Week 16 Day 7: Assignment: Ask 'What Am I Not Seeing?' in Your Next One-on-One

In your next round of one-on-ones, add this question to the end of the conversation: 'What am I not seeing right now -- about the project, the team, or my own leadership?' Then be quiet. Let the silence sit. The first time you ask, you may get 'nothing' or 'I cannot think of anything.' That is okay. The question plants a seed. By the third time you ask, people will come prepared with answers.

Here is why this specific question works and how to maximize its impact. 'What am I not seeing?' accomplishes three things simultaneously. First, it acknowledges your blind spots openly -- the question itself is an admission that you do not have complete information. Second, it positions the team member as the expert -- they see things you cannot, and the question validates that. Third, it is specific enough to be answerable but open enough to invite any topic. The key to making this work is what you do with the answer. If someone says 'I think the new deployment process is causing more problems than it solves,' your response should be: 'Tell me more about that. What specifically are you seeing?' Not 'well, we need the deployment process because...' The first response pulls more truth out. The second response pushes truth back in. Keep a running list of what surfaces from this question across all your one-on-ones. After four weeks, review the list. You will see patterns -- recurring blind spots, systemic issues, and communication gaps that no dashboard or status report would ever reveal. Add these patterns to your Leadership Operating Manual as a new section: 'My Known Blind Spots.' This connects directly to the Trust Audit from Week 15 -- the question is a lightweight, ongoing version of the same principle.

The 'What am I not seeing?' question operationalizes what Heifetz and Linsky (2002) call 'getting on the balcony' -- the practice of stepping back from the action to observe patterns that are invisible from within the system. Their research on adaptive leadership identifies the leader's inability to see their own impact as the primary barrier to organizational adaptation. The question also leverages what Kahneman (2011) calls 'WYSIATI' (What You See Is All There Is) -- the cognitive bias where decision-makers treat available information as if it were complete information. By explicitly asking 'what am I not seeing,' the leader counteracts WYSIATI by creating a structured input for information that would otherwise remain outside their awareness. Research by Fast, Burris, and Barber (2014) on 'managerial self-efficacy and voice behavior' found that leaders who expressed uncertainty about their own perspective received more honest feedback than leaders who projected confidence, because the uncertainty signal reduced the perceived status differential. The four-week accumulation approach aligns with what Weick (1995) calls 'ongoing sensemaking' -- the continuous process of interpreting experience through accumulated data points rather than isolated events. The instruction to add blind spots to the Leadership Operating Manual follows the iterative documentation pattern established in Week 13 and reinforced in Week 15's Trust Audit.