I’ve worked in Corp America for 30 years, aside from incompetence and poor work ethic the main reason I see people hit career snags is due to their blind spots. I know that’s a big statement, but it’s true. Having transitioned from Corp America to leadership coaching I now help individuals work through their blind spots. Many times these blind spots have turned into career hurdles or even roadblocks. Unfortunately I know most people don’t have direct access to a coach. Therefore I hope this article will help raise awareness of the subject and encourage people to tackle their blind spots. I outline a few options at the end of the article.

Let’s start with the basics, what is a blind spot?   Webster says a blind spot is “an area where a person’s view is obstructed.” This can by a physical limitation such as a blind spot in the side-view mirror on your car, however that type isn’t very interesting for this discussion. In this context, a blind spot is a trait or behavior I have that I cannot see, but is a trait or behavior that others around me see. So let’s look at some real examples as a way to solidify:

Individual Contributors

• Your view: “I am very careful with my work and always double check everything so that people can count on me. My boss appreciates my thoroughness” Their view: “She is afraid to take any kind of a risk or make any mistake, it slows her down and therefore I don’t think I want her on this new project”.
• Your view: “I always try to explain the details about my work to my boss so that she understands everything, she appreciates it”. Their view: “This guy is killin’ me with all the details. I just need the high-level points and he takes forever to explain every point. I avoid him when I can because I don’t have time for him.”

Managers, Leaders, and Executives

• My view: “I like-management-by-walking-around. Usually I stop by to get status to offer advice to my team members. On average I see them at least two times a day. They appreciate the support”. Their view: “This dude is a total micromanager and doesn’t trust me. He stops by all the time to check up on me and tell me what to do.”
• My view: “When any of the executives give me a task I can knock it out of the park. I’m an execution machine!” Their view: “He’s great at getting things done but he’s poor at any type of strategic thinking.”

The last example is from my own personal history. It was particularly insidious because I thought I was doing a great job but my career was stuck because I didn’t have skills to think strategically and look for opportunities beyond my current tasking.

So hopefully I’ve convinced you that blind spots are real, they can have a impact on you, and by definition you can’t see them.  So where do we go from here?

Step #1 – Finding Tools You Can Use

Here are some suggestions:

• A simple place I like to start is a personality profile such as ProScan, DiSC,  etc. Any of these are a good first step. They cost $50 on the web and if you take the time to read the analysis carefully you may resonate with some of the “challenges” for a personality type.
• A 360 profile is similar to a personality profile however it will solicit input from your manager, peers, and people you lead. I favor these profiles because they give a much more accurate and complete picture. If facilitated correctly this can be a powerful tool to increase your awareness of how others see you.
• Business simulation – There are many simple business simulations to observe how you react under simulated pressure, however I favor using an escape room. We own a mobile escape room that we take to companies where we have teams work through the escape room and we observe them through cameras. In this venue we can quickly identify blind spots for many of the team members.
• Coach – If you have access to a coach or qualified manager I would highly recommend taking advantage of that opportunity. They are trained to help you identify your blind spots and put practices into place that will help eliminate your blind spots.
• Close friends and co-workers – If you completely trust someone, can be vulnerable to feedback, and have a thick skin, then it’s possible to receive the feedback directly from the source. Be careful that you don’t push back on the feedback, just absorb the info and carefully consider it.

This is an overview to blind spots. In future articles we’ll explore non-work related blind spots, team blind spots, cultural blind spots, public identity, as well as techniques to work with each.

Being owners of a mobile escape room for the last two years we’ve seen a large rise in their popularity. We’ve also seen an increase in business teams using these facilities for their team building events and training. Team building and the fun fast pace of an escape room is a great match. We personally monitor each team in the escape room and we’ve noticed clear patterns for success. Specifically, these highly collaborative teams have several common team skills which contribute to their success both in the escape room and, as we find when talking with them after the event, also back in the office.

These patterns are so prevalent for the successful teams that we will be sharing these “escape room cheat” in the hopes they will improve your chances in an escape room, but more importantly in the office context as well.

