Description

Recently I delved into a topic that was escalated to me, that turned out to be far worse than I thought. Let's talk about leadership blind spots.

Notes:

• As a leader, you cannot be everywhere at all times.
• Instead, you rely on your team to tell you if there are any issues that you need to be aware of.
• Like many leaders, I assume that everything is fine if I am not hearing about issues.
• That optimism is done largely for mental health issues, as there is no point in worrying about unknowns, but the flip side is that you will have blind spots.
• Recently, I had a Product Manager that escalated to me about the performance of one of my engineers.
• He complained that the engineer had poor communication skills, poor availability, and also questioned the quality of his work.
• Obviously I took that seriously, but decided to firstly speak with the engineer in question to get his side of the story.
• When I did, I discovered many more problems existing in the team, including:
  1. The PM cancelled the sprint retrospectives because the actions identified in previous retros were never actually actioned.
  2. Pull requests were left open for way too long, resulting in long-lived branches causing merge conflicts.
  3. The PM was running the stand-ups, and controlling the agenda there. The engineers had little say.
  4. Tickets being brought into the sprint were consistently poorly define.
• I think you get the picture: there is a lot going wrong in the team that needs to be fixed at a process level, but instead of fixing that, the PM was too busy blaming one of the engineers.
• It's a great example of how scratching at the surface of a problem can reveal layers of compounded problems underneath.
• So what can a leader do to handle such blind spots?
  1. Encourage your team to report issues to you, safe in the knowledge that you won't "shoot the messenger".
  2. Don't freak out!
  3. Don't blame!
  4. Instead, solicit feedback from everyone involved, identify the actions, and assign owners. In essence, do a retrospective.
  5. Solicit regular status reports from your team, and encourage them to flag issues there and not just present good news.
• A great format for such reports is to have dedicated highlights, lowlights, and blockers sections to encourage your team to cover all of the bases.
• Sadly however, you will inevitably be blind-sided even with great reporting: the key thing is to control your reaction, and drive the conversation based on the facts rather than an emotional reaction.

Notes and subscription links are here: https://techleader.pro/a/689-Leadership-blind-spots-(TLP-2025w16)