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When was the last time someone in your team told you something about your leadership that you did not want to hear?
If you can answer immediately, you may have a healthy feedback culture.
If you struggle to answer, the silence around you is the answer. And the consequences reach further than most leaders realise.
When Strengths Become Overused
A leader succeeds because they are decisive, driven and confident. They take ownership, work harder than everyone else and hold high standards. Consequently, they do more of what made them successful. That is where the problem begins.
Decisiveness becomes control, confidence becomes certainty, high standards become perfectionism and resilience becomes isolation.
A strength was used a little too often, in an environment that had changed. Eventually the behaviour becomes the norm.
Peter Drucker argued that leaders consistently overestimate how well they understand their own effect on others, and that the only reliable corrective is feedback grounded in actual results, not self-assessment. Past performance, he warned, is one of the most persistent traps in leadership as a guide to future judgement.
How Drift Happens and Why Nobody Notices
The progression moves through six stages. A healthy leader makes a tiny drift, a small overuse of a strength in response to pressure. It works, so it becomes a habit. The habit becomes a pattern. The pattern becomes invisible to the leader, a blindspot, while remaining entirely visible to everyone around them. By the time it shows up as unhealthy leadership, it has often been running for months.
That is what makes it so difficult to catch. Each step feels like a reasonable response to a real situation: more decisiveness in a crisis, higher standards when performance slips, tighter control when stakes are high. None of it feels like drift. It feels like leadership.
Success Changes the Feedback Loop and Kills Ingenuity
The higher a leader rises, the more isolated they become from the truth. Not because people stop seeing it, but because they stop saying it. The signals travel upward in softened form. Problems arrive pre-filtered.
The leader receives positive signals at precisely the moment they most need honest challenge.
But the cost is not only personal. When a leader becomes impossible to challenge, the organisation loses something more than truth about that leader. It loses the conditions that allow ingenuity to function. Nobody brings a better idea to someone who has stopped questioning their own. Nobody raises an unconventional solution to a leader who has signalled, consciously or not, that challenge is unwelcome. The innovation that organisations depend on reaches the top only when people believe it is safe to bring it. An isolated leader does not just limit their own development. They limit their organisation’s capacity to think.
Drucker’s point was that self-examination is not optional for leaders who want to remain effective. It is the discipline that keeps the feedback loop open, and with it, the flow of ideas that every organisation needs to stay ahead.
When the Environment Outpaces the Leader
The difficulty comes when the environment changes but the leadership response does not. What worked when responsible for yourself may not work at scale. What worked in a crisis can become destructive as a permanent model.
I spent twenty years in senior corporate leadership. The moment I remember most clearly came four weeks into rescuing a $100M account facing an $80M legal threat. I had taken over decision-making completely. It was what the situation demanded, and it worked. Then I noticed the team had stopped making decisions at all. Every question, every call, every next step came to me. Taking control had been the right call. Staying in control too long was the blindspot. I handed power back. The account recovered. But knowing when to stop doing the right thing is a different skill from knowing how to do it, and I had not seen that coming.
Leadership requires something more difficult than knowing your strengths. It requires knowing when they have stopped serving you, and you are almost always the last to find out.
Two Leaders, Two Different Lessons
Richard Nixon demonstrates the danger of isolation from uncomfortable information. As power created distance, the information around him became distorted. The truths that might have changed his decisions existed, but the environment made them impossible to hear.
Abraham Lincoln provides the counter-example. Rather than surrounding himself with agreement, Lincoln deliberately brought opposing views into the room, his Team of Rivals. Disagreement was not a threat to his leadership. It was protection against it.
The difference was not personality. It was the environment each leader created.
The Blindspot Nobody Talks About
Every leader has blindspots. The dangerous assumption is believing that because you cannot see yours, they are not there.
Success produces confidence, and confidence produces the conviction that one’s own judgement is sound. That is precisely when it is most likely to be wrong.
Drucker’s answer was systematic feedback, comparing actual results against expectations rather than against memory. Most leaders never do this. They rely instead on their track record. That is the moment the blindspot stops being personal and starts being organisational: the ideas that never reach the top, the questions that go unasked, the ingenuity that stays quiet because nobody was sure it would be welcome.
So the question is not: what are my weaknesses?
It is: which of my strengths am I now overusing?
And the most important: who can tell me the truth, and do they feel safe enough to do it?
The leaders who sustain ingenuity are not those who have eliminated their blindspots. They are the ones who have built enough challenge, reflection and honest relationships around themselves to ensure those blindspots do not stay invisible for long, and that the ideas, the questions, and the uncomfortable truths keep finding their way through.
About the authors:
Carl McCann MBA is a former RAF Wing Commander and senior corporate leader who led five global transformations and served as EMEA Chief of Staff for a $10BN region.
Dr Shannon Hogan is a leadership researcher, educator and executive coach who developed
the Leadership Strength-Shadow Paradox. Together, they explore the blindspots that emerge when leadership strengths are overused under pressure, and their impact on decisions, teams and organisational performance.