How to spot your management blind spots

Posted on

 

 

 

 

by Lewis Senior

 

Every human being, leaders included, has blind spots. These aren’t flaws in character or failures of competence, they’re simply the unseen gaps between intention and impact.

Most of us don’t realize these blind spots are there until something goes wrong: a team misfires, communication breaks down, or feedback loops fall silent. But what if you could learn to detect, and even predict, those blind spots before they undermine your leadership?

The key lies in understanding your leadership style, particularly through the lens of personality diversity.

The Hidden Costs of Blind Spots

Blind spots can take many forms: an overemphasis on results at the expense of relationships, an aversion to conflict that stifles honest feedback, or a tendency to micromanage when stressed. Often, these patterns emerge because we’re wired a certain way, with our habits of perception, communication, and decision-making shaped by our personality tendencies.

When left unchecked, these tendencies become predictable pitfalls. And in the complex dynamics of today’s hybrid, fast-moving workplaces, the cost of not seeing yourself clearly can be high: lost engagement, missed innovation, and eroded trust.

Leadership Style Isn’t Just a Buzzword

Understanding your leadership style isn’t about fitting into a box, it’s about recognizing how you naturally lead, and where you might unintentionally lead others astray.

One powerful approach comes from personality diversity frameworks like the E-Colors, which segment human behavior into four primary tendencies: Red (action oriented), Green (analytical), Yellow (social and optimistic), and Blue (empathetic and caring). Most people exhibit a combination of two dominant E-Colors, which shapes how they communicate, make decisions, handle pressure, and relate to others.

For example:

  • A leader with Red/Yellow tendencies may be dynamic and persuasive, but risk steamrolling quieter team members.
  • A leader with Blue/Green tendencies, meanwhile, may be thoughtful and supportive, but struggle with quick decision-making under pressure.

Recognizing these patterns is all about awareness. Once you understand your natural style, you begin to see not just what you bring to the table, but what you might be missing.

Three steps to spot and manage your blind spots

1. Know Thyself (Really)

Most leaders assume they’re self-aware. But research from Tasha Eurich and her team has shown that while 95% of people think they’re self-aware, only about 10% to 15% actually are. Personality assessments, when well-designed and behavior-based, can act as a mirror that reflects back not just your strengths, but also your triggers and tendencies under stress.

Ask yourself:

  • What kind of situations bring out the best in me?
  • When things go sideways, how do I typically react?
  • What do others frequently thank me, or warn me, about?

A Red/Green leader, for instance, may pride themselves on logic and decisiveness. But under pressure, that same logic can turn into coldness, and decisiveness into dismissiveness. Recognizing that pattern is the first step toward managing it.

Leadership blind spots by personality style

2. Invite honest feedback, then listen deeply

Blind spots are, by definition, hard to see. That’s why intentional leaders proactively seek feedback, not just once a year, but as an ongoing dialog. The trick is not just asking for feedback but making it safe for others to give it. This is especially important when your leadership style may unintentionally discourage openness.

For example, a Yellow/Red leader might radiate enthusiasm but dominate conversations, making it hard for others to express disagreement. By understanding this, they can slow down, ask more open-ended questions, and truly listen, creating space for perspectives they might otherwise miss.

Try this: At your next team meeting, ask, “What’s one thing I could do more of or less of to support your work better?” And then say thank you. No justifications, no explanations, just listen.

3. Use Personality Diversity to Build Balanced Teams

Diversity isn’t just about backgrounds, it’s also about brains. A Yellow/Blue leader might be great at building a nurturing, collaborative culture but benefit from having a Red/Green colleague to inject structure and drive results.

High-performing teams aren’t made up of people who all think alike, they’re made of people who understand how they think differently and can adapt accordingly. When team members know each other’s personality styles, they’re better equipped to resolve conflict, leverage strengths, and avoid collective blind spots.

4. Bridging Awareness and Action with Personal Intervention

While recognizing your leadership blind spots is one thing, responding to them in the moment is another. That’s where Personal intervention becomes invaluable. While the lens of personality diversity allows you to identify your natural behaviors and preferences, Personal intervention is the actionable skill that allows you to pause, reflect, and choose your response, especially in those critical moments when your default tendencies might otherwise take over.

