Ask somebody on your team what they’re best at and you’ll get an answer in a couple of seconds. Two or three things, named with confidence, and they’ll believe every word of it.
Then ask who told them.
That second question is the one I’ve watched stop people, and it has stopped a lot of them over 25 years of leading and advising sales teams. Most people carry a short list of their own strengths that has never been checked against anybody else’s view of them. It arrives early, it gets accepted, and after that it shapes a great deal: what somebody puts their development time into, what they leave alone because they’ve decided it’s handled, and what they steer around without ever calling it avoidance.
That’s the ordinary version of this problem, and almost everybody has one. Not a dramatic misjudgement, just a settled opinion nobody ever tested.
Three you can judge, seven you can’t
Last week’s post covered the ten core competencies every commercial role depends on, and it ended on a warning worth picking up properly.
Three of the ten are about what you do when nobody’s watching. Growth mindset, taking responsibility and drive all show themselves in private, in the call you made that nobody asked for and the loss you owned before anyone else raised it. You’ve got a fair chance of judging those yourself, as long as you’re honest with yourself on a bad day.
The other seven are a different matter, because they don’t exist inside you at all. They exist in how other people experience you.
- Presence isn’t how calm you feel. It’s how calm you looked to a customer who had just challenged you in front of their own boss.
- Team player isn’t your intention towards your colleagues. It’s what they’d say about working with you on the last bid.
- Customer centricity isn’t how much you care about customers. It’s whether the customer felt it.
- Coachable is the sharpest one of the lot, because somebody who isn’t coachable is the least likely person to know it. That’s more or less the definition.
On those seven, your own view isn’t worthless. It’s just half the answer, and it’s the half you can’t check from where you’re standing.
What happens when you see both halves
Put your own rating and the ratings from the people around you side by side, and every one of the ten falls into one of four groups.
Known strength. You think you’re good at it and so do they. Useful, and reassuring, though it’s rarely the reason anybody does this. It confirms what you already believed.
Known development area. You know it needs work and so do they. That sounds like bad news and it isn’t, because at least everybody is looking at the same thing. A manager and a seller who agree on the problem can get somewhere. Most development stalls long before that point.
Hidden strength. They rate you higher than you rate yourself, and this happens far more often than people expect. Usually it’s something somebody decided about themselves years ago, often after one bad experience, and then arranged their working life around avoiding. Someone who concluded at twenty four that they were poor at presenting, and has spent fifteen years handing the deck to a colleague, might well be better at it than half the people who volunteer. The capability is already there. What’s missing is the confidence, and that’s a much quicker fix than building the skill from nothing.
Blind spot. You rate yourself higher than they do. This is the expensive one, and it’s the only one of the four that will never surface on its own.
Why the blind spot survives
Think about who would have to tell you.
Your colleagues won’t, because it isn’t their job and there’s nothing in it for them. Your customers certainly won’t, they’ll just stop replying. Your manager might, though appraisals tend to be about output rather than how you work, and there’s rarely a natural moment in a pipeline review to say “the reason that deal stalled is that you talk over people”.
And there’s a more human reason underneath all of that. Telling somebody they’re not as good at something as they believe is a genuinely unpleasant conversation to have. Most people, including good managers who care about the person in front of them, will find a reason to leave it for another day. Then the day never comes.
The result is that the more senior somebody gets, the less likely they are to hear it. Which is precisely backwards, because by then more people are affected by it.
What it costs
Take somebody who has decided they’re strong on understanding the customer, when the people around them wouldn’t agree. They’ll keep building value cases that don’t land, and every time one misses they’ll look for the reason in the technique. So they go on another course, get better at the financial modelling, tighten up the slides, and the cases still land flat. From the inside it looks like bad luck, a hard market, or a customer who didn’t get it.
Nobody is being lazy in that story. They’re working hard, and they’re working hard on the wrong thing, for years. The correction they need is the one nobody has said out loud, and no amount of effort aimed somewhere else will substitute for it.
The real cost of a blind spot isn’t the weakness itself. It’s every hour of development spent somewhere the weakness isn’t.
If you lead a team, this is the part that costs you money
Everything above applies to one person. Now multiply it.
If you’ve got eight people and you’re building development plans for all eight, what are you building them on? Their own view of themselves, your view of them, and last year’s results. The first is half an answer. The second is your honest impression, formed mostly from the situations you happened to be present for. The third tells you what happened, not why.
You can’t build eight development plans on eight self-assessments and expect them to be aimed at the right things. Some of them will be, by luck. You won’t know which.
And your own list is subject to exactly the same problem as theirs. You’re setting the development priorities for eight people while working from a view of your own judgement that nobody has ever checked either.
Why anonymous matters, and isn’t just good manners
If feedback is attributable, you get the polite version. People are not being dishonest when they soften it, they’re being sensible, because they’ve got to work with you next week. The polite version is the one you already have, and it’s the reason the blind spot has survived this long.
Our assessment takes feedback from up to twenty people you nominate. Managers, peers, the people who report to you, and it’s aggregated into themes rather than reported back as individual responses. Nobody can be identified from it, which is what makes it worth reading. It covers all ten of the core competencies from the outside, alongside the skills for your specific role, what motivates you and how you build trust.
For a leader, doing it across a team gives you something you can’t get any other way: a consistent read on every person, on the same ten capabilities, from the people who work with them daily. That’s a development plan built on evidence rather than on impressions and last year’s figures.
Where to start
You don’t need our assessment to make a start on this, and it would be a strange thing to claim.
Write down the two or three things you’d say you’re best at. Then, next to each one, name the last person who told you so, unprompted, and roughly when. Not a performance review, and not somebody being kind at the end of a good meeting. Somebody who volunteered it.
If most of those rows come back blank, you’ve found something. It doesn’t mean you’re wrong. It means you don’t know, and you’ve been developing yourself on the assumption that you do.
The useful question was never which of the ten you’d score yourself lowest on. It’s which one the people you work with would name, and whether you’d be willing to hear it.
That’s what the 360 feedback in the MyAcumen assessment is built to answer, alongside your own view of the same ten:
Or if you lead a team and want a quicker place to start, the Team Scorecard takes about four minutes and points you at where the gaps most likely are.
