A 360 Can Help You See Your Blind Spots in a New Light
As a leader, you owe it to your team to bring your best to work. Who better to help you do it than your team?
When it comes to interacting with others, each of us has a blind spot. Leaders are no different, but the implications of not understanding their blind spots are greater because other people look to them to set an example for the rest of the company. The leader’s failure to identify and deal with their blind spots can also sabotage not only their leadership but also the success of the company.
This problem is much more prevalent than many people believe among founders who tend to be confident individuals – and all the more so when they are purpose-driven founders like the ones I work with. The greatest hurdles to dealing with your blind spot are, first, the fear of change. But as Jim Collins wrote in his classic, Good to Great, “Level 5 leaders [these are the best leaders] have a radical orientation to the truth, and the humility to embrace the changes necessary for the greater good.”
The second hurdle is that your team is often reluctant to speak up when your decision making, planning or problem-solving is not productive or helpful to them in their work. None of us are brilliant at everything, right? But who is going to tell us this when we need this information the most?
One of the tools I have enjoyed success using with founders is a 360 coaching program that allows founders, CEOs and other leaders to gather anonymous feedback from their teams on their strengths and opportunities to improve and to use this feedback to make concrete changes to their leadership style as well as to the company. At the risk of generalizing, let me say that the only thing more certain than the feeling of trepidation founders feel at the prospect of doing a 360 is the renewed energy they feel after they’ve done one and can take positive action.
So, how does a 360 work?
Mini-case study: the visionary who missed the small picture
I recently worked with a young company in the CPG space that boasted a charismatic founder and talented team that wasn’t clicking the way someone looking from the outside would think it should. After a couple discovery sessions with the founder, I proposed a 360 coaching program for him. Talk about diving into the deep end of the pool. It was my job to gather the data, do the interviews and then deliver the tough message the CEO most needed to hear.
My process involved the following:
An initial feedback briefing, to create psychological safety for the CEO, and all the participants, followed by collection of feedback.
An outline of the leader’s strengths, areas to leverage, weaknesses to delegate, opportunities for growth and blindspots to manage.
A coaching debrief to help the CEO synthesize the feedback into an action plan.
A monthly follow-up.
The main learning from the 360 was that while the founder was viewed as an extremely creative, persuasive and articulate champion of the brand – both within the company and with external audiences – he fell short on several important leadership traits, notably planning, setting and sticking to priorities and “ownership,” which related to being present with his team day to day.
The founder’s expertise and passion for his mission also tended to make him seem arrogant and high-minded and rather a poor listener, even though his team also admired his collaborative nature, salesmanship and sense of humor.
In the course of my coaching with the founder, he took the feedback to heart, looked very hard at his leadership and where his blind spots had gotten the better of him and made some important decisions about changing some things. First, he hired a COO to delegate the planning, systems and prioritization processes the team needed to do their work. Second, he pledged to devote more time to improving the product and its packaging, two action items that would have seemed to stand out as priorities but hadn’t in the outwardly focused founder’s mind. And, finally, freed from much of the day to day by his new COO, the founder determined to leverage his strong reputation in the industry and double down on his audience-facing communications, including a Ted Talk and other thought leadership activities.
What seemed truly amazing to the founder, once the process had run its course, was how obvious the solutions were once he had gained a new perspective on them. He immediately saw how his strengths – knowledge of and passion for his company’s mission – could also be his weaknesses, i.e., inattention to detail, focus on himself and his vision rather than team. And he is choosing to do something proactive about making his beloved company stronger.
And that’s the best outcome a coach could hope for. Let me know what you’re doing to address your blind spots, so you can bring your best self to your company as the leader.
Sincerely,
Nick Van Nice, ScalePassion