What If Your Greatest Strength Is Your Leadership Blind Spot?
The very thing that made you successful could be keeping you stuck.
You've built a business. You've assembled a team. You've made thousands of decisions along the way.
But now you're facing a challenge that doesn't seem to respond to the approaches that have always worked.
What if you don't need better answers?
What if you need questions you haven't thought to ask?
That's the idea behind Mike Maddock's Six Seats framework, developed to help CEOs and leadership teams uncover blind spots, recognize missing perspectives, and make better decisions.
Your Greatest Strength Can Also Be Your Blind Spot
Leadership blind spots are assumptions, habits, and ways of thinking that prevent us from recognizing important risks, opportunities, or information.
They're particularly difficult to spot because they often grow out of our greatest strengths.
A brilliant innovator may overlook the operational details needed to make an idea successful. An exceptional operator may dismiss a breakthrough opportunity because it threatens an efficient system.
And as leaders become more successful, they often surround themselves with people who reinforce the thinking that got them there.
Different backgrounds. Impressive experience. Remarkably similar instincts.
That combination can work beautifully for years.
Until the business reaches a plateau, the market changes, or a once-reliable strategy stops working.
Mike Learned This the Hard Way
Mike Maddock helped build a business from $5 million to $25 million in less than three years.
He had a talented executive team. They were smart, experienced, and accomplished.
Then the business began to struggle.
Despite trying dozens of new ideas, the decline continued.
Mike brought in an executive coach, who asked the team to complete Kolbe assessments. The results revealed something he hadn't expected.
Nearly everyone shared a strong Quick Start instinct.
When faced with a challenge, they instinctively brainstormed, experimented, and pivoted to another idea.
Those strengths had helped build the business.
But now the team was approaching every new problem through essentially the same lens.
Mike had surrounded himself with people who were different in experience but remarkably similar in how they solved problems.
He didn't need to abandon his strengths.
He needed people whose strengths were different from his.
Read Mike's full story about discovering his leadership team's blind spots.
Six Seats. Six Different Questions.
Mike developed the Six Seats framework around a powerful principle:
The people who see the world differently from you may be the people you need most.
The framework identifies six complementary leadership perspectives.
Each contributes a natural strength, a question others may overlook, and a potential blind spot.
These aren't fixed personality labels. Most leaders recognize themselves in more than one seat.
And no seat is inherently better than another.
1. The Operator
“What could go wrong?”
StrengthTurning ideas into profitable, reliable results through discipline, efficiency, and execution.
Potential blind spotBecoming so focused on processes and preventing mistakes that promising innovations get dismissed.
The Operator helps make sure great ideas actually work.
2. The Strategist
“What game are we really in?”
StrengthRecognizing patterns, simplifying complexity, establishing priorities, and identifying the right path forward.
Potential blind spotOveremphasizing analysis and planning while overlooking execution challenges or human consequences.
The Strategist helps make sure you're playing the right game.
3. The Rainmaker
“Who actually cares?”
StrengthUnderstanding customers, building relationships, and connecting opportunities to revenue.
Potential blind spotBelieving more sales will solve every problem, even when pursuing revenue distracts from the larger strategy.
The Rainmaker helps make sure someone wants what you're building.
4. The Visionary
“What are we afraid to imagine?”
StrengthChallenging assumptions, recognizing possibilities, and imagining what could exist.
Potential blind spotChasing exciting new ideas while losing interest in execution or commitments already underway.
The Visionary helps make sure yesterday's thinking doesn't limit tomorrow.
5. The Tech Futurist
“What changes if we assume the future arrives early?”
StrengthRecognizing how emerging technologies can transform businesses, industries, and opportunities.
Potential blind spotBecoming fascinated with technology while overlooking the underlying business problem or human impact.
The Tech Futurist helps make sure tomorrow doesn't catch you by surprise.
6. The Orchestrator
“Who's not being heard?”
StrengthUnderstanding people, building trust, and helping different perspectives work together.
Potential blind spotSeeking harmony or agreement when productive disagreement is necessary.
The Orchestrator helps make sure the right voices are part of the conversation.
One Problem. Six Different Perspectives.
Imagine a CEO struggling with profitability.
She's a natural Strategist. Her instinct is to help employees understand how their behavior affects the company's financial performance.
It's a reasonable approach.
But is it the only way to see the problem?
Consider what happens when six perspectives examine the same challenge.
What if we tracked the leading indicators that drive profitability instead of focusing on results after the fact?
How can we make the connection between employee behavior and profitability easier to understand?
Could the real problem be insufficient sales opportunities and too much nonbillable work?
What if we developed an entirely new offering with significantly higher margins?
Could a real-time performance dashboard make the problem visible to everyone?
Is the team avoiding difficult conversations about accountability?
Six perspectives. Six different ways to understand the same challenge.
The CEO may still decide that her original plan is the right one.
But now she's considered possibilities that might never have occurred to her.
That's the power of the Six Seats: not six people giving you advice, but six perspectives helping you discover the questions you've been missing.
Try It: What Question Is Missing From Your Table?
Think about a business challenge you're facing right now.
Maybe growth has stalled. Maybe you're considering a major investment. Or perhaps your leadership team keeps revisiting a problem without making progress.
Try this exercise, adapted from the question-based approach Mike explores in Your Seat at the Table.
Write down the challenge.
Describe the problem in a sentence or two, without jumping to a solution.
Ask people to write their questions independently.
Before discussing solutions, invite a few trusted colleagues or advisors to write down the questions they would ask to better understand the challenge.
Have them work independently first.
Compare the questions through the Six Seats.
Which perspectives appear naturally?
Are most questions about efficiency? Customers? Strategy? New ideas?
Which of the six perspectives seems absent?
Explore the missing questions.
Return to the Six Seats and consider what someone with a different perspective might ask.
Don't rush to an answer.
Sometimes the question that initially feels least relevant is the one that reveals a new possibility.
Which Seat Do You Naturally Occupy?
You probably recognize yourself in one or two of these perspectives.
Understanding your natural strengths is valuable.
Understanding which perspectives you're missing may be even more important.
Discover your seat, and start exploring your blind spots.
Take the Six Seats QuizThis short quiz on the Flourish Advisory Boards website explores how you naturally approach work and decisions. It asks eight questions and requests your name and email. It is a discovery quiz, not an official Kolbe assessment.
From Better Questions to Better Leadership
Recognizing your blind spots is one thing.
Having people around you who consistently help you see beyond them is another.
That's why Mike founded Flourish Advisory Boards.
Flourish brings CEOs together in carefully curated peer advisory groups called Flourish Forums.
Rather than assuming that different professional backgrounds automatically create different perspectives, Flourish intentionally considers how members naturally approach problems and opportunities.
The Six Seats framework helps inform that process, alongside tools such as the Kolbe assessment.
The goal is to create an environment where accomplished leaders challenge one another's assumptions, explore unfamiliar perspectives, and ask better questions.
Because the most valuable person at your table isn't necessarily the one with the best advice.
It may be the person who asks the question nobody else thought to ask.
Discover Flourish Advisory Boards
About Mike Maddock
Mike Maddock is an entrepreneur, four-time bestselling author, and creator of the Six Seats framework. For more than 30 years, he's helped leaders challenge assumptions, solve complex business problems, and discover new possibilities.
Meet Mike Maddock