If the loop needs better data on how you land, self and team awareness sets out how to take a regular, structured read. And if the change you are making touches the rules you lead by, leadership from the inside out shows how to write them down.

The loop is simple to describe and hard to keep running alone, mostly because nobody notices when you stop. If you want someone to hold the twelve weeks steady, book a 30-minute strategy call and bring the one sentence you wrote about your blind spot. We will build the first if–then rule together.