Leaders and Blind Spots

How many blind spots do you think a leader has on average?

You may have guessed 1 or 2, as I did. That’s well short of what Mark Murphy of Leadership IQ posits in a recent Forbes.com article. He suggests, based on feedback from employees, that leaders have 3.6 blind spots on average.

Such a great coaching opportunity, right? Well, not exactly.

Mark goes on to say that many organizations think that bringing feedback about such blind spots to a leader through a mechanism such as a 360 survey would do the trick. Awareness equals change. Again, not exactly.

1,200 people were surveyed in the research, and 54% attributed the blind spots’ persistence to the fact that the leader thinks their current approach is working well. In such a case, they’re not going to change by hearing that maybe it’s not so effective. What leader wakes up looking for cognitive dissonance about their leadership approach?

40% of those surveyed said their boss dismisses or minimizes feedback.

What these statistics suggest is that leaders are not going to change just because they get feedback. I recall one painful story from my first years as a newly minted executive coach.

The client was one of a team of partners running an investment company. I was assigned to them as their coach by the partner running HR. In my first meeting with this partner, they threw up a huge red flag, which I naïvely discounted:

They said they didn’t need coaching, but were going through with this because they were hoping to set a good example for their fellow partners who really needed the coaching.

I thought that was an interesting tidbit and set it aside because I figured that, even if this partner had the wrong idea going in, they were still going to benefit from the great coaching I was going to provide.

Fast forward to a few months with little progress, when I suggested I do a round of confidential oral interviews with a group of reports to get feedback on the leader. My client agreed and I went to work interviewing some 17 people. As you might imagine, I uncovered what I thought were several blind spots.

When I presented the consolidated feedback to the partner, they basically dismissed or minimized the feedback. That was completely contrary to what I thought was going to happen. I thought they would do an about-face and ask for support in making the necessary changes to address their gaps.

Making things worse, the partner decided they had no more time for this nonsense and fired me as their coach. Boy, was I humbled in the process. This ranks right up there as one of my biggest failures as an executive coach.

Now it’s clear that blind spots and feedback aren’t enough to establish the need for a coaching engagement or, more importantly, succeed with one. The leader must be open to feedback and change. If you don’t have that, you’re going to be doing the equivalent of pushing a boulder uphill.

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