Blindspotting: Preventing Hidden Sabotage at Work

Todd Henry [00:00:02]:

Have you ever wondered how someone so talented, so driven, so well intentioned, could unknowingly derail their own work, their team, or even their career? Let's be honest, most of us like to think we have a pretty accurate read on ourselves, right? I mean, we know our strengths, we know what motivates us. And we've likely spent enough time in rooms full of sticky notes and whiteboards to be able to say confidently, I'm pretty self aware. But here's the tricky part about blind spots. By definition, you can't see them. You may feel the effects of them. Tension on your team, a missed opportunity, a sudden emotional reaction you can't quite explain. But you don't always see the source. And more often than not, they don't show up in our weaknesses.

Todd Henry [00:00:45]:

They show up in our strengths. In my work with creative pros and leaders over the years, I've noticed a consistent pattern. The very things that make someone brilliant at their job can, if left unchecked, become liabilities. Their ability to move quickly becomes impatience. Their high standards become micromanagement. Their confidence becomes arrogance. And the worst part, they often have no idea it's happening until it's too late. In die Empty, I wrote about the importance of spending yourself on behalf of meaningful work.

Todd Henry [00:01:17]:

But what often stops us from doing that isn't a lack of drive. It's misdirected effort. It's pouring our energy into patterns and behaviors that once served us really well. But no longer do we evolve, but our habits don't. Our context changes, but our identity stays stuck in the past. Which brings me to today's conversation. Marty Dubin is an executive coach, a former CEO, and now the author of Blindspotting, a book that aims to make the invisible visible for leaders. What I love about Marty's approach is that it's not about radical personality change.

Todd Henry [00:01:53]:

It's about small conscious adjustments, micro recognitions that allow us to stay effective, connected, and in alignment with our values as we grow. He identifies six key areas where blind spots often hide. Motives, traits, emotion, intellect, behavior, and identity. And the last one, Identity is especially powerful because when your role changes, what happens when your self concept doesn't? That's a recipe for frustration, for stagnation, and worse, for unknowing sabotage. You're still clinging to the tools that got you here, even though they might be the exact things holding you back now. So here's what's true. As a leader of creative people, you are constantly evolving. You have to constantly evolve.

Todd Henry [00:02:40]:

Your influence, your authority, your impact. They're all expanding. But if you're not actively adapting your internal frameworks along with your external responsibilities, you're likely leaving a trail of unintended consequences, pain, hurt, frustration behind you. So before we jump into the conversation with Marty Dubin, I want you to reflect on this question. What strength of mine, something I'm proud of, something that I've leaned on, is at risk of becoming a liability? And maybe more importantly, who in my life have I empowered to tell me the truth before I know I need to hear it? This is Daily Creative. Since 2005, we've served up weekly tips to help creative professionals and leaders be brave, focused, and brilliant. My name is Todd Henry. Welcome to the show.

Marty Dubin [00:03:33]:

I've been an executive coach, and one of the things you do is you do 360 interviews. You interview everybody that works around the person. And the typical thing is those interviews tend to fall into two buckets. What's the person great at? What are their strengths? And where are their opportunities for improvement? And typically, when I would do that, the leaders, hey, I know my strengths. Let's just talk about what I need to improve. And I would say, no, let's spend a little bit of time at least making sure you're leveraging your strengths. But I tended to agree with them, like, the gold was in the. In the areas where improvement.

Marty Dubin [00:04:06]:

And then after a while, I started seeing this strange pattern that the problems, the opportunities were actually the flip sides of many of the strengths. And they weren't an exact antonym of the description, the adjective on the strength. But the more I thought about it and the more I reflected back with them, it became just really clear that many of the problems were people overusing their strengths and not realizing when it became a problem. The confident executive becoming arrogant. The kind of highly decisive executive, Ready, fire, aim. And that was the genesis of thinking about this. And as a clinical psychologist, I really tried to think about this in a holistic way. What are the different aspects of somebody's personality? And where might there be blind spots in different areas in the book?

