The Leadership Blind Spot You Don't Know You Have

This week a friend in our plein air group set up a few feet from me. Same afternoon light, same view, same subject.

Her painting looked nothing like mine. Mine was a light watercolor that was more literally descriptive of the landscape. Hers was an energetic multi-media exploration focused on another painter in our group in the environment.

What each of us painted revealed as much about how we see as it did about what we were looking at.

This is the third piece in a series on discernment as a leadership skill.

In the first, I wrote about thinking in layers - how the visible complaint is rarely where the real leverage lives. In the second, about reading the source - what a report or email tells you about the person who wrote it.

Both of those ask you to look more carefully at the situation in front of you. This one asks something harder:

What are your own filters making invisible?

Every leader sees through a lens shaped by experience - what you've been rewarded for, what scared you early in your career, what your nervous system learned to do under pressure, the cultural context you grew up in, and natural personality patterns you've spent decades reinforcing.

You can't remove the lens - no one can. But you can get curious about it.

One of the questions I ask in coaching sessions is: In what ways might your history or position or perspective limit what you can see here?

It's disorienting the first time you sit with it. Most of us have never been asked to examine the instrument we use to examine everything else.

Under pressure, this gets harder. When you're in reactive mode (trying to solve a problem fast, protect your team, hit a deadline) you lose access to the broader view. The very thinking you need most goes offline. You act from what's available, which is usually your most well-worn patterns.

This is another reason the pause matters. Not just to read the situation more carefully, but to notice what you're bringing to it.

What I've found, after years of doing this work, is that our blind spots aren't random, they follow patterns - ones shaped by our core fears, our default coping strategies, the ways we've learned to stay safe and effective. Once you can name your pattern, you can work with it. You can start to notice when you're filtering, rather than assuming you're seeing clearly.

This is why ego/personality work matters in leadership. Not as a label or a box to put yourself in, but as a map of your own tendencies, including the ones that make certain things invisible to you.

Two painters working on the same scene, producing completely different paintings.

In the book Watercolor Painting, Hoffman writes that the best paintings show us "only the essential aspects of the subject" and in doing so, reveal the world "fully realized in a few washed strokes." What makes that possible isn't just skill. It's a painter who knows their own instrument - their tendencies, their go-to moves, the moments when habit takes over from observation, when they start painting what they expect to see rather than what's actually there.

That's the work I'm pointing to here. Not just looking more carefully at the situation, or reading the source more skillfully. But knowing yourself well enough to catch the moment when you're filtering - and choosing, in that moment, to look again.

🤔 What are you "painting in" that isn't actually there? And what might you be leaving in the white space?

This is the third piece in a series on discernment as a leadership skill that initially appeared on LinkedIn.
See Part 1: Thinking in Layers | Part 2: Read It Like a Painting