Dealing with blind spots
I recall my first coaching session with SP when she cast her eyes downwards into her coffee cup and said: ‘I do not know how this has happened. I just cannot believe my team would say these things about me.’ We were going through the feedback she had received from a recent 360 review, which had resulted in SP being assigned behavioural coaching in lieu of promotion to equity partnership. The review comments were tough to digest. But what struck me most was not what the feedback said, but how completely unaware SP was of how she was perceived by her team members.
We all have blind spots. Even the most self-aware among us have sides of ourselves that we do not see. It is because we all have baggage – the leftovers from our internal family dynamics, our cultures, our environments, our traumas, our experiences in corporate life – that we have submerged deep inside of us from moments in the past. A key element of being more conscious is acquiring enough self-knowledge to better recognize our wounds from the past, and take responsibility for their impact, positive and otherwise, on those around us. This means altering our behaviour so we do not inflict these wounds on the people around us. The good news is that there are tools available to enhance our understanding of ourselves and the impact we have on others.
The Johari window (Luft and Ingham, 1955*), for example, can improve our awareness of ourselves and others in a group. It identifies four types of self, relating to awareness of our personality traits, characteristics, and qualities as follows:
1. Open self - Characteristics of ourselves that we are aware of and are known to others.
2. Hidden self - Characteristics of ourselves that we know about, but which may be too private to share with others.
3. Blind self - Characteristics of ourselves that others can see but of which we are blissfully unaware.
4. Unknown self - Hidden depths within ourselves that nobody knows about, including ourselves.
Narrowing the Perception Gap
As leaders of change we must narrow the Perception Gap; the gap between how we see ourselves and how others see us. We do this by working on increasing the size of our Open Self, by working through each of the other selves – Hidden, Blind and, Unknown. We embark on the process of reducing our blind spots by focusing on the areas of ourselves that we are yet to uncover or of which we need deeper understanding. This involves:
· self-disclosure – the need to communicate, open up to vulnerability, and become more approachable (without oversharing!); and
· feedback – seeking in-moment, factually based, open feedback on how we make a person feel, what we are not seeing, and what we should know. It is necessary to seek feedback not just from our direct reports but also from other stakeholders to understand what others are saying about us and our behaviour.
As we uncover more of ourselves, we understand ourselves better, allowing others to understand us better too. And the light that we shine, allows others to follow our lead into change.
If you are seeking to change the way you lead to have greater impact, reach out to engage in C-Success Coaching at https://www.kiranscarr.com/coaching.
*Luft, J. and Ingham, H., ‘The Johari window, a graphic model of interpersonal awareness’ in Proceedings of the Western Training Laboratory in Group Development (1955) University of California, Los Angeles.