Every one of us has blind spots.
Places where we believe we understand both context and situation and yet we miss something important. This is why it’s important to remind ourselves that we are not good or bad but instead good-ish, trying to be our best selves and often falling short.
Recently I admired a photo of women leaders, appreciating seeing a large group of women at a table together and failed to notice that all of the women were white. This surprised me, as I have been in such groups before and have been quick to point out this fact. How did I miss this?
On the plus side, my intentional effort to expand my network to non-white women, gave me the opportunity to recognize this blind spot when I noticed others expressing frustration for being – yet again – invisible to people like me. As someone who deeply cares about expanding opportunity for all I had managed to be part of the problem.
Not a great feeling.
Which is why this post by Kim Scott stuck with me.
This made me want to share a few more stories – places where I have heard men I admire and know to be well intentioned, say things to me that were so obtuse I found myself unable to respond. Literally gobsmacked out of words. I share these not only to reflect on my lack of courage, but to give more color to the kind of bias that is the hardest to mitigate. It is not lost on me, that both of these situations also have a power differential element.
While talking about wage gap to a senior executive
I was a mid level leader at the time and somehow ended up on the topic of the wage gap with a leader that
a) I strongly admire and know to be supportive of women in leadership
b) in a powerful position for a long time
As the topic of the paygap came up, he said “I just don’t want to know“. To my best understanding, his point was that he saw this as reprehensible and didn’t want to have any association with the problem. I honestly believe it was not a fear of compliance risk – at the time that wasn’t really a thing. Completely missing the point that without the understanding, he was going to perpetuate the problem.
While interviewing for a board seat
Early in my board journey, I interviewed for a few board seats that ultimately weren’t a fit. As so often happens, I learned a lot from the interview process – mostly good. In this one case, I was interviewing with an entire board together for a HR-adjacent product company.
At one point the topic of gender gap on boards came up and a man (who I didn’t know well but honestly believe was a supporter of women on boards) pondered [out loud] that maybe men are just more flexible and less demanding. Again, I was so taken aback (and in an interview!) that I couldn’t sort out what to say. As if the entire construct of power weren’t already biased to men. Of course, they didn’t need to demand anything special, their needs were accounted for in the structure itself.
The thing about blind spots is, we need to have someone else point them out, and when they do, we can’t unsee them. This can lead to shame or enlightenment, often both. Either way, hopefully they also help us change.
In the end, we are all obtuse. This is not unique. How intentional we are in building a habit to discover what we are missing and practice perspective taking is how we improve.
This is super uncomfortable. That is why you know it matters.
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