Identifying and Overcoming Leadership Blindspots
Bryan Runion ·
Every leader has blind spots — patterns you don't notice that shape your team more than you realize. A practical guide to finding yours and doing something about them.
Every leader has blind spots. The uncomfortable part isn't that they exist — it's that, by definition, you can't see them. They live in the gap between how you experience yourself and how the people around you experience you. Closing that gap is one of the highest-leverage things a leader can do, and it doesn't require a personality overhaul. It requires a habit.
What a leadership blind spot actually is
A blind spot isn't a weakness you're hiding. It's a pattern you genuinely don't notice: the meeting you always dominate, the feedback you consistently soften, the type of person you keep promoting, the decision you delay because it makes you uncomfortable. Others see it clearly. You don't, because it's operating on autopilot underneath your good intentions.
Blind spots are structural, not moral. They're the natural byproduct of taking on more scope than any one person can consciously observe. That's why senior leaders often accumulate more of them, not fewer.
The five most common blind spots I see
Thinking out loud as if it were a decision. You're exploring. Your team hears a directive and quietly reorganizes their week around it.
Praising outcomes, not process. You reward the heroic save and miss the person who prevented the fire in the first place. Over time, your culture optimizes for drama.
Confusing agreement with alignment. Nobody pushed back in the room, so you assume the plan is solid. Half the room is already drafting the workaround.
Promoting in your own image. The people who get ahead sound, think, and communicate like you. The team gets faster at what it already does well and slower at everything else.
Avoiding the conversation you owe someone. You've rehearsed it a dozen times and had it zero. Meanwhile, the person keeps operating on the assumption that everything is fine.
A 30-minute self-assessment
Set a timer. Answer honestly, in writing — not in your head. Vague answers mean you already know something is off.
When was the last time someone changed my mind? What did they say, and what did I do differently after?
What is the conversation I'm avoiding right now? Who is it with, and what is the actual cost of the delay?
Who on my team disagrees with me most often? Have I made that safe, or expensive?
If my direct reports described my leadership to a peer over coffee, what would they say — the parts I'd want to hear, and the parts I wouldn't?
What am I rewarding, structurally, that I don't actually want more of?
How to get honest feedback without ambushing anyone
"Do you have any feedback for me?" is a question that almost always gets a no. It's too broad, too high-stakes, and too easy to deflect. Ask smaller, more specific questions that give people a safe surface to answer on:
"What's one thing I did in that meeting that made your job harder?"
"If you were running this project instead of me, what would you change first?"
"What do you think I'm underestimating right now?"
Then — and this is the part most leaders skip — say thank you, write it down, and change something visible within two weeks. People stop giving feedback that seems to disappear.
Building the organizational habit
Individual awareness is fragile. Structural awareness compounds. A few practices that make blind spots harder to hide:
A standing dissent slot. The last five minutes of major decision meetings are reserved for the strongest case against the decision. Assign it to a person, rotate the role.
Pre-mortems, not post-mortems. Before you commit, ask: "It's six months from now and this failed. What killed it?" You'll surface the objections nobody wanted to say out loud.
A quarterly "stop doing" list. Culture is shaped as much by what you tolerate as by what you champion. Name what you're going to stop.
Start with the one you already suspect
You almost certainly finished reading that list of five with one of them pressing on you a little harder than the others. That's not an accident. Blind spots don't stay perfectly hidden — they leak. The discomfort you feel when a specific example lands is the cheapest, most reliable signal you'll get.
Pick that one. Not all five. Write down the pattern in a single sentence, name the situation you'll notice it in next, and decide what you'll do differently when it shows up. Come back to it in thirty days.
If you want a more structured starting point, take the Leadership Blindspots quiz — it takes about ten minutes and gives you a personalized read on which pattern is most likely running underneath your leadership right now.