When your strength becomes your blind spot
Every senior leader has a strength that built their career
The thing people rely on them for. The thing that feels effortless for them. The thing that becomes part of their professional identity. For some, it’s clarity. For others it’s decisiveness, calm under pressure, strategic thinking, relationship building, or delivery excellence.
These strengths are real. They are earned and they are valuable. But if you’re not careful, your greatest strength can quietly become your most limiting blind spot over time as you move through your career.
Not because your strength stops being useful. But because the environment around you changes faster than your concept of self does.
The strength that once differentiated you can start to distort your leadership, narrow your perspective, or create patterns that no longer serve you or the organisation. The irony is that the more you are praised for your strength, the more you double down on it, and the more narrow your perspective becomes.
Let’s unpack how this happens, why it’s especially common amongst product and transformation leaders, and how high impact leaders evolve before their strengths turn into liabilities.
The strength blind spot paradox
A strength becomes a blind spot when:
You rely on it automatically,
You use it in situations where it doesn’t fit,
You overuse it under pressure,
You assume it’s always the right tool,
You stop noticing its unintended consequences, and
Others see the downside long before you do.
This is not a character flaw. It’s a developmental inevitability.
The higher you go, the more your strengths need to evolve. Not because they’re wrong, but because the context has changed.
Why this shows up so strongly in product and transformation leaders
Your roles sit at the intersection of:
Ambiguity,
Complexity,
Cross functional frictions,
Competing incentives,
Technical constraints,
Organisational fatigue, and
Executive pressure.
To survive in this environment, you’ve built strengths that help you navigate chaos. But those same strengths can become rigid patterns when:
The stakes rise,
The visibility increases,
The politics intensify,
The organisation grows,
The role expands, or
The expectations shift.
Let’s look at the most common patterns.
Six strengths that quietly become blind spots
Clarity becomes control
You’re known for bringing structure to chaos. But under pressure, clarity can morph into:
Over directing,
Over specifying,
Collapsing ambiguity too quickly,
Not giving others space to think, or
Solving instead of facilitating.
The intention is good, but the impact is constraining.
Decisiveness becomes impatience
You move fast, you cut through noise, and you don’t get stuck. But decisiveness can become:
Rushing alignment,
Making calls without enough context,
Overriding quieter voices, or
Mistaking speed for progress.
The organisation feels pushed and not led in this scenario.
Calmness becomes emotional distance
You’re steady, you’re composed, and you’re unshakeable. But calmness can become:
Hard to read,
Hard to connect with,
Hard for others to escalate to, or
Interpreted as disengagement.
Your steadiness becomes a wall instead of an anchor.
Strategic thinking becomes detachment from reality
You see patterns others miss, you think long term, and you elevate conversations. But strategy can become:
Too abstract,
Too conceptual,
Too far from operational constraints, or
Hard for teams to translate into action.
People admire your thinking but struggle to execute it.
Relationship building becomes avoidance of hard calls
You’re trusted, you’re collaborative, and you’re great with stakeholders. But relational strength can become:
Over accommodation,
Soft boundaries,
Delayed decisions,
Avoiding conflict, or
Protecting harmony over progress.
You become the glue, but at the cost of momentum.
Delivery excellence becomes over functioning
You get things done, you’re reliable, and you’re the person people turn to. But delivery strength can become:
Taking on too much,
Becoming the fixer,
Operating at the wrong altitude,
Shielding others from accountability, or
Burning out quietly.
You become indispensable and trapped.
How to know when a strength is becoming a blind spot
Blind spots don’t announce themselves or give you warning that they’re coming. They show up as subtle patterns:
You feel stretched but can’t articulate why,
You’re praised for the same thing repeatedly but you’re not promoted,
You’re relied on heavily but not included early,
You’re respected but not fully understood,
You’re delivering but not scaling,
You’re influencing but not shaping, and
You’re exhausted in ways that don’t match your workload.
These are signals, not failures. They’re telling you that your leadership identity needs to expand.
The leadership shift from strengths driven to context driven
High impact leaders don’t abandon their strengths. They simply rebalance them. They ask:
“When is this strength useful?”
“When is it limiting?”
“What does this situation actually require?”
“What’s the cost of using this strength here?”
“What’s the alternative leadership move?”
This is the shift from automatic to intentional, from habitual to contextual, and from comfortable to effective.
How high impact leaders evolve their strengths
They build the opposite muscle
If your strength is clarity, build comfort with ambiguity,
If your strength is calmness, build emotional expression,
If your strength is decisiveness, build patience,
If your strength is strategy, build operational empathy,
If your strength is relationships, build boundaries, and
If your strength is delivery, build delegation.
The opposite muscle doesn’t replace your strength, it completes it.
They get curious about impact, not intent
They ask:
“How is this landing?”
“What’s the unintended consequence?”
“What patterns do others see that I don’t?”
Impact is the real measure of leadership maturity.
They let go of the identity that no longer fits
This is the hardest part. You have to release:
Being the fixer,
Being the smartest,
Being the calmest,
Being the fastest,
Being the most reliable, and
Being the one who always knows.
These identities served you well, but they don’t scale.
They expand their leadership repertoire
Senior leadership is not about having one dominant strength. It’s about having range. Range is what allows your leadership to travel across functions, personalities, power structures, levels of ambiguity, and organisational maturity.
Range is what makes you enterprise ready.
If you’re noticing your strength becoming a blind spot, you’re not behind, you’re evolving
This is the natural inflection point of senior leadership. It’s the moment where:
Your role expands,
Your identity stretches,
Your patterns get exposed,
Your strengths need recalibration, and
Your leadership becomes more nuanced.
It’s not a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of readiness. You’re outgrowing the version of leadership that got you here and stepping into the version that will take you further.
If you want to evolve your strengths into enterprise level leadership range, let’s work on this together. Here are three ways:
Influencing for Impact: This practical 2-day workshop is for you if you want to influence a decision maker, influence a change in customer or colleague behaviour, or influence someone to buy something from you,
Executive and Leadership Team Coaching: Work directly with Lai-Ling to problem solve for your specific situation in a confidential setting. This is for you if you want to develop and execute on a game plan that is 100% tailored to you, or
Leadership Development: Invest in the product and transformation leaders in your company with leadership development that is customised for their role. This is for you if you want your people to learn about people and politics.