So, let’s start with a simple explanation of an escape room for those that are not familiar. If you already know the context for an escape room then you can skip this section. Most escape rooms are a large area where a team can work together to solve puzzles with the goal of exiting the escape room before time runs out. Typically, each escape room has a theme, for example our mobile escape room is a 1960’s themed prison including a warden’s area, real jail cell, and stainless steel toilet. Teams work together to find clues, piece together information, solve puzzles, and ultimately deduce the sequence that allows them to unlock the door and exit the room.

One of the most prevalent skills we see from the high performing teams is their ability for everyone to communicate effectively. We’ve coined the phrase “it’s one thing to speak but it’s another thing to be heard”. Even within the chaos of the escape room (and the office context) each member is able to fully listen and communicate information about the clues their seeing and the ideas they have for solving puzzles, in other words getting stuff done! The best practices we see fall into these areas:

• In the escape room, as within a team meeting, there’s an ebb and flow of communication as different people find clues and advocate for ideas. Regardless of title each person is given a space to be fully heard. What one person sees as a clue may trigger an idea with another person. Without this communication skill the clue connection is missed.
• An escape room is designed to provide a blizzard of information, some useful and some not. Like the pile of email people get each work day. Team members able to successfully discard the useless clues and focus communication around the interesting clues are much more successful due to higher quality information.
• Each team member is fully present and listening to the conversations from the other members. There are no exceptions and no one is left out.
• At critical junctures in the event when the team is off track someone will clearly summarize the state of the clues and re-focus the team.
• We see teams that recognize their communications diversity and each member plays to their strengths. For example, some members are very detailed while others are more of the cheerleader. All types are needed and appreciated. Any team with all cheerleaders will have a hard time succeeding.

We hope this escape room cheat was useful but more importantly we hope you’ll apply it to your work context as well.

We’ve gotten a good amount of feedback on our “Escape Room Strategy” series, frankly it proves our theory that smart leaders are using escape

rooms for more than just a fun team outing. One common theme in the feedback is a question around the need for leadership, specifically is there a style of leadership that enhances the performance of the team? Based on the hundreds of teams we’ve observed we can confirm there is a style and it should surprise no one that it closely mirrors successful business leadership. Compare how these leadership styles match what you’ve experienced at work.

To keep this article from becoming a leadership tome I’m breaking the discussion into four leadership types, from worst to best performing.

Leaderless

It will surprise no one that the worst performing team in an escape room is a team where no one takes on the leader function or the leader is weak. In this scenario the team either succeeds or fails based on individual talents and random luck of discovery. Teams tend to fall into group think and stay blocked when they hit a significant challenge. It’s rough to watch as teams like this struggle.

Execution Based Leadership 

It’s common to see one or possibly two people on the team step into an authoritative role. Interestingly it’s not always the person with the highest title, rather usually someone passionate about “beating the best time”, competitive and a strong personality. In this mode, the leader will set the goals, orchestrate most activities, call timeout when the team is stuck, act as the central locus of information, and motivate folks when needed. In the escape room as in business, this model works but is highly dependent on the leader’s skills, her/his ability to forego mistakes, and team’s willingness to buy in to their leadership.

Situational and Servant Model Leadership

Typically without any overt discussion someone will step into the leadership role when the time is correct. Depending on the situation they will praise, strategize, and motivate the team.  While this list isn’t comprehensive here are some examples:

• Ensure everyone is on the same page without making anyone feel inadequate. This is usually done via strategic questions vs direct statements. This increases buy-in from the team
• Exemplify high standards, ethics, and setting a model for everyone
• While solving puzzles they will monitor team members for engagement or possible issues
• Usually the first person to praise individual accomplishments and celebrate team successes, they enjoy seeing their team succeed above the pride of their own accomplishments
• They do not directly point out failures rather they ask indirect questions to get back on track
• Watching the team for progress and course correcting at strategic moments
• Empower team members to “run with it” when they have a good idea or success
• Talk about their own mistakes first before anyone else’s

No lead necessary – while the previous leadership type does show the best results we would be deficient if we didn’t list one last type. Occasionally ( 1 in ~30) we see a team that has gone through the forming–storming-norming-performing (see link here) steps of team development. The lead has done some masterful work building the team into a highly skilled machine. These teams work together incredibly well, playing to each other’s strengths, calling in help when needed, drawing energy from each other, and enjoying each other. No leader is required and it’s a beautiful sequence to watch.

