Aware summary

So what do you, your last boss, and your car have in common? You’ve got it – you all have blind spots. 

Leadership blind spots are areas where leaders fail to recognize problems – whether within themselves, their teams, or their organizations. Like the blind spots in automobiles that cause countless accidents when drivers change lanes without checking their mirrors, leadership blind spots create dangerous zones of invisibility that can lead to devastating consequences.

Self-awareness is one of the most fundamental leadership competencies. So how can you develop it? Let’s look at three approaches.

The first is to deliberately seek structured external feedback – to gather data from those who observe your leadership in action. A 360-degree review is a comprehensive assessment where feedback is collected from supervisors, peers, and direct reports across multiple dimensions. Unlike casual feedback, these structured assessments use standardized tools that measure a range of specific competencies and areas for growth.

Marcus thought he’d covered all the bases when he announced his company’s new remote work policy. His team had spent weeks crafting what seemed like a comprehensive plan. Then, the implementation began – and the complaints started flooding in: IT support gaps, communication breakdowns, and manager confusion about expectations. What happened? The team had planned for success, but never seriously considered what might go wrong.

This scenario illustrates a common leadership blind spot: the tendency to focus on intended outcomes while failing to anticipate unintended consequences. Advanced self-awareness requires you to identify and challenge the fundamental assumptions you hold. Scenario planning represents one powerful tool for this. Rather than defaulting to optimistic projections, systematically explore all potential outcomes, including those that feel uncomfortable to consider. The point is to reveal underlying assumptions and biases that often remain hidden in conventional planning processes. When you ask yourself, What if my key assumptions prove wrong?, you begin to see the blind spots before they create problems.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he transformed the company through his unique gift: visionary product design and relentless perfectionism. His superpower lay in imagining products that didn’t yet exist. When Tim Cook succeeded him as CEO, he brought a completely different set of abilities centered on operational excellence and supply chain mastery. Where Jobs was the brilliant disruptor, Cook became the masterful optimizer.

Every leader possesses a unique set of talents that represents their distinctive contribution to the world – as Csorba puts it, their “superpower”. Your goal in your professional development should be to discover your superpower and then learn to deploy it to its greatest effect. Self-awareness thus serves two purposes in leadership development – revealing limiting blind spots along with the combination of strengths that define you at your peak performance.