Todd Henry [00:04:56]:

It's very insightful, the way you describe this. You say, super strengths can become supernovas, which I love that phrase. Can you explain that paradox? How is it that something that has led to great success suddenly becomes a hindrance? Or do you have any examples of how that has happened?

Marty Dubin [00:05:11]:

I think we all can relate to this. I don't know about you, but my spouse will tell me that, take your strength and then add the modifier too. T o o and my wife will definitely Tell me when I'm too organized or when I am too decisive. And I think of these as strengths and they are strengths, but I do overplay them. Or there are situations when they aren't called for, but they're my go to. They're the natural automatic response. Think for all of us. Things that work don't become self corrective.

Marty Dubin [00:05:44]:

We just do more of them.

Todd Henry [00:05:45]:

The idea is we can actually identify these blind spots. We can find them in our. You categorize blind spots into six distinct areas. Could you give us a brief overview of the six areas? I want to dive into a few of them and ask you some more pointed questions. But what are the six areas of blind spots?

Marty Dubin [00:06:01]:

Sure. And I with the title of your podcast, the most creative part of this for me of writing the book was I knew I had these six areas and I was talking about em with a colleague of mine and she said I want to be able to talk about these with an executive and I need to draw them on a napkin when we're at lunch. And I was like, yeah, I know. I've just been putting off trying to figure it out. So the hard brain work was the kind of figuring out these, how to make it simple. So if you think about these six blind spots in three concentric circles, and this is a self awareness model is how I look at this. And in the core I'll mention them all and then we can go back and talk to you about each one in the core is our motives. Those are the things that are the deepest, most hidden from our own awareness, what's really driving us, what's the engine in our own personality system.

Marty Dubin [00:06:51]:

And then the next ring are what I've labeled traits intellect and emotion. And these are pretty darn hardwired and we can change them around the edges a little bit. But these are by the time we're adults, this the traits are the adjectives we use to describe ourselves. Our emotional makeup is the emotion part and our intellectual makeup. And then on the outside ring are the two areas which are most accessible to our conscious awareness and they're most visible to other people. Our behavior and our identity. And so maybe I'll just I open the book with the identity one because I think it's one that we don't think about too often. But we all have name tags that we stick on ourselves when who we are.

Marty Dubin [00:07:32]:

When you go to cocktail party and somebody introduces themselves and you introduce yourself, how do you describe yourself? How do you describe your work and the blind spots that come up in Identity are when we have a role shift and our identity doesn't shift with that role. Classic one is the individual contributor, the marketing expert that becomes a marketing manager and still wants to do all the marketing instead of manage other people doing the marketing. I did a lot of work with entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and I think there's three stages of being an entrepreneur. First it's an innovator, and then it's a business builder. Once your product is starting to catch and you've proven out the feasibility, then you actually have to build out a business around it and then you actually have to become a leader of that business. There are many entrepreneurs who really their identity is to be an innovator and they struggle in that shift. And whenever you make the shift, there should be some grieving over your past identity. It was who you were.

Marty Dubin [00:08:35]:

So an identity blind spot is when you have a misawareness that your role has shifted and your identity hasn't shifted with that role. In the middle ring are the traits which kind of was where we started those supernovas. And the next is being able to manage your own feelings and not be surprised by them. And we all have blind spots with that. We feel something. It's like, where did that come from? Why did I get so teary? Or why was I so angry in that meeting? If you can manage your own emotions and you have some awareness, then you're in a good position to be able to aware of other people's emotions and be able to read the room, manage your. Your relationships with your colleagues and your subordinates and your superiors. And the last one I think about the very sophisticated is being able to see the downstream effect of emotions, to not only see what the emotions in that moment, but if you're a leader, you want to be able to act decisively and strategically.

Marty Dubin [00:09:32]:

And how, if I show my emotion right now that I'm thinking about, this is gonna have effect right now and it'll have a downstream effect that I wanna have with that kind of emotion.

