Leadership Blind Spots: How to Find Them Before They Find You

Every leader has blind spots. Learn the three places they hide (overused strengths, your story, inner voices) and how executive coaching brings them to light.

LEADERSHIPEXECUTIVE COACHING

Steve Roskamp

10/19/20261 min read

Every leader has a blind spot. The question is whether you find it, or it finds you.

Blind spots are the parts of your leadership you can't see from where you stand. That's not a character flaw. It's how blind spots work. And left alone, they quietly cap how far you and your team can go.

Here are three places they tend to hide.

1. Your strengths, overused

The thing that got you promoted can become the thing that holds you back. An overused strength turns into a failure point. Decisiveness becomes steamrolling. Care for people becomes avoiding hard conversations. Because it still feels like a strength, you don't question it.

2. Your story

Past experiences shape how you read other people, usually without you noticing. A comment lands as criticism because of something years old. A quiet team member reads as disengaged because of what you learned early in your career. You think you're seeing the situation. You're often seeing your history.

3. The voices in your head

We all carry internal "Saboteur" voices that steer decisions. The Judge, the Controller, and the Pleaser are three common ones. They sound like good sense in the moment. You can read more in our post on leadership self-sabotage.

How do you actually find a blind spot?

You usually can't do it alone. That's why executive coaching exists. In 1-on-1 coaching, we start with data. The Strengths Deployment Inventory (SDI) shows your core motivations and how they shift under conflict. The Saboteur Assessment identifies the inner voices undermining your leadership. Then we have the conversations that surface what the data points to.

The goal isn't to fix you. You're not broken. The goal is to find these things before they find you, and to build practices that hold up under pressure.

If you'd like to see what the process looks like in practice, read how executive coaching works. Or go straight to the source: email steve@achillesconsultinggroup.com to book a free consultation.

You can also explore our other leadership services for teams and organizations.