Think back to the original question, how close do these leadership styles mirror your work experience?

As owners of a mobile escape room our passion is to bring the escape room experience into a corporate setting where we’re able to observe teams as they endeavor to escape. Beyond being a mobile escape room our unique value add is the post event discussion. We will typically spend at least an hour decompressing the energy around the successful moments and reflections on the inevitable stumbles. These facilitated discussions nearly always uncover multiple opportunities for growth. If you’re local to Colorado then BustoutColorado would love to provide you with these facilitated discussions. If you’re not local to Colorado then I would strongly encourage you to find an escape room venue that is proficient in these discussions. You can find a list of qualified companies here.

I can’t stress enough that you should look for someone trained in facilitation to maximize the experience, however we recognize that might not be possible due to location and/or cost challenges. Therefore, we would like to share some simple, yet powerful suggestions for someone that might be doing a self-facilitation.  Prior to reading the rest of this article I would encourage you to read this helpful article by Tyler Hayden and Andrew Gipson.  Their article does an excellent job of explaining the steps to create a self-facilitated experience. With their permissions, we have then extended the concept of the facilitated discussion within this article so that it might provide additional support for the self-facilitator.

We present four basic observation points that can be used by anyone to start the facilitated discussion:

Celebration

As the team is working their way through the event be keen to notice how the team celebrates when an interim puzzle is solved or they have a breakthrough.  Typical celebrations will last for 10-20 seconds with loud exuberance by all parties.  Signs to look for:

• Minimal Celebration – If a team does little celebrating and moves quickly to the next puzzle then point out the observation and ask if it parallels work celebrations, often they do.  You can describe a typical celebration and ask why theirs might be muted. Among other reasons this can be caused by a poor culture, a culture of extreme execution focus, or lack of specific personality types such as DiSC I type.
• Lack of participation – If one or more members fail to participate in the celebration then carefully pointing out the fact and ask for opinions on the root cause.
• Excessive celebration – If the team celebrates too much at the cost of getting puzzles solved then dig into why there is  a reduced sense of urgency.

Communications

As noted many times in previous articles, successful communications during the experience is crucial for success. As the experience unfolds notice who’s speaking the most/least, who’s talking but not being heard by the others, who’s communication is having the biggest impact. When the experience is concluded the facilitator can derive questions from these suggestions. If nothing stands out then we have two favorite questions for this area, “Who felt like they were talking but not being heard?” and “<Bob> your communications seemed to always help the team along, what was your strategy for this event?”.

Leadership

We’ve never had a team that didn’t get stuck at some point in the experience. This is where a key skill is needed on the team. As a facilitator watch how the team reacts when they lose momentum and start to flounder. Does someone step up, call timeout, regroup the team and brainstorm? Are there multiple uncoordinated leaders? Does the team get demotivated and loose interest for the rest of the event? Any successful team needs a combination of an emotionally intelligent leader as well as team resilience. During the debrief a good question for this condition might be, “I noticed you got stuck on puzzle X, what technical and leadership skill areas would have helped us unstick sooner”? Note that we don’t make this a personal attack on any de facto leader.

Clue Overload

Any well-designed escape room will contain many props and clues that are distractions. What’s interesting to watch is the amount of emphasis people put on these fake clues.  A well-oiled team will have the ability to sift through the noise and efficiently gather the important clues. Watch closely for a team or team members that focuses too long on the wrong clues. If this happens then a useful debrief question might be, “I noticed you got stuck a bit on X tell me how many distractions this team encounters at work and how are they handled?”. This question usually leads to several ideas for improvements in team productivity.