Like color blindness, some people on your team may have developed Leadership Blindness. Here are a few of the symptoms:

• You have to repeat instructions or requests two or more times.
• Directives, especially those in print, appear to go unnoticed.
• The same mistakes happen again, and then yet again.
• Important details are being overlooked, especially when dealing with customers.

Leadership Blindness occurs when employees become distracted, overwhelmed, or ambivalent and are no longer paying consistent, careful attention to input from the leadership team. Although Leadership Blindness, like color blindness, can’t be completely cured, it can be diminished or substantially mitigated by dealing with one of the key causes — Artwork Affliction.

Like the artwork on walls, after a while everything blends in, even things that are especially meaningful to us. Artwork Affliction happens every day in corporations across the globe, and it’s not only the art that’s being overlooked. Those signs espousing your customer service best practices haven’t been noticed in months. The sales process, reviewed for the umpteenth time in the weekly meeting, was forgotten as people walked out of the conference room. Even the main page of your intranet barely gets a notice even though the content may change from time to time.

The cure for Artwork Affliction is relatively simple: change the look, location, or liability. You can alter the design, color, formatting, and wording (including for what is said) — the look. Moving the location, just like moving furniture, often recaptures attention. To shift the liability, delegate responsibility to team members for regularly modifying the look or location of key totems of workplace significance.

You’ve worked hard to build a company with processes and systems that drive your business. By avoiding Artwork Affliction and the Leadership Blindness that results from it, you’ll have your best practices doing what they are supposed to do.

This Week’s Radical Accountability Activating Action: Note at least several key areas where there appears to be Leadership Blindness. Elect one or two important processes or reminders that are contributing to that and change the look, location or liability.

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