Todd Henry [00:09:41]:

You mentioned something, and this is something I found very interesting as well in the book, is we tend to think of maybe blind spots as a moment in time, right? We think of them as my inability to see something about myself is affecting what's going on right now. But what I found interesting is it's almost like a snail's trail right across our life. As we, as we transition into different roles or different relationships or other things, we bring the residue from our past experiences with us. So something that maybe wasn't a Blind spot suddenly becomes a blind sp. Because to your point, we still are holding on to the breakeation is the development, the childhood development phase where we learn how to let go of one thing and grab onto another. It seems like blind spots can emerge over time. These aren't hardwired, they can emerge over time as we transition into new roles or new relationships.

Marty Dubin [00:10:31]:

Yeah, we are. If we sat there and thought about everything we did all the time, we wouldn't be very effective. Most we act on our default responses that we've built and we're pattern recognizing beings. So we figure out the patterns and we figure out responses. And so we are on automatic pilot most of the time, quite frankly. And, and that works well for us. But situations are always challenging and different. And so now we're in a situation that is different than before and we're still behaving in the same particular way that we're patterned and we're not aware that we're not as effective.

Marty Dubin [00:11:05]:

And one thing I want to point, I want to make is the book is about making small changes. This isn't about transforming your personality, which I don't think you can do anyway. Nobody, I've never transformed anybody, nor should I ever. This is really about being self aware and then making those small tweaks. Senior leaders in particular are effective 95% of the time. So this is looking at that extra edge to your point of when those patterns from the past now are no longer effective. And we need to become aware of that.

Todd Henry [00:11:35]:

Like you said, it's the small areas of our life. We're 95% effective, but it is in those margins that we can do the most damage. Right. Sometimes it's in those blind spot areas where we can really cause maybe the area of our deepest insecurity is the place where I will often tell leaders the place where you can do the most damage to your team is in the place where you're the most insecure and you may not even be aware that's what's happening. But your reactivity when somebody touches that area of insecurity can do a lot of damage to somebody else.

Marty Dubin [00:12:06]:

Yeah. I share experiences from my own career in the book and in retrospect, looking back on the 15 years when I was an executive, I can see lots of blind spots. And one for me in particular is in terms of kind of personality. My, I would say personality trait I have is agreeableness. Now I don't, I never really defined myself that way, but I, I can get along with a lot of people and that works well. And we got into a major conflict with a customer, a contract dispute. And I approached it in my typical way, maybe we should just talk about this and I'm sure we can work it out instead of really being a good business person and saying, wait, we have a contract, nobody's going to change the terms midway through the contract because, oops, there was a mistake in the beginning and I gave away too much of our leverage, quite frankly, in trying to be collaborative than if I would have approached it right from the beginning.

Todd Henry [00:13:01]:

So one of the, I think important elements of this is we can't see our own blind spots.

Marty Dubin [00:13:09]:

Right.

Todd Henry [00:13:09]:

That's why they're by definition, they're definitely, definitionally they're blind spots because we can't see them. But there are ways that we can begin to identify where they might be. What are some tactical things that leaders who are listening can do to begin to identify whether they might have a blind spot? Obviously we want them to read your book, but what are some tactical things that you would spell out for them?

Marty Dubin [00:13:31]:

Yeah, I think probably the two of the easiest ones are around emotional blind spots or at least emotion as a signal of a blind spot. Because those are the things that often we're surprised by some strong emotion that came seemingly out of nowhere for us. And I would think most of the time those are related to a motive blind spot, some motive. We weren't aware of what we were really after and, or what we were really, what was really important to us. And an emotion came through when our, our desire for some goal was blocked or some very strong feeling showed through, shown through. And so those can be the moments to start to reflect and say, wow, why, why did I tear up in that meeting? Or why did I pound the desk? Or why was I so upset? Why am I always so upset with that? One colleague of mine. And it probably has something to do with some motives that are going on, potentially an identity. And so some self reflection at that, at that moment.

