Uncovering Your Leadership Blind Spots?

In this episode of The Leaders Kit Bag, we’re tackling one of the biggest challenges even the most self-aware individuals face: uncovering your leadership blind spots.

Using a personal story from the development of Ben AI, I share a real-life example of how a name that seemed perfectly logical on paper almost became a serious misstep, simply because the people around me didn’t feel comfortable enough to challenge it early on.

We explore the real reason why valuable insights often go unspoken: a lack of psychological safety.

This episode unpacks what psychological safety really means, why it’s so crucial to your team’s effectiveness, and the key things we can do to accelerate it in new working relationships.

You’ll learn:

• Why even confident teams may hesitate to speak up
• The two root causes of low psychological safety
• How to reinforce open communication by praising the right behaviour
• A simple strategy to accelerate trust-building in your team

…all in just six minutes!

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Podcast Transcript: Uncovering Your Leadership Blind Spots

No matter how self-aware we think we are as leaders, we all have blind spots.

The key question is, are you doing enough to uncover them?

That’s exactly what we’re exploring in today’s episode of The Leaders Kit Bag.

I’m sharing a few tips and ideas to help you spot those hidden gaps. And the same tools will help reduce the number of missed opportunities or missteps in your team or even across your entire business.

Let me share a personal example from my own business.

Around nine months ago, I launched Ben AI, my AI clone. What you may not know is that the original name was Ben in Your Pocket.

We’d been running with that name for months through planning, development and prep.

Then, in an email exchange, a former client of mine, who oozes confidence and knows me well, asked, “Ben, have you actually market tested that name?”

I hadn’t. Not properly, anyway.

That one comment made me think. And the name Ben in Your Pocket, while it made sense logically, suddenly felt… a bit icky. So we changed it.

I shared this with my new assistant, and her response was, “Oh God, I’m so glad you said that. I’ve been thinking it was a bit weird, but I didn’t know if I should say anything. I wasn’t sure if it was my place or how you’d take it.”

Why does that happen?

Why do people hold back from sharing insights or flagging potential blind spots?

It all comes down to psychological safety.

When psychological safety exists, people feel confident enough to speak up, even if it’s outside their area of expertise or seniority. They’ll challenge assumptions, offer different perspectives and highlight things we might have missed.

But psychological safety can be missing for a couple of reasons.

One, it just doesn’t exist in the organisation’s culture.

Or two, it’s still being built in a new working relationship.

I like to think the second was true in my case. That the safety and openness were building naturally with my assistant as our relationship grew.

So, how do we accelerate psychological safety?

One way is to set expectations around ways of working early on.

You can invite feedback, that helps to a degree. But remember, as leaders, people pay much more attention to what we do and how we react than what we say.

So a more powerful approach is to reward and acknowledge the behaviours you want to see, just like we do with kids.

When my assistant gave me her honest opinion, I made a point of thanking her properly: “I really appreciate that. I wish you’d said it sooner. And if you’ve got thoughts like that in the future, please tell me. It’s really valuable.”

That response is what builds trust.

And when others share similar insights, make sure you do the same.

Focus on reinforcing the behaviours and ways of working you want to cultivate in your team.