At its core, Personal intervention is a simple but powerful self-regulation tool that empowers leaders to break free from autopilot reactions. Whether it’s choosing not to interrupt (if you’re naturally dominant), taking a stand (if you tend to avoid conflict), or slowing down your decision-making (if you’re overly action-oriented), personal intervention creates the space for intentional leadership.

In high-pressure, emotional, or high-stakes situations, the very environments where blind spots often surface, this practice can be the difference between a reactive misstep and a response that aligns with your values, your vision, and the needs of your team. Developing this muscle of choice transforms awareness into action and helps leaders show up in ways that inspire trust, adaptability, and effectiveness.

From Awareness to Action

Spotting your blind spots is a practice built and refined over a lifetime. It means choosing response over reaction. It means embracing vulnerability and being willing to grow in public. It means moving from autopilot to intentional leadership.

Understanding your leadership style is merely the first step to a more connected, more resilient, and more effective way to lead—an evermore essential skill in a world that demands more humanity from our leadership than ever before.

This post originally appeared at fastcompany.com

Harvard Research Says Great Leaders Do 3 Simple Things to Motivate the Best Employees

Posted on

 

 

 

 

 

by Bill Murphy Jr.

 

You can’t mandate psychological safety.

Have any of these things ever happened to you?

  • You call in your team for a brainstorming meeting, looking for smart ideas. But everyone seems afraid to speak up.
  • You think you have the core of a smart idea, and you ask for feedback to improve it. But everyone tells you it’s perfect, no room for improvement — even though you know that can’t be right.
  • An employee makes a suggestion that you consider, but ultimately reject. Afterward, they become sullen — or even tell you that shooting down their ideas made them feel like they’re not free to offer ideas in the future.

As a leader, I’m betting you’ve probably been in some of these situations, and you might even have paid attention to the idea of promoting “psychological safety” in the workforce in order to get your team to offer their best.

So, what if I told you that the notion of “psychological safety” has turned into one of the most misunderstood concepts of our business generation, and that there are things that smart leaders can do to motivate employees better as a result?

Writing in Harvard Business Review, Amy C. Edmondson of Harvard Business School and Michaela Kerrissey of the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health say they’ve identified key misconceptions about psychological safety — along with how leaders can build a “strong, learning-oriented work environment.”

Here are the things they say people don’t understand, along with their blueprint for success:

Psychological safety doesn’t mean simply being “nice.” Continue reading →

How to harness your personality traits to level up your career

Posted on

 

 

 

 

Story by Merrick Rosenberg

 

The most successful leaders aren’t necessarily the loudest, the most visionary, or the ones with all the answers. Instead, they know what drives their actions and what triggers their reactions. They understand themselves and can read what others need with precision. Furthermore, they don’t treat each person the same way. Instead, they tailor their approach to meet the needs of each individual or situation.

These leaders go beyond possessing highly developed emotional intelligence. They become their best selves and help others do the same. Their skill is based on harnessing personality to promote personal and organizational success.

But before we explore the power of personality intelligence, let’s introduce the four styles every leader needs to understand.

The Styles

We will use birds as a simple way to help explain, remember, and apply the four styles.

  • Eagles are confident, direct, and results-focused.
  • Parrots are social, optimistic, and energizing.
  • Doves are supportive, empathetic, and harmonious.
  • Owls are logical, questioning, and precise.

We all possess a mix of styles, but one or two typically stand out. Once you recognize these styles, you’ll start noticing them everywhere, from emails and meetings to how you lead with others. Continue reading →

How to Stop Annoying People, According to a Harvard Business School Professor

Posted on

 

 

 

 

by Bill Murphy Jr

 

Read anything good lately?

Read anything good lately? Cool, glad to hear — hey, let me tell you about what I just read! In fact, it involves the extremely annoying thing I’m doing right now!

That would be “boomerasking,” which is how Harvard Business School professor Alison Wood Brooks describes a very common but almost universally disliked conversational quirk.

