Leadership Blind Spots: What You Can’t See Is Running Your Team

Reading time: 7 minutes

Everyone on your team can see it, except you.

That thing that happens with your attitude when you’re under pressure.
The way you shut down certain conversations.
The behavior that everyone has noticed, talked about, and quietly worked around.

Everyone knows it.
You don’t.
Because it’s tucked right into your leadership blind spot.

The uncomfortable truth about leadership blind spots is that, by definition, you can’t see them on your own. If you could see them, they wouldn’t be called blind spots – they’d just be called… spots. They’d be called “all the things you know you’re doing to annoy people but you choose to ignore.”

That would be a different problem entirely and would probably be a conversation best had with a stiff drink in hand.

So let’s stick with the blind spots, and what you’re supposed to do with all those things you can’t see.

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Why Leadership Blind Spots Are More Expensive Than You Think

When you are in more junior level jobs, your blind spots have limited reach. Sure they may impact your work, your immediate relationships, and maybe even a small team. But they’re usually not big enough to cause meaningful rumbling.

But as you rise to more senior levels, your blind spots become part of the organizational architecture.
That’s bad.

Here’s what I mean…

  • The type of leader who doesn’t like ambiguity, will build an organization with so many processes, it will destroy creativity and agility.
  • The leader who avoids conflict will create a culture that breeds an us-vs-them toxicity (check out the most dangerous word in leadership.)
  • The kind of leader who needs to have all the right answers will have a team that just waits to be told what to do.

None of those leaders chose those outcomes. They didn’t decide to slow down productivity, build resentment, or create a culture of silence. It happened as a byproduct of their leadership blind spots.

That’s what makes leadership blind spots so costly. They’re not single events – they’re recurring patterns that shape everything. They influce the decisions you make, the behaviors you reward and the environment your team operates in every single day.

Worst of all, their effects compound quietly, oftentimes for years, before anyone calls them out.

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The Most Common Leadership Blind Spots

Leadership blind spots aren’t random. After working with hundreds of leaders across industries as a leadership coach, I’ve noticed certain patterns that show up over and over. Here are the ones I see the most.

The Impact Gap. You think you come across one way but your team experiences you in a completely way. You both experience the world differently. You think you’re being direct – they experience you as harsh. You think you’re being collaborative – they experience you as indecisive. You think you’re being supportive – they experience you as micromanaging. The Impact Gap is the distance between your intention and your effect. Most leaders are shocked by how wide it actually is.

Conflict avoidance that pretends to be diplomacy. This one is sneaky because it looks like a virtue. After all, you’re thoughtful, you consider all perspectives and you don’t rush to judgment. But what you’re actually doing is avoiding the uncomfortable conversation that everyone knows needs to happen. You think you’re hiding it but your team has noticed – they’re just not telling you. You’ve made it implicitly clear that conflict isn’t welcome and they aren’t going to create conflict by bringing up your need to avoid conflict..

The genius trap. You got to where you are partly because of how you think. Your judgment is good and so is your pattern recognition. Because of that, you’ve built a team that relies on your judgment and your pattern recognition – and slowly, without meaning to, you’ve pushed out everyone else’s ideas. The leadership blind spot isn’t that you’re smart. It’s that you don’t realize how thoroughly you’ve made that everyone else’s problem to deal with.

Optimism as avoidance. You’re a builder with a growth mindset. You’d rather not dwell on problems as much as focus on solutions. That’s a huge strength of yours. It’s also, in certain cases, a leadership blind spot. When your team brings you problems early and you just jump in with a fix instead of helping them take ownership, they’ll stop bringing you problems early. Instead, you’ll find out about the problems when they’re bigger. You can thank your optimism for hiding the truth.

Pretend confidence. Leaders are supposed to be confident, so you project confidence. You do it even when you’re not confident because, well, that’s what leaders do, right? Wrong. Eventually, your team will stop giving you ideas because you always seem to have better solution. They stop telling you concerns because you always seem sure that your perspective is more important than theirs. One day you’re realize you’ve lost access to the information you actually need to lead well and you’ll blame your team for that. It’s not their fault.