Marty Dubin [00:14:29]:

And I mentioned one, the earlier one of just adding that modifier T o O to some of your favorite, favorite traits. And you may begin to get an idea of where a trait blind spot might be creeping.

Todd Henry [00:14:41]:

I was speaking once at Air University in Montgomery, Alabama for senior Air Force officers. One of the other speakers that day was General George Casey, who's a former four star general, retired. And we were in the green room and I was eating a blueberry muffin and he comes up behind me and I turn around and it's obviously very imposing when you Have a general standing right in front of you. I think I spit blueberry muffin all over his nice suit. But he asked me something about creativity and I answered, but I said, general, what's the most important thing I should know about leadership? And without missing a beat, he said, you need people in your life to speak truth to you before you realize you need people in your life to speak truth to you. By the time you realize you need them, it's already too late. And that really has stuck with me over time because I realized we often don't invite people into our lives, Marty, until we realize there's a problem.

Marty Dubin [00:15:30]:

Right.

Todd Henry [00:15:30]:

And by the time we do that, maybe it's already too late. What is the role that other people can play in helping us identify potential blind spots in our life?

Marty Dubin [00:15:40]:

Yeah, and it is so true in hierarchical organizations where power people are aware of the effects of power and so they don't speak truth to power. And I had one leader tell me that as he arose in the organization, he got less and less feedback until he was a CEO and only his wife and kids could tell him when he was screwing up. And so being vulnerable is, and being self disclosive breeds more self disclosure and creating a climate of feedback. And it's, and it is walking the talk. Executives often start, sometimes ask me like I need to give some hard feedback to this person and help me figure out how to do it. And really the place to start is how about asking them to give you some hard feedback first and let you be the receiving end of that and be able to talk about how important it is to be able to do that and begin to create a climate where that is accepted. And that's really part of the, part of the way the culture works. And I think the other part of what you're talking about too is being open for not knowing what you don't know and being able to be.

Marty Dubin [00:16:43]:

When we're leaders, we think somehow we've got to have it all together. We've got to have all the answers. It's what people expect of us. And it's so relieving to be able to just say, I don't know and can you talk to me about that some more and begin to create that kind of an environment.

Todd Henry [00:17:00]:

Marty Dubin's book is called Blindspotting and it's available now wherever books are sold. And we had a fascinating, pretty wide ranging conversation. If you'd like to hear the full conversation, you can do so@dailycreativeplus.com it's absolutely free. One of the core truths we landed on today is the cost of unexamined strengths is often paid by the people around you. It's easy to assume that we're operating in good faith, and to be fair, we usually are. Most people are just trying to do a good job. Most people. But good intentions don't prevent blind spots.

Todd Henry [00:17:34]:

In fact, they often fuel them. And as Marty shared, the confident leader can drift into arrogance, the decisive one into impulsiveness, the collaborative one into avoidance of necessary conflict. The power of blindspotting is that it gives us language and a structure for identifying these hidden patterns. Whether it's your emotional default setting, your deeply embedded motives, or even an outdated self image, these areas don't need an overhaul. They need awareness. Because once you can name it, you can change it. So here's your homework. Leaders Creative pros Ask someone you trust.

Todd Henry [00:18:09]:

What's something that I might be overdoing? Reflect on your triggers. What situations make you act on autopilot in ways that might not serve you anymore? Revisit your identity. Are you still showing up like the role that you used to play? Listen, Leadership is not about perfection. It's about progression. And the only way to lead with clarity is to be willing to see what you couldn't see before. Thanks so much for listening. Again. If you'd like the full conversation with Marty Dubin or any of our guests, you can do so@daily creative plus.com My name is Todd Henry.

Todd Henry [00:18:46]:

If you want to learn more about my books, I have seven of them or my speaking events, you can do so@todhenry.com until next time. May you be brave, focused and brilliant.