The Blind Leader

Blind spots, denial, and the collapse of control

Every leader has blind spots. If you think you don’t, you probably have some even worse. Not because you are arrogant, malignant, or stupid. Because you are human, and seeing ourselves objectively is impossible, no matter how hard we try.

Photo by Laura Chouette on Unsplash

Some blind spots are minor, gaps in awareness or information. But others are far more consequential. They become distortions in perception, feedback loops that continue to amplify (or attenuate), and decision habits that narrow focus over time. Left unexamined, they quietly corrode effectiveness, sabotage trust, and lead even well-meaning leaders into leadership derailment.

Two recent Netflix documentaries: The Titan Sub Disaster and Trainwreck: The Cult of American Apparel, serve as high-profile examples of this pattern. Not just because they ended in collapse, but because each disaster grew from untreated leader blindspots.

These are not stories of sociopaths, and certainly not delusional or incompetent leaders. These two visionary founders managed to take wild ideas and make them a reality; one building his own submarine to visit the wrecked Titanic, the other revolutionising fashion by rejecting the offshore sweatshop operating model in favour of American-made. Their stories are mirrors for anyone whose leadership has ever rested on instinct, ambition, or deeply held vision.

How It Feels to Lead from a Blind Spot

You’re trying your best. You’re pushing forward, carrying the weight, holding the line. But something’s off. It never quite works out how you want it to, and you can’t figure out why. That’s why it’s called a blind spot, just like the blind spot on your retina (everyone’s got one), or the one in the mirror of your car, we go about the world as if it isn’t there.

Imagine every time you merge lanes, you nearly crash into a car that was next to you. You thought the space was there, otherwise you never would have pulled across. And yet here you are, getting the horn and flashing high-beams, or worse, from your angry fellow motorist.

In and of themselves, blind spots aren’t ‘bad’, until they cause you to do things that, if you weren’t blind, you wouldn’t want to do.

In leadership this might show itself like this:

• You feel blindsided by outcomes, conflict, or team dynamics that seem to come out of nowhere.

• Things that make perfect sense to you just don’t land with your team. You explain, clarify, repeat, but traction never comes.

• You find yourself stuck in recurring scenarios: the same breakdowns, the same frustrations, the same results, despite changing the players or pushing harder.

• The team seems tired, disengaged, or resistant, but you can’t understand why. You’re working hard. You care. You’ve got a clear vision. Why won’t they follow?

• You feel confused. Frustrated. Sometimes even resentful. You wonder why others aren’t matching your energy or seeing what you see. It’s isolating, lonely at the top.

• And despite all the effort, you’re not getting the results you expect, or the loyalty you feel you’ve earned.

These aren’t just signs of burnout or organisational inertia. They may be symptoms of something deeper: a leadership blind spot.

The Drift into Denial: How Blind Spots Form

Blind spots do not emerge overnight. They grow gradually, in leadership environments where feedback is muted, challenges are reframed as negativity, and where “being right” becomes more important than seeing clearly.

It’s a double-edged sword for the entrepreneur or the visionary. On the one hand, you need to silence your critics, follow your vision, and turn the impossible into reality. But these very features: confidence in your own vision, single-mindedness, stubbornness, can also become detriments, derailing your progress and putting your mission at risk.

Common signs of leadership drift include:

• Dismissal of Dissent¹
  Concerns and criticism are reframed by the leader as “resistance” or “misalignment with culture”. Feedback becomes filtered, overtly or covertly.

• Overreliance on Charisma²
  Charm and vision replace structure, accountability, and analysis. When impression management becomes more important than tangible performance, leadership effectiveness is reduced.

• Repetition of Failure³
  Failed strategies are rebranded rather than revised. Learning is bypassed. Because the ‘visionary’ can do no wrong, any time something falls over, it is rationalised as someone else’s fault, whether it’s an unforgiving market, the ignorant customer, or the incompetent subordinate.

• Focus on Vanity Metrics⁴
  Leaders highlight what still looks good, while ignoring hard truths that signal deeper issues. Don’t get me wrong—sometimes forming a strategic narrative is a wise leadership move; to shore up support and to keep up morale. But when you’re putting a spin on things, don’t spin yourself.

• Ethical Blindness⁵
  Leaders under pressure may fail to notice moral consequences, or rationalise harmful outcomes. We fool ourselves into thinking that we’re justified in cutting those corners, or ignoring those problems, seeing them as obstacles to our bigger vision. Leaders lose sight of the fact that a single ethical lapse could be the difference between success and failure in the future.

These patterns do not point to malice or lack of ability. They reflect a form of psychological drift, often unconscious, that arises under pressure, isolation, or identity threat.

When Strength Becomes Sabotage

Leaders do not typically fail because they are incompetent. They fail because the very traits that helped them succeed: confidence, vision, boldness, go unexamined and eventually over-applied. We cover our weak points with our strengths, or rely on the comfortable and well-known tactics that got us where we are.

