I once wrote about leadership biases and a friend named Cary Branscum asked, “How can we at least not be aware of our own bias?” I added the italics for emphasis. I don’t think Cary was necessarily asking for advice, but I thought he posed a fascinating question. It made me wonder, how come we, as leaders, are sometimes not aware of our biases? Why do we have these blind spots?
I can think of a few reasons we have “bias blind spots” and here they are:
- We are too proud to notice them.
- We don’t have people around us who will address our biases honestly.
- We are too busy creating and implementing our agenda to notice them.
The bottom line is that we have to choose to be aware of our blind spots. The alternative is to willingly choose blindness. What are other reasons for our “bias blind spots”? I really want to know so I can be more aware of mine. I don’t want the ministries I lead to be cases of the “blind leading the seeing”.
