Smart Disruption: How to Find Your Blind Spots at Work

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In a recent article we introduced the Johari Window. This is an incredibly helpful exercise for uncovering our blind spots.

Why Bother With Blind Spots?

Building the habit of pausing to find your blind spots has two big impacts:

First, examining blind spots helps leaders avoid derailment and directly supports the skill- and reputation-building needed for continued advancement. Strong leaders value career-long professional development and continuous improvement. The growth we expect from our business we expect from ourselves as well. We don’t believe that once we reach a certain title, P&L or scope that we’ve arrived and completed learning. Investigating and addressing our blind spots is a core ingredient to building elite leadership competencies.

Second, identifying and challenging blinds spots helps leaders uncover and address harmful status quo norms and unwritten rules in our workplaces and on our teams. Norms and unwritten rules that are harmful range from exclusionary culture, to microaggressions, to assessments of potential and performance that are rooted in unconscious biases.

There can be all kinds of risks and costs to upholding harmful norms, from the high cost of losing talent, to lack of progress on DEI goals and the brand-damage that brings, both with customers and employee candidates. If harmful norms are hindering diversity in your workplace, the company, on balance, will be making poorer decisions, not keeping pace with changing demographics of customers, and losing ground to competitors.

Leaders who investigate and address blind spots with openness and curiosity establish better rapport and relate better to all team members, including those who don’t look like them and aren’t from similar backgrounds. These are leadership super-strengths: they lead to stronger, higher performing teams, longer employee retention and reduced turnover expense. Since diverse teams drive better business outcomes, you can differentiate, and win, by being better at building and leading diverse teams.

I’ll See it When I Believe It

How many times have you actually said the opposite? We’re conditioned to “know” that seeing is believing, but that’s actually contrary to how our human brains work. We’re wired for confirmation bias, which means that our brains prefer to seek evidence that supports our strongly held beliefs — whether or not we’re aware of those beliefs consciously.

Here’s something to consider: We know our own work styles, we know our successes. It’s only natural that, when we meet up-and-coming leaders, we are often drawn to people who remind us of our younger selves. That familiarity can lead us to unconsciously prefer candidates who look like us, speak like us, have similar backgrounds or interests…and use them as evidence that the best candidates are like a younger version of us. It also means that if we believe we’re fully free of bias, would never commit a microaggression, and are leading the team “just fine, why change?” then we have lower incentive to reflect on how we can improve, and we miss actual behavioral blind spots that are painfully obvious to others around us.

Time and time again, we’ve heard the notion that if ain’t broke, don’t fix it. This approach doesn’t work when we fail to see what’s “broke” in the first place.

Six Steps to Uncovering Blind Spots with Johari Window

The Johari Window is an analytic tool to map out what we know, what we know that we don’t know, and what we don’t even know we don’t know.

In the context of leadership and workplace culture, this means identifying, comparing and challenging what you think you know, what you know personally deep within, and what others know about you but that you can’t yet see. For this exercise, when we talk about what is “known,” we’re talking about what is known about things like your style, decision-making, language, behavior and contribution to norms and unwritten rules.*

Follow these six steps to put the Johari Window to work for you. (You can get a copy of a blank Johari Window workbook here.) These exercises will take time and real effort. But rest assured that the effort will pay for itself for years to come: Uncovering your blind spots will take you to a new level of leadership effectiveness.

Step 1: Acknowledge and assume you’ve got blind spots

You realize by now this exercise won’t work at all unless you understand that you (along with every living person) have blind spots. Sadly, a lot of leaders don’t understand (or believe) this, and don’t look for theirs.

Kudos to you for getting to this point — it’s a strong differentiator for you!

Start by reflecting on why you want to investigate your blind spots. Write down your responses to the following questions.

• To what degree do I truly believe I’ve got blind spots?
• If I believed, even briefly, that I’ve got ’em, what might I think and what actions might I take?
• What is the risk of investigating my blind spots?
• What am I concerned I might find out?
• How will my personal leadership and work outcomes benefit from investigating my blind spots?
• How will my team benefit? My company?

Step 2: Brainstorm ways to help you “see what’s unseeable”

By definition, our blind spots are unseeable by us ourselves. So we need outside data.

Brainstorm15 sources of external information about yourself. The number is deliberately large: it’s an old design trick to help you pull past the first few obvious answers and get to more impactful, creative ideas.