It goes like this:

  1. Someone asks you a question. You’re flattered! They care about your opinion!
  2. But when you start to answer, it seems as if they’re not even listening. Maybe they don’t let you answer at all.
  3. Finally, impatiently, they dive straight into a story about their experience, or their opinion — as if the whole point of asking you the question was to hijack the conversation so that you’d have to listen to them, instead.

Now Brooks and another professor, Michael Yeomans of Imperial College London, have coauthored a roughly 15,000-word examination of the whole tendency in the Journal of Experimental Psychology — digging into why people fall into the trap, why it annoys so much, and what you can gain by training yourself not to.

It’s annoying!

Despite my boomerasking at the beginning of this article — that was just a narrative example. I try to avoid doing this in real life!

Because it’s annoying, right? Almost everyone agrees.

In an especially clear example, Brooks cites research that suggests that when people go on dates, asking questions and seeming interested in the answers makes it more likely they’ll get a second date, while “boomerasking” has the exact opposite effect.

“Unfortunately, it turns out that boomerasking is an easy way to undermine the superpower of question-asking,” she said.

Bragging, complaining, and sharing

Brooks and Yeomans came up with three categories of “boomerasking,” including:

  • Ask-bragging: “Asking a question followed by disclosing something positive, e.g., an amazing vacation,”
  • Ask-complaining: “Asking a question followed by disclosing something negative, e.g., a family funeral,” and
  • Ask-sharing: “Asking a question followed by disclosing something neutral, e.g., a weird dream.”

But if almost everyone seems to agree that they’re annoyed by boomerasking, why do people do it? Two reasons, mainly.

First, they have a harder time recognizing and categorizing their own boomerasking, as opposed to when other people do it.

Second, they subjectively conclude that the other person in a conversation will like them more and feel included if they start conversations with a question — while not apparently recognizing that asking isn’t the same thing as actively listening to the answer.

Breaking the habit

Brooks and Yeomans also looked at how taking control of the boomerasking habit can help people become better leaders.

For example, a boss who doesn’t realize he or she is prone to boomerasking can create a culture in which employees don’t think their expertise or opinions are valued, which in turn leads to low morale.

“We’ve all had the experience of the bad boss who calls a meeting to ask for people’s feedback on a topic and lets people briefly chime in, only to mostly tell them what he thinks,” Brooks said in an interview. “It’s what drives people nuts about meetings—people come together to take advantage of the hive mind, to share their useful knowledge or feel heard.

Want to break the habit? Brooks has a few tips:

Try to identify if you do it, learn to show real interest when you ask people questions, and ask questions that you can’t answer yourself easily.

Oh, and maybe call out the elephant in the room by acknowledging the concept of boomerasking, and telling your employees that you’d like them to call you out if you do it.

Got any other ideas?

Seriously, I’m not boomerasking. If you’ve got something to suggest, message me here.

If we get enough smart replies, maybe we can do a follow-up.

This post originally appeared at inc.com.

The only way to future-proof your career? Be more than one thing

Posted on

 

 

 

 

BY Kudzi Chikumbu

 

A friend once asked me how I could be a marketing executive, a fragrance influencer with over 400,000 followers, and a paid public speaker all at once. “Don’t those things live in different worlds?” she asked. My answer was simple: It’s the only way to survive.

In today’s career landscape, having just one title, one path, or one platform isn’t safe—it’s risky. We have all heard the clarion call about AI rapidly transforming the workforce. It’s no longer just about skill; it’s about diversifying and leaning into your identity as your moat. What we’re living through is a strategic career inflection point—a moment where the rules of the game change so dramatically that the old playbook becomes obsolete.

When I was earning my MBA at Stanford a decade ago, one of my favorite classes was called Insight to Outcome taught by Thomas S. Wurster. To this day I think about the concept of strategic dissonance, as outlined by Michael Tushman, Charles O’Reilly, and Andy Grove in their legendary paper from 30 years ago, which I read as part of the class. This wisdom from 1996 is still applicable today. In a business context, strategic dissonance is what happens when a company’s actions no longer reflect the changing external environment—even if they keep doing what once worked. When applied to careers, I think of it as career dissonance: when what we’re doing day-to-day doesn’t get us to the life we actually want because the rules have changed.

