Years ago I sat in an Executive Team meeting and watched two colleagues, I'll call them Sandy and Henry, have an excruciating exchange for ten straight minutes. Let me paint the picture.
Sandy: You need to give me your objectives so I can put them into the scorecard for the board.
Henry: I need you to do it.
Sandy: But you need to write it.
Henry: I know, but you need to do it.
Sandy: When are you going to give it to me?
Henry: I didn't know you needed it.
Sandy: Everyone knew we needed it for next week.
Henry: I don't remember doing it this way last year.
There was more neck craning in that room than a Wimbledon final, everyone's head swiveling back and forth with nobody willing to call the match, and at one point the CEO caught my eye in a way that felt like quiet agreement about what we were all privately thinking. Henry was struggling to hold the role, and I remember inwardly screaming to myself, “Why are we all just letting this happen?”
Breaking the Tension
A single sentence sat right there in front of all of us, unused, the entire time, something as simple as “Let's pause and help the two of you sort out who owns what by end of day”, and yet every person in that room, myself included, decided that interrupting felt riskier than watching, so we watched.
After everyone filed out, Henry pulled me aside and asked whether there was something he was missing, and I knew the answer, had known it for some time, but instead of saying any of that honestly I mumbled something inane and moved on to my next meeting. I told myself, that it was someone else's place to address it. But I was being a coward, protecting myself from a difficult conversation I preferred to avoid.
I should also mention that at that very same meeting, we learned Henry had hired a coach, which made complete sense given what I had witnessed. But what complicated things considerably was that he introduced her to the team at that same meeting, sitting right beside him, and fair or otherwise people drew their conclusions. Whatever goodwill he had accumulated quietly evaporated in that room over the course of one uncomfortable hour.
In the days that followed I noticed something uncomfortable in myself, which was that I had started writing him off too, getting absorbed into the group's shared perception of him until it felt easier to let that perception harden than to do anything about it.
What finally changed things was one Thursday evening when instead of the patient conversation I had been meaning to have for months I simply said, “Henry, you need to write five pages and give them to Sandy”, and he looked at me and said “Why didn't she just say that?” In that single exchange I understood that one honest minute had accomplished what twenty minutes of public circling in front of an entire leadership team had failed to do.
I have thought about that moment ever since, because the problem in that room was never that we failed to see what was happening. We all saw it unfold in living colour. But what we each did with what we saw and how our interpretations hardened into judgments became the very reason nobody moved. McGill professor Karl Moore captured this in a recent Forbes piece on leadership blind spots, arguing that the most dangerous ones are rooted in unexamined perception far more than in ignorance. When I read that I felt the full weight of what had happened in that meeting settle into place, because we had all been looking at Henry without any of us thinking to examine our own perceptions.
Three Things To Carry Forward
Three things I have carried since that day, feel less as a framework and more as a hard-earned sense of what I should have done differently. The first is simply to name the pattern out loud while you are still in the room. A low-drama line like let's pause and sort out who owns what costs nothing and ends a standoff that is costing everyone something. Everyone in these moments is waiting for someone to say it. Next time, be that leader who breaks the tension.
The second is to translate vague conflict into one concrete ask, since most circular arguments are really just two people circling what they have been avoiding. The work of leadership in those moments is to find that one or two sentences and say them plainly without drama and without an audience where possible.
The third is to notice the moment you start writing someone off and treat that feeling as a signal rather than a verdict, because it means your perception has gotten ahead of your leadership. The more useful question is whether you have said the honest thing you’ve been holding back. Henry needed one direct conversation that we had been withholding for months. As I look at it now, what we did as an Executive Team was cruel.
Blind spots are rarely about being oblivious. Most of the time everyone in the room can see the problem clearly enough, but what we struggle to see is our own part in leaving it alone. The cost of that particular blindness tends to land hardest on the people who can least afford it.
Next week I’m launching a short survey built around the questions of how leaders spot the patterns that are tripping them up and what they do once they see them. I’d love for you to be part of it.
What is the thing you have been seeing clearly and leaving alone?