This is captured in Hogan’s⁶ derailers model: every strength, when overused, can become a liability. Charisma becomes seen and experienced by your colleagues as attention-seeking, or impression management. Passion becomes volatility. Perfectionism becomes control. Collaborative leadership becomes conflict-averse indecisiveness. Confidence, delusional overconfidence, or even arrogance. Risk tolerance becomes recklessness. Or the flip-side, prudence becomes risk aversion.

These derailers are most likely to surface under stress or success: when leaders believe they are “doubling down” or “holding the line,” but in fact are closing off avenues of perception and adaptation.

Importantly, leaders almost never recognise their own derailers. As research shows, self–other agreement in leadership ratings is often low. In other words, it’s common for leaders to have a different perception of themself when compared with their colleague’s perceptions. And the research shows that blind spots are most damaging when leaders rate themselves highly and others disagree⁷.

Stockton Rush – OceanGate (The Titan Sub Disaster)

Stockton Rush embodied the archetype of the bold disruptor: a visionary determined to break boundaries and redefine what was possible. But his greatest strength became his undoing. Rush dismissed the concerns of engineering experts, reframed safety protocols as needless bureaucracy, and cast prudent doubt as cowardice or worse, betrayal. His blind spot was not technical ignorance, but an unchecked belief in his own judgment. He saw himself as a pioneer and surrounded himself with enablers rather than challengers. In the end, his failure wasn’t just a failure of innovation: it was a failure to build in dissent, to test his vision against inconvenient truths, and accept the bad news when it came in. His hubristic over-confidence in his own abilities led to the death of five people and the end of a promising scientifically innovative company.

---

Dov Charney – American Apparel (Trainwreck)

Dov Charney’s blind spot was identity fusion: he didn’t just lead American Apparel, he was American Apparel. His charisma, creativity, and rejection of the fashion industry’s norms made the brand iconic. But as his personal mythology grew, so did his isolation from consequences and ethics. Criticism became betrayal. Governance became an obstacle. Culture became cult. His boundary-pushing behaviour, once framed as part of his creative genius, slipped into ethical grey zones (or truly, red zones), ignored or excused by those who needed him to be a saviour. Charney didn’t fail because he lacked vision. He failed because he wouldn’t separate his personal identity from the business, and because no one around him was empowered to say “enough.”

The Psychology Behind the Blind Spot

Leadership blind spots are not random. They emerge from predictable psychological processes, especially under stress or high ego investment:

• Cognitive Dissonance⁸
  When new data contradicts belief, it is reframed or dismissed to preserve mental consistency.

• Escalation of Commitment⁹
  The more a leader invests, the harder it becomes to withdraw, even in the face of failure.

• Positive Illusions¹⁰
  Leadership is difficult, and ambiguous. It requires you to take initiative in uncertainty. One way we cope with this paradox is by shielding ourselves with an optimistic self-view. This buffers our ego, and helps us overcome inertia; but it can also make us blind to our weak areas when things go wrong.

• Illusion of Transparency
  People believe they are clearer communicators than they actually are, leading to chronic misunderstanding¹¹. “I know what I meant, so if they don’t get it, they’re the problem,” is an easy enough frustration to feel. But overestimating our ability to communicate clearly can cause us to be blind to the complexity and ambiguity our followers face as well.

• Power-Induced Empathy Gaps¹²
  Power reduces a leader’s sensitivity to others’ emotional states. See my recent post on “power blindness,” where those in positions of privilege and power systematically under-estimate how much power and privilege they have, and how their behaviour is experienced by those with less.

These patterns do not emerge from malice. They are cognitive defaults, system errors we are all susceptible to, manifested by power, pressure, and isolation.

A Solution: Strategic Humility

Just like any systematic threat to our effectiveness, leaders need to address their own blindspots. Using strategic humility, the deliberate process of questioning our own assumptions, identifying our own limitations, and knowing the boundaries of our knowledge, we can reduce the risk that our blindspots will derail us.

Sometimes there’s a connotation to the word ‘humility’, associating it with weakness, meekness, or deference. That’s not the kind of humility we’re talking about. Strategic humility is a leadership stance, which you use to design your organisation, build your climate and culture, and underpins the way you operate in every area. It’s like install truth-telling infrastructure.

Organisations which have a culture of strategic humility have a strong and grounded sense of their current capabilities. They know what they do well, and why, and they question themselves, their processes, and their limitations.

Leaders who use strategic humility know their strengths, know their weaknesses, and constantly seek feedback to improve both. This strategy is not about criticism or negativity. It’s about increasing the likelihood you will achieve your objectives, and those of your organisation and your people.

Check your blind spots

1. 360° Feedback Mechanisms

Structured, multi-rater feedback is one of the most effective tools for revealing blind spots. Leaders who receive accurate upward, downward and lateral feedback show better performance outcomes and greater behavioural change¹³.

Effective when:

• Anonymity is guaranteed

• Paired with leader development coaching (this is important: it’s not easy to hear direct feedback about yourself. Having someone help you unpack it, and make a plan of action, might be essential).

• Feedback is tied to behaviour, not personality (this is about skills, abilities and outcomes; not about who you are as a person).

2. Psychological Safety & Red-Teaming

Teams where dissent is expected and disagreement is safe to voice consistently outperform those that avoid conflict¹⁴. In decision making settings, deliberately assigning a “devil’s advocate” or running red-team exercises reduces groupthink and enhances decision robustness¹⁵.

