Blind Spots in Leadership: How Strengths Become Risks
eliza hl
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Blind Spots in Leadership: How Strengths Become Risks
Star performers drive results—but even strong leaders can have blind spots. When their perceptions about the business or their colleagues or themselves are off, the consequences can ripple across the organization.
In this post, we explore how leadership blind spots emerge, how they hurt performance, and how the IO | Finance & Leadership workshop helps senior teams recognize and address them.
What Are Leadership Blind Spots
We expect senior people to have strong judgment. But even seasoned leaders may:
- Make decisions based on outdated or incomplete assumptions.
- Undervalue the contributions of other teams.
- Misread risk or miss key warning signs.
Blind spots aren’t just personal issues—they create real business risks. They distort decisions, damage trust, slow execution, and weaken alignment across departments.
Leadership blind spots rarely come from ignorance or bad intentions.Instead, they emerge when a leader’s greatest strengths are applied too rigidly, too often, or in the wrong context.
A leader known for fast decision-making might start to make all decisions quickly, even the complex choices that require important details or signals from an extended team.
Often, a weakness is simply a strength applied in the wrong place.
How Strengths Become Blind Spots
Leaders rely on the skills and behaviors that made them successful. But when the situation changes—a larger team, a complex strategy, faster competition—those same strengths can quietly become liabilities.
- Confidence becomes stubbornness.
- Decisiveness becomes rashness.
- Independence becomes isolation.
But these strengths—confidence, decisiveness, independence—are widely embraced as strong leadership qualities. That makes it difficult for leaders to recognize when they are being applied in the wrong place or context. Because these traits are familiar and feel "right," they are hard to recognize as risks. Over time, blind spots grow deeper and harder to correct.
Dangerous Blind Spots That Become 'Death Zones'
Not every leadership blind spot becomes a crisis. But under pressure, certain patterns consistently emerge—even among highly capable leaders.
These high-risk traps are what we call the Leadership Death Zones.
They aren't obvious flaws. They're instincts and habits that become dangerous when overused or misapplied—and they appear across industries, roles, and leadership styles.
Adapted from the book High Altitude Leadership by Don Schmincke and Chris Warner, these eight “Death Zones” are recurring traps that limit leadership effectiveness:
- Fear of Death: Avoiding bold action due to risk or uncertainty.
- Cowardice: Failing to make tough calls or confront uncomfortable truths.
- Comfort: Sticking with what's familiar, even when change is needed.
- Tool Seduction: Relying on systems and tools instead of tackling real issues.
- Selfishness: Prioritizing personal or departmental goals over shared success.
- Lone Heroism: Trying to fix problems solo rather than using the team.
- Arrogance: Believing you always know best—and ignoring others.
- Gravity: Invisible forces (like culture or pressure) that slow progress.
Recognizing these patterns early allows leaders to adapt—before small misjudgments become big failures.
How IO | Finance & Leadership Tackles the Challenge
IO | Finance & Leadership helps participants:
- Work through high-pressure business scenarios.
- Identify personal and organizational blind spots.
- Engage in reflection and peer feedback.
Each participant receives a set of Leadership Death Zone cards—a simple, visual tool that helps them recognize key risks in themselves and others. One participant even asked to take extra cards to better understand her boss’s blind spots.
The workshop doesn’t point fingers. It helps leaders build awareness, adjust their approach, and improve how they show up across the business.
From Awareness to Action
When senior leaders recognize their blind spots, they:
- Step back and reflect more thoughtfully before acting.
- Invite broader input and discussion to challenge their assumptions.
- Make sharper, more balanced decisions.
- Lead with greater humility and insight.
- Strengthen alignment across functions and levels.
IO | Finance & Leadership is built for strong performers who want to deepen their self-awareness, build team alignment, and sharpen their leadership approach.
Want to bring this to your star performers? Let’s talk about how IO | Finance & Leadership can strengthen decision-making, trust, and leadership impact.
Book a Demo
Missed Part 1? Blind Spots in Business: Why Misguided Perceptions Hurt Performance, where we explore how employee-level misunderstandings affect day-to-day operations and decision-making.
The IO | Finance & Leaderhip workshop includes the 8 High Altitude Leadership death zones. The focus is Better Business Leaders. Better Business Acumen. Better Business Results.
