This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Creativity, Inc." by Ed Catmull. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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What are leadership blind spots? How do these prevent you from being the best manager for your organization?
Leadership blind spots are your problem areas that you’re unaware of. Because you don’t know they exist, they’re hard to discover and improve on.
Read more about leadership blind spots and how to fix them.
Finding Your Leadership Blind Spots
Everyone has leadership blind spots, or problematic areas they’re unaware of. Discovering these issues isn’t easy because these trouble areas exist outside of your current perspective. For example, if you’re in upper management at a manufacturing facility, you may not know about issues on the production line if you’re not seeing them for yourself.
These blind spots can lead to unexpected meltdowns or poor decision-making. To avoid potential disaster, raise your awareness and constantly search for the “hidden” problems in your organization.
When you’re in a position of power, people tend to tell you what you want to hear. This deferential treatment can skew your perspective in dangerous ways. For example, a high-ranking executive may believe that employee morale is high because, whenever she sees her employees, they seem happy and hard at work. However, she’s unaware that this high morale is an illusion. Her employees are actually unhappy with their work environment, but they don’t want to upset the “boss.” Employee frustration may continue to fester until, suddenly, people begin quitting “unexpectedly.”
There are three factors that lead to leadership blind spots:
- Employees are on their best behavior around people in power. You can’t always rely on your managers or employees to be honest with you about brewing issues. Even when you ask for candidness, team members may withhold information at the risk of looking incompetent.
- Hierarchy can create a false sense of importance. While hierarchy in a company can be beneficial, it can also lead to people attributing value to job titles. For example, a middle manager may treat an executive with the utmost respect because that person is “important” while they treat their employees terribly because those people aren’t “important.” This can lead to false information being passed up the chain of command while mistreatment goes unreported. As a leader, this makes it challenging to know if an employee is actually doing good work, or if they’re just saying what you want to hear.
- Complex and large organizations have a lot of moving parts. Different departments deal with a series of daily routines and responsibilities. Because of this, every team member has a different perspective based on their limited view of the company. Even executive members who are supposed to oversee multiple departments don’t have a clear perspective on every moving piece of an organization. Therefore, when decisions are made without first consulting others, they’re made with an incomplete picture of the status of the company.
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Here's what you'll find in our full Creativity, Inc. summary :
- How Pixar went from selling computers to successful animation studio
- What it takes to build a creative workplace culture
- Why George Lucas sold Pixar to Steve Jobs
