Stress is part of leadership. There’s no way around it. When you know how to leverage stress, it can help you grow your leadership skills. When stress leverages you, it can cause blind spots in your awareness.
Blind spots, by definition, are things you cannot currently see on your own. Gathering data from external sources and committing to being open-minded and expanding self-awareness can help leaders learn to see what they currently cannot. It’s a process that changes your leadership in your career as well as who you are as a person.
The Top 10 Leadership Blind Spots (and the Problems They Cause)
Everyone is unique, with their own personal characteristics and challenges. So while these blind spots aren’t inherent to every leader, they are common, especially among leaders who haven’t learned how to leverage stress to accelerate their leadership growth.
1. Overestimating Communication Effectiveness
Leaders often assume their vision, priorities, or expectations are clear. In reality, messages can be misunderstood or diluted as they travel down the chain of command. When there is a gap between what leaders say and what employees hear, this gap can undermine alignment.
2. Neglecting Emotional Intelligence
Mid-level and executive leaders sometimes undervalue the role of empathy, self-awareness, and relationship management—especially when they lean heavily on technical or strategic skills. This blindspot can erode trust and engagement.
3. Believing Culture Will “Take Care of Itself”
At higher levels, leaders may fail to recognize that their own behaviors set the organization’s cultural tone. Ignoring culture or assuming it is self-sustaining often allows dysfunction, silos, or disengagement to grow unchecked.
4. Failing to Invest in Future Organizational Leaders
Many leaders underestimate how much their organization relies on a pipeline of strong future leaders. Neglecting succession planning, coaching, and development leads to talent gaps that surface during crises or transitions.
5. Overconfidence in Decision-Making
Executives in particular can become insulated by authority and bolstered by past success. This may lead to overreliance on intuition, confirmation bias, or underweighting dissenting voices when making high-stakes decisions.
6. Micromanaging or Over-Delegating
Mid-level leaders often err by holding onto tasks too tightly; senior leaders sometimes swing the opposite way, delegating without sufficient clarity or oversight. Both patterns create performance gaps and frustration.
7. Ignoring Feedback
As leaders rise, receiving candid feedback becomes an increasingly rare occurrence. Many leaders fail to recognize how filtered their feedback is—or they dismiss or rationalize criticism. This blindspot hinders self-awareness and growth.
8. Short-Term Focus at the Expense of Strategy
The pressure to deliver quarterly results or hit near-term KPIs can cause leaders to underinvest in long-term priorities such as innovation, sustainability, and people development. This blindspot can usher in long-term organizational instability.
9. Assuming Organizational Alignment
Leaders often assume that teams and functions are rowing in the same direction. In reality, misaligned incentives, unclear priorities, and siloed execution are common. Without deliberate cross-functional alignment, friction grows.
10. Forgetting the Human Side of Change
Executives may underestimate the time, communication, and emotional support required for people to adapt to change. Leaders can see change as logical; employees often experience it as disruptive or threatening. This blindspot can invite turnover and unnecessary team conflict.
Identifying Blind Spots in Leadership When You’re Stressed
Leaders are defined by how they perform under stress. The real question is how leaders leverage stress to support their leadership growth, not how they reduce stress. I support my coaching clients to explore the added stress that is potentially caused by those blind spots. In general, being strategic and proactive is an effective way to eliminate compounding stress from blind spots in your leadership.
There are some great tools that can be used to get a “better look” at blind spots. I use personality assessments, 360 feedback, and emotional intelligence (EQ) assessments to reveal behavioral and communication characteristics that give clients opportunities for introspection. Of course, these tools aren’t the end-all, be-all when it comes to understanding yourself better. They’re a helpful starting point for becoming more self-aware. Then, we can work on diving deeper.
Energy Leadership Advisors helps develop unique self-awareness to accelerate leadership growth. We do this through our Values Anchored Leadership program, data, and individualized coaching support. Together, we’ll explore your values, goals, and purpose to identify your unique blind spots; discuss them and how they impact your leadership; and help you to determine how to address these areas of your leadership if they are creating gaps between intent and impact.
This work can be difficult and takes time. Once you “see” the blind spot, you have to decide if you want to do something about it. If you decide to embark on that journey, you’re learning to see something that you currently cannot, as well as doing the internal work of addressing this potential gap in leadership performance! However, the unique structure of Values Anchored Leadership spreads the process out over the duration of our engagement. We’ll build on your personal and organizational values to create an opportunity for meaningful and long-lasting change and improvement.
I speak from a point of experience when it comes to working through personal blind spots, and here’s an example. I used to struggle with smiling. To be more specific, I rarely smiled and the natural structure of my face conveyed a frown. I wasn’t unhappy or angy—I just didn’t portray a smile. Then, I got feedback that not smiling made it seem like I was indeed angry and upset with my colleagues. It was a true blindspot. To avoid creating friction or deepening any potential negative feelings among my team and coworkers, I learned to intentionally smile. Today I find it much easier to smile and convey warmth. Not only is it a more accurate reflection of what I really feel, it also creates the type of environment I want to foster thereby increasing my leadership effectiveness.
Leadership Stress Isn’t Necessarily a Bad Thing
Although the term “stress” in leadership is generally considered as a negative thing, I would argue that not only is stress an essential part of the leadership experience, it can absolutely produce positive outcomes. Just like “stressing” your physical capabilities through exercise, leadership stress exercises your leadership capabilities. Leadership stress often produces learning moments and strengthened leadership, not leadership failure.
When organizations are in times of stress—crisis, tight deadlines, accidents, and more—that is when leadership is needed most. Moments of stress are what define you as a leader, and how you show up in those moments reveals a great deal about not only your leadership, but your character. If you want to grow your leadership, I encourage you to look at stress as an opportunity to grow and learn, to shrink blind spots, and refine your art of leadership.
Grow Your Leadership and Shrink Blind Spots with Energy Leadership Advisors
It’s impossible to see blind spots in leadership on your own. Having a coach is a great way to not only identify your blind spots, but refine your art that is leadership and accelerate your leadership growth as well. I’m passionate about guiding leaders through Energy Leadership Advisors’ Values Anchored Leadership program, supporting them as they develop sustainable behavioral changes to minimize or eliminate the detrimental impact of a leadership blind spot.
If you’d like more information, please make an appointment with me via my Calendly link! I am passionate about supporting leaders and love hearing more about your journey. This initial conversation is free of obligation, so please don’t hesitate to be in touch.