And right now, AI is the change that is accelerating that dissonance.

People are talking about AI replacing jobs and we need to focus on what to do next in a strategic way. According to McKinsey, nearly 12 million U.S. workers may need to change occupations by 2030 due to AI and automation. That’s not hypothetical. That’s an inflection point.

What to do

So how do we not crumble? We need to understand inflection points. In class at Stanford I remember learning that at every strategic inflection point, three things happen:

1. The degree of difficulty of evolving increases. Getting to your new goal gets harder. The path becomes steeper.

3. Resources are even more constrained. You need to think about more efficient ways to use your time and energy. If you keep doing everything the way you used to, you’ll burn out.

Yes, these challenges feel uncomfortable. But they’re also invitations—to focus, experiment, and grow. So what do you do in this moment of massive shift in the workplace? These are the three things I’ve found that worked for me and people I admire to address the challenges brought on by the advent of this specific career inflection point.

1. Use the tools to become more of yourself

Instead of fearing AI, leverage it to ease the degree of difficulty of building your “portfolio” career. This way you can address the first challenges of strategic inflection points. When LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude dropped, I didn’t use them to replace my voice—I used them to refine it. I used AI to launch my podcast (Not Just One Thing), structure my content, and sharpen my public speaking. People say AI tools kill creativity. In my case, these tools didn’t diminish me. They revealed more of me.

2. Build your calendar like it’s your portfolio and buy back your time

Each strategic inflection point forces you to get sharper about where your energy goes. And the good news is, constraint breeds clarity. Only a few things are going to move you forward. People get stuck trying to master prompt engineering by never starting. You are better off testing, measuring, and iterating. You don’t need to master every prompt—just experiment out loud. That’s how you find the next version of you. When you find out what’s working, focus more on that. This helps you address the second and third challenges of strategic inflection points.

You will no longer need to waste all your energy on low-impact actions. Use AI to automate your logistics. Reclaim that hour to work on your side project. Book time to journal, plan, or build a content system. According to a RescueTime study, the average knowledge worker spends just 2 hours and 48 minutes per day on productive tasks. That means you’re not just fighting burnout—you’re fighting wasted energy.

In my case, I used tools to streamline my work and double down on my fragrance content. I tested ideas, launched small, and iterated fast. You can build a micro business, pitch yourself for speaking, or start developing a product—all with the tools already at your fingertips.

3. Make your story your competitive advantage

One of the most powerful ideas from the strategic dissonance paper was that most companies keep expanding their existing competencies instead of evolving with the market. The same is true in our careers. We double down on what we’ve already done, instead of asking what will matter next. What’s the best way to do this? What’s your everlasting competitive advantage? Your real edge in this new world isn’t technical. It’s personal. Your personal story.

I was born in Zimbabwe and raised in South Africa. I started out in accounting, but I always knew I wanted to be a creator. I made YouTube videos. Then pivoted into tech. I joined musical.ly, which became TikTok, and spent years helping creators find their voice. I was using my own passion of wanting to be a creator and my analytical skills from my time as an accountant. This use of my authentic story allows me to stand out and build a career. People call me multi-hyphenate. I just think of it as an integrated portfolio career.

In a world built for sameness, difference is your power. I learned that from another class at Stanford that was taught by Allison Kluger and Tyra Banks. Your background is your moat. It’s the thing that no prompt can generate, and no algorithm can replace.

In this new world, your hybrid path isn’t a hurdle, it’s your blueprint to success. We are not at the end of work as many people fear. We’re at the beginning of becoming. As Maya Watson said on an episode of my podcast, Not Just One Thing: “It’s not about what you do. It’s about who you’re becoming.” That’s the work. She’s right. And you’re going to need more than one title to get there. Being multi-hyphenate isn’t indulgent—it’s how you stay employed, inspired, and in motion.

The people who will thrive are the ones who use the tools, manage their time like a portfolio, and tell the truth about who they really are. That’s how we build careers that are dynamic, fulfilling, and truly human.

 

Source: Fast Company