What Your Team Isn’t Telling You: How 360° Feedback Reveals Blind Spots That Block Performance
Even experienced leaders can miss a critical factor in their effectiveness: how their behaviour is perceived by others. It’s not a matter of competence, but perspective. When intention doesn’t match impact, performance suffers. Often without the leader realising why.
Blind spots aren’t character flaws. They’re patterns that sit just outside our awareness and quietly influence how teams respond. Over time, they can erode trust, stall performance, and undermine culture.
This article explores why blind spots are common in leadership, how they affect outcomes, and why most leaders can’t identify them on their own. It also explores how 360° feedback helps leaders see what they’ve been missing and make meaningful changes.
Because you can’t shift what you can’t see. And what you can’t see may well be holding you back.
Why Blind Spots Are So Common — And So Costly
Blind spots don’t come from carelessness. Rather, they come from overreliance on habit. Under pressure, leaders tend to lean on familiar behaviours that once worked well. But those same patterns can become liabilities as contexts shift and teams evolve.
Cognitive bias plays a role too. Most people assume their intent is clear, their actions fair, and their style effective. It’s not arrogance, it’s just human nature. Add in the power dynamics of leadership, and honest feedback becomes rare. Teams often hesitate to challenge or correct what doesn’t feel safe to say out loud.
Even in teams that perform well on paper, the cost is high. Innovation slows when debate is shut down too quickly. Frustration builds when ownership is promised but quietly overridden. Silent misalignment grows when feedback loops break down.
What feels like strong leadership from the inside can feel like control, inconsistency, or confusion from the outside.
These disconnects rarely come up in status reports. But they shape how people engage, what risks they take, and how long they stay. When blind spots go unaddressed, they create friction points. These can drain energy and slow momentum in ways that are hard to trace, but impossible to ignore.
The Intention vs. Impact Gap: Why Self-Perception Isn’t Enough
Leadership is rarely judged by effort. It’s judged by impact.
You might think you’re supporting your team by stepping in when things go off track.
But to them, it may feel like you don’t trust them.
You might believe you’re creating space for input.
But others may see a pattern of decisions already made.
These aren’t failures of intent. They’re mismatches between how you see your leadership and how others live it.
Most leaders rely on self-assessments or one-way feedback to gauge their effectiveness. But those tools are limited. They reflect how leaders think they’re showing up, not how their behaviour is received across different contexts and relationships.
This disconnect grows under stress. In high-pressure moments, even well-intentioned leaders can slip into defensiveness or approval-seeking without noticing. And because those behaviours often look like commitment or care on the surface, they can go unchecked for years.
This is where self-regulation comes in. It’s the core practice that helps leaders bridge the gap between intention and impact. Sitting at the centre of the Leadership Growth Profile framework, self-regulation is about seeing, owning, and regulating.
It’s the true growth engine that allows leaders to reduce negative Red Zone behaviours and act from the Green Zone instead (we talk more about the Red and Green Zones below).
That’s why real growth doesn’t start with what you want to do better. It starts with understanding how you’re experienced by others, especially when the stakes are high. This perspective shift is essential for leaders who want to close the gap between good intentions and leadership that teams can feel and trust.
Feedback that captures this is more than data. It’s a mirror, helping leaders see clearly, adjust meaningfully, and lead with greater impact.
How 360° Feedback Closes the Gap
Leaders can’t grow in a vacuum. Self-reflection matters, but it only takes you so far. Without input from the people you work with every day, it’s easy to miss patterns and reinforce unhelpful habits.
That’s where 360° feedback comes in. It collects feedback from across the system – direct reports, peers, and managers – to provide a fuller, more accurate picture. However, not all 360s are created equal. Many are too broad, too subjective, or too disconnected from real behaviours to drive change.
The Leadership Growth Profile addresses those limitations. It builds on the 360° model with a research-based framework that focuses on specific, observable behaviours. These are the behaviours that shape culture, influence performance, and support long-term development.
Because feedback is anonymous and structured, participants can be honest. The result is a balanced view of what’s working, what’s getting in the way, and what’s going unseen.
