Discovering Your Blind Spots

I frequently facilitate planning with organizations and their teams. I help them flush out their blocks and obstacles and assess their environment and internal capacity. And even with that work, blind spots always show up during implementation. Blind spots are issues, behaviors, biases, challenges, operating outside of your awareness. You often can’t see them until someone points them out. As individual leaders, we all have behaviors that we can’t see the impact of because they are so automatic to us. Groups and organizations have these blind spots too. Blind spots are embedded in the organization’s culture. Some groups are overly optimistic.  Others have different kinds of unaware biases. All of these things block the manifestation of an organization’s vision. Usually blind spots raise their ugly heads during the discussion about why something failed, or some goal did not get met. 

 

How can you figure these things out before they have a negative impact? One way of flushing out these blind spots in advance is personal and professional development. I think this is one reason why individual and group coaching has become so popular and productive. The coach joins the individual or the group on their implementational journey. They support their day-to-day awareness, choices, and learning. The coach’s job is to raise the awareness of the client and see what they cannot see. Coaches help clients see their pattern and the impact of their choices. The coach supports their increased awareness of their thoughts, behaviors, actions, intentions, and their impact on others and their vision and goals.

 

Sometimes people’s intentions don’t match their impact. This incongruence inspires so much learning. This is the work of sustainable change that transforms organizations and their leaders. It profoundly changes what the leaders and their organizations are capable of and are able to produce. This kind of self-reflection and learning is why people declare themselves a “learning organization”, even when the rigor of the self-reflection work is missing. Self-reflection or self-examination is also the thing that most people avoid. And it is the key to great success.

 

If you or your team could benefit from coaching, please contact me and let’s talk. Click here to schedule a consultation.