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How Leadership Blind Spots Stay Hidden

Here’s the thing that makes leadership blind spots so persistent: the higher you go, the less likely anyone is to talk to you about yours.

Your direct reports manage upward. They give you the information they think you want, filtered through their understanding of what’s safe to say. Your peers are busy with their own issues and agendas. And your leader or your board wants confidence from you, not self-examination. Meanwhile, your spouse is tired of hearing about work and kinda wants you to shut up about it for a night or two.

The feedback loop breaks exactly when you need it the most.

The behaviors that create leadership blind spots usually look like strengths from the outside. Decisiveness looks like leadership until it becomes the reason your team stops thinking. High standards look like excellence until they become the reason your team is afraid to bring you imperfect work. And vision looks like inspiration until it becomes the reason no one feels ownership over anything.

Your blind spots hide inside your strengths. That’s why they’re so hard to see – and why the people around you are often reluctant to point them out. Telling a decisive leader that their decisiveness is a problem feels like an attack on something the leader values pretty highly about themselves.

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The Signals That Something Is There

You can’t see your leadership blind spots directly. But you can learn to see their shadows – the patterns and outcomes that they create – even if you can’t trace them back to their source. Here are some signals you should look out for.

You keep having the same conversation. If you’ve addressed the same issue multiple times – with the same person or different people – and it keeps coming back, something in the system is causing that. Usually that something is you.

Your team doesn’t disagree with you. Not because they always agree. Because disagreeing doesn’t feel safe, or useful, or worth the cost for them. A team that never pushes back isn’t a team that has psychological safety. It’s a team that’s learned to be quiet.

The results don’t match the effort. Your team is working hard. Smart people are putting in real effort. But the outcomes keep falling short in ways you can’t fully explain. It’s worth looking more closely at that because your leadership blind spots are usually the cause for why effort doesn’t match outcome.

You feel isolated. Not in the dramatic sense – but there’s a quality to your interactions where you’re not quite getting the full picture and you know it. People are telling you things, but not everything. And it’s not just because of your imposter syndrome. Their limited communication is usually a signal that your leadership blind spots have created a culture where full honesty feels too risky.

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What To Do About Leadership Blind Spots

The first thing to know about leadership blind spots is to accept that you have them. We all do. This may sound obvious. It isn’t.

Most leaders intellectually agree that everyone has blind spots, but they think theirs are smaller or less significant than other people’s. That belief, on its own, is a leadership blind spot. How meta, right?

The second thing is to stop trying to find your blind spots yourself. You can’t. That’s the whole point – your blind to them. Uncovering your leadership blind spots requires an outside perspective from someone who has no stake in your ego and no incentive to manage your reaction.

That’s what leadership coaching is actually for, at its core. The most important thing a coach does is show you what you can’t see – in a way that you can actually hear it, rather than dismiss it. The best leadership coaching services can do that very quickly.

The leaders I’ve worked with who’ve made the biggest shifts didn’t do it by trying harder or thinking more carefully about their behavior. They did it by finally seeing a pattern they’d been running for years – and once they saw it, they couldn’t unsee it.

Your behavior will change when your awareness changes. That’s the sequence that actually works.

If you want to know what your leadership blind spots are – the actual ones that are blind to you – the Leadership Diagnostic Workshop is specifically designed to surface them in one short session. That’s the whole point of it. Come in not knowing what you don’t know. Leave with a clear picture of what’s been running in your blind spot all along.

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Jeff Matlow is a leadership coach and 3x entrepreneur who helps senior leaders spot the unconscious patterns keeping their teams dependent on them – then redesign the environment so everyone can actually perform. He’s spent 25+ years working with leaders at Disney, Porsche, Nestlé, and hundreds of high-growth companies. Think Ted Lasso meets Brené Brown meets a Navy SEAL. Learn more about working with Jeff or subscribe to The Best Leadership Newsletter Ever.