That level of clarity doesn’t just help the leader. It helps the whole team. It builds trust, alignment, and shared language around what great leadership looks like.
What makes the Leadership Growth Profile different?
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What the Leadership Growth Profile Reveals: Patterns, Blind Spots, and Breakthroughs
The Leadership Growth Profile helps leaders see what they can’t always recognise on their own.
At its core is the Green Zone and Red Zone framework:
- Green Zone behaviours: Intentional, values-aligned actions like active listening, curiosity, and accountability. These behaviours build trust and drive high performance.
- Red Zone behaviours: Reactive habits that tend to emerge under pressure, such as control, defensiveness, or people-pleasing. While often unconscious, these habits can undermine culture and erode clarity.
The Leadership Growth Profile maps these behaviours across multiple rater groups. This reveals how consistently leaders are showing up – and how those behaviours are seen.
It identifies:
- Strengths leaders may take for granted or undervalue
- Red Zone tendencies such as approval-seeking, control-oriented responses, or overreliance on expertise
- Misalignments between self-perception and team experience
This insight turns vague feedback into something practical.
Example: A leader sees themselves as collaborative. But the Leadership Growth Profile reveals a pattern of interrupting or dismissing input in meetings, especially when deadlines are tight.
They weren’t aware of it. Now they are – and they can shift.
With the right support, that insight can become a new pattern. Listening actively, pausing before responding, and inviting input from quieter voices.
Over time, this doesn’t just change a behaviour. It shifts how the leader is seen, trusted, and followed. It also strengthens the kind of workplace culture that drives performance, learning, and engagement.
These shifts reflect vertical development. The capacity to think, relate, and lead from a more mature, intentional mindset.
From Insight to Impact: Turning Feedback into Change
Feedback only creates value when it leads to meaningful change. The Leadership Growth Profile is designed with that outcome in mind. It doesn’t stop at diagnosis — it gives leaders the tools to grow, supported by structured coaching and clear behavioural insight.
After reviewing their feedback, leaders work with a certified coach to explore the patterns behind what they’re seeing. Together, they examine how often certain behaviours show up, what triggers them, and what might be driving the gap between intention and experience. These conversations aren’t about judgment. They’re about building awareness and choosing what to do next.
This work supports vertical development: the process of expanding how leaders think, relate, and respond. It’s not just about correcting a habit. It’s about growing the internal capacity to lead with greater perspective, maturity, and intention.
When leaders develop at this level, they build:
- Stronger self-regulation under pressure
- More grounded, values-driven decision-making
- Deeper trust and connection with their teams
With the right support, feedback doesn’t just raise awareness. It shifts capability. And when that shift happens, the results show up everywhere; in culture, performance, and long-term impact.
Why This Matters Now
Leadership today is far from simple. Hybrid teams, shifting expectations, and a growing pressure to “do more with less” have created a leadership environment that’s both complex and exhausting. Many leaders are doing their best. But often, they’re doing it on autopilot.
In this environment, good intentions aren’t enough. Without awareness, leaders fall back on old habits that may no longer serve them or their teams. They act from urgency instead of clarity, from habit instead of choice. What’s needed now is a shift toward intentional leadership; the kind that starts with seeing yourself clearly.
That’s what makes 360° feedback essential. When it’s structured, anonymous, and grounded in observable behaviours, it offers leaders the clarity they need to lead with purpose. It’s not a threat to authority. It’s what gives that authority strength, direction, and trust.
The Leadership Growth Profile takes this one step further. By revealing the patterns and blind spots that traditional self-assessments miss, it offers a practical path forward. Not just to act differently, but to lead differently.
See Clearly, Lead Powerfully
In a time of rapid change and rising expectations, 360° feedback is an essential component of successful, purpose-driven leadership. It gives leaders the insight they need to align intention with impact, uncover blind spots, and build the kind of trust that drives real results.
When paired with a research-backed leadership assessment like the Leadership Growth Profile, that feedback becomes a catalyst for lasting growth. Not just in what leaders do, but in how they think, relate, and respond.
The result is leadership that’s not just effective, but truly worth following.