Make it safe for your colleagues to surface your blindspots. Your focus should be on being the most effective leader you can be. Not protecting your self-image. Paradoxically, this approach will not diminish you. It will bolster your position and earn you respect; leaders who get results in terms of achieving their organisation’s and team’s objectives, including by deploying strategic humility, earn leadership capital and loyalty.

3. Cognitive Humility Practices

Leaders who frame decisions as ‘provisional hypotheses’, that is, as a potential option, open to revision, rather than as fixed beliefs show higher adaptability and resilience. Encouraging leaders to “think aloud” and ask, “What might I be missing?” helps reduce overconfidence bias¹⁶.

Effective phrases:

• “Here’s my current thinking. What do you think?”

• “What’s a smart competitor betting on that I’m not seeing?”

• “Here’s what I was trying to achieve: did that land?”

4. Backcasting and Failure Anticipation

A “pre-mortem analysis”, as opposed to a “post-mortem analysis” is where before making a decision or taking a course of action, you imagine why your plan might fail. This approach has been shown to reduce planning fallacy and overconfidence, especially in uncertain or ambiguous environments¹⁷.

Especially effective in group environments, explicitly inverting the frame of discussion from “what might work,” to “what would prevent this from working,” can trigger divergent thinking. Rather than just trying to prove your course of action is the right one, surface the things that might tank it. And build in contingencies to your plan to prevent this from happening.

5. Leadership and Executive Coaching

Evidence from meta-analyses confirms that executive coaching improves self-awareness, behavioural change, and performance outcomes¹⁸. Coaching provides a dedicated space to surface blind spots, challenge assumptions, and build reflection into leadership hygiene.

Strengthening your weaknesses, and avoiding overcapitalising on strengths, is a challenging path to walk. An experienced coach can help you avoid the dead-ends and pitfalls.

Final Word: Don’t Be the Last to Know

The most dangerous moment in leadership is not when things are going wrong. Things are always going wrong. It’s when they are going wrong, and you’ve convinced yourself they aren’t. And if they are, that it’s not within your control.

You don’t need to be flawless to lead well. But you do need the courage to look, and the discipline to build strategic humility into your operating system.

Because blind spots are inevitable. But staying blind is a choice.

1. Goleman, D. (1998). What Makes a Leader? Harvard Business Review; Scott, K. (2017). Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity.

2. Gardner, W. L., & Martinko, M. J. (1988). Impression management in organizations. Journal of management, 14(2), 321-338.

3. Staw, B. M. (1976). Knee-deep in the big muddy: A study of escalating commitment.

4. Fleenor, J. W., Smither, J. W., Atwater, L. E., Braddy, P. W., & Sturm, R. E. (2010). Self–other rating agreement in leadership: A review. The leadership quarterly, 21(6), 1005-1034.

5. Bazerman, M. H., & Tenbrunsel, A. E. (2011). Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What’s Right and What to Do About It.

6. Hogan Assessments (2019). The Dark Side of Leadership: 11 Reasons Leaders Fail. https://www.hoganassessments.com/blog/the-dark-side-of-leadership-11-reasons-leaders-fail/

7. Atwater, L. E., & Yammarino, F. J. (1992). Does self–other agreement on leadership perceptions moderate the validity of leadership and performance predictions? Personnel Psychology; Fleenor, J. W., et al. (2010). Self–other rating agreement in leadership: A review. The Leadership Quarterly.

8. Festinger, L. (1957). Social comparison theory. Selective Exposure Theory, 16(401), 3.

9. Staw, B. M. (1976). Knee-deep in the big muddy: A study of escalating commitment.

10. Taylor, S. E., & Brown, J. D. (1988). Illusion and well-being. Psychological Bulletin.

11. Keysar, B., & Henly, A. S. (2002). Speakers' overestimation of their effectiveness. Psychological Science, 13(3), 207-212.

12. Keltner, D., Gruenfeld, D. H., & Anderson, C. (2003). Power, approach, and inhibition. Psychological review, 110(2), 265; Galinsky, A. D., Magee, J. C., Inesi, M. E., & Gruenfeld, D. H. (2006). Power and perspectives not taken. Psychological science, 17(12), 1068-1074.

13. Fleenor, J. W., Smither, J. W., Atwater, L. E., Braddy, P. W., & Sturm, R. E. (2010). Self–other rating agreement in leadership: A review. The leadership quarterly, 21(6), 1005-1034.

14. Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly.

15. Nemeth, C., Brown, K., & Rogers, J. (2001). Devil's advocate versus authentic dissent: Stimulating quantity and quality. European Journal of Social Psychology, 31(6), 707-720.

16. Fast, N. J., et al. (2009). Power and overconfident decision-making. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

17. Klein, G. (2007). Performing a project premortem. Harvard Business Review.

18. Theeboom, T., Beersma, B., & van Vianen, A. E. M. (2014). Does coaching work? A meta-analysis on the effects of coaching on individual-level outcomes in an organizational context. The Journal of Positive Psychology.