Overcoming Blind Spots for Business Growth– Part One

We all have blind spots and they can potentially cost our businesses a lot of money. We can’t anticipate a problem that we don’t know exists and we can’t make decisions about an issue that hasn’t yet arisen. Similarly, when we are operating securely out of a well-established comfort zone, we might not be actively scanning our environment for opportunities we haven’t yet identified, or great ideas we haven’t yet developed. But there are two kinds of blind spots: the ones we don’t know we have, and the ones that we know we have, and that scare us.

The blind spots that we don’t know about come from a number of conditions in our lives: some are a function of our personality, and others come from our training. Still others result from previous experiences that set us up with a system of filters through which we perceive the world around us.

The biggest blind spot we at Light-Core see at the C-level is an inability to understand why managers, as well as the team, are not able to lever the opportunities digital disruption has unearthed that those at the C-level are able to “see” so clearly.

Blind Spots in the C-Suite

The C-level does not appreciate that what they see and sense is beyond the bandwidth threshold of most of their managers, team and, in some cases, others in the C-Suite. For the C-Suite, this is agonizing. For the manager and team members, who have smaller bandwidths than those to whom they report, this is triggering unprecedented levels of disengagement and burnout. Those who report to people with big bandwidth want to see the patterns that those above them see, but they are literally blind to them. Most want to be able to hear the nuances in conversations with suppliers or clients that those above them hear, but they are literally deaf to them. They want to sense, understand and take action on the opportunities that those senior to them identify, but they are numb to the navigation keys that senior executives use to navigate VUCA.

This tension is tangible and growing at a gallop. The folks in the C-Suite can see the solution, but they have no way of relating the “how” to others, because they themselves are deaf, numb and blind to how they do what they do. Managers can sense that they are not performing to expectation, but they have limited-to-no capacity to build bridges to either the C-Suite or their team.

When it comes to the impact of VUCA on performance, most people, senior, mid-level and junior, are literally deaf, numb and blind.

This is a big topic and I’ll have more to say about it in my next blog – in the meantime, if you’d like to find out how Light-Core can support your organization to unprecedented returns in the months and years ahead, we invite you to get in touch.