Some examples to get you started:

• 360-degree anonymized feedback
• Exit interviews with former team members or clients
• Can you expect candor from your current team? If so, ask them about your blind spots
• Survey trusted colleagues who you believe will be balanced and candid (no pollyannas)
• Ask peers with whom you’ve had past conflict
• Data from the recruiting team
• Data from the company employee engagement survey
• Self-assess: how do you typically react to feedback? What feedback have you received more than once that you strongly disliked, struck you as odd or that you didn’t “get”
• Compile themes from past performance reviews
• Take another, closer look at past leadership assessments
• Brainstorm at least five more

Pick three sources from your list that are reasonable for you to execute. Keep your list close to hand, you’ll need it in Step 5.

Step 3: Identify Your Open Self — And Challenge It (Quadrant I)

Now fill in your personal Johari Window. The Open Self quadrant, sometimes called the Arena, is all about things that are known to everybody — — to yourself, to your team, to your colleagues.

First, fill in what Everybody Knows. Be brutally honest: this is about both what you say is true, as well as your actions — even if (especially if) your actions sometimes differ from your statements or from company policy.

What do you and everyone else absolutely know to be true about:

• Your leadership style, and how you “show up”
• Your communication preferences
• How you uphold or disrupt the company culture
• Unwritten rules about working with you; hot buttons and quirks
• How to get promoted or get the bonus when working with you
• Track record on hiring, inclusion, retention, promotion and representation of a variety of highly diverse team members
• Interests you consider worthwhile and important
• Your beliefs about what makes someone high potential or a great candidate
• Your attitudes towards clients, peers, senior leaders, other stakeholders

Next, challenge these elements of your Open Self to combat confirmation bias:

• What might make them untrue?
• Are they ever just conditionally true? What situations change your behavior and beliefs?
• Can you find three material contradictions to any of these known knowns?
• Are there “false knowns,” old stories that aren’t relevant anymore, or other irrelevant knowns?

Step 4: Identify the Personal Knowing in your Hidden Self (Quadrant II)

Your Hidden Self isn’t readily seen by others, but it’s known to and understood by you. You might choose not to expose the Personal Knowing you keep hidden, or you might just instinctively keep it hidden.

Personal Knowing is about beliefs deep within, as well as confidence, assuredness, creativity, thought processes, the way you see and understand your environment(s), private strategies. Answer the following questions to investigate.

• What do you personally know about your leadership, working style, approach, biases and impact that others don’t know?
• What makes you keep this Personal Knowing hidden? (Or, why do you prefer it hidden?)
• What does your lived experience tell you about good leadership and the workplace?
• How do you put your Personal Knowing to work for you?
• How often do you dismiss or second-guess your Personal Knowing?

If you answered, “Frequently:” How might you re-frame your Personal Knowing as a strength or asset? What actions might you take if you did that?

If you answered, “Never:” To what degree might this put you at risk for overconfidence or derailing behavior? What evidence may contradict this Personal Knowing you’re so sure of?

Step 5: Dig Further Into Your Blind Spots (Quadrant III)

This is where your brainstorm and short list from Step 2 come in!

First, gather qualitative and quantitative data from the three sources on your short list.

Next, reflect on the results.

• How are you showing up in ways you didn’t realize?
• What are you surprised about (pleasantly? disappointedly?)
• Is your default response to difficult feedback to believe or to disbelieve?
• How might this play into your ability to understand your Blind Spots?
• How does this change if the feedback is positive?
• Is your default response to others’ descriptions of their experiences to believe or disbelieve?
• Does the default change based on how similar to you the other person is?
• How might this play into your ability to understand your Blind Spots?
• For areas where you are perceived differently than you had expected, can you identify the gap between others’ perception and your intent? As you look at the root cause (or causes) of that gap, dig deeper than your first answer. As hard as it is, try to take the role of an “outside observer” to really understand.

Step 6: Prioritize What You Will Act On

Pull it all together. What does the data, your reflection and your attempts to disprove what Everybody Knows tell you?

What do you think your top three blind spots are?

Take action to work with your blind spots over the next two weeks:

• Identify a trusted friend or colleague you can use as a sounding board: do they agree these are your blind spots?
• Take note throughout the day of times you see or suspect blind spots are coming into play. What’s going on? Do you take different action when you become aware of them?
• What commitment will you make to “showing up” differently, now that you’re armed with this knowledge?

* By the way, you’ll have noted that this exercise intentionally skipped the “Unknown Self” quadrant of the Johari Window. Uncovering things unknown to both others and oneself is far beyond the scope of this article. If you’re interested to investigate this quadrant, consider approaches like therapy, coaching, meditation, faith-based practices, or deep journaling.