Leadership and the Power of Inattentional Blindness

 

“Leaders often fail to notice when they are obsessed by other issues, when they are motivated to not notice, and when there are other people in their environment working hard to keep them from noticing.” – Harvard Business School Professor Max Bazerman

When you are driving and have your complete attention on just one item, this could simply be because you are eating, speaking on the phone, or texting, and despite your eyes being fixed on the road, you will fail to see important details.

The 5 Levels of Leadership by John C. Maxwell looks at five levels of leadership, which begin with positional leadership and end with Pinnacle leadership. In the area of leadership, we all aspire to get to level 5, and it is really not an easy journey there. 

One of the reasons why it takes so long to get there is attentional blindness. As leaders, we fail to notice important information in our ecosystem, and the failure to notice means we become reactive leaders instead of being proactive. We make so many decisions every day, and as leaders, we need to be confident that we can understand our environment and consequently make better decisions. However, it is not always possible to get everything right, we are human and we miss things and you can always;

  1. Pay attention to distractions from colleagues and from activities that take you away from actual leadership.

  2. Analyze situations further; Think about motives and any bias that you or others might have. 

  3. Request feedback from the teams that work with you and report to you. You'll learn not only what you don't know about yourself, but also what others do.

  4. Be ready to give feedback to your team. 

  5. Create systems and processes that give incentives to employees based on proper KPIs.

  6. Create a personal development plan for growth for yourself and your team.




My name is Primera Muthoni, and I enjoy  being a Product Manager. On other days, you will find me supporting women entrepreneurs by helping them navigate and adopt technology to accelerate business growth.

Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.


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