There’s a particular heaviness that settles on leaders as they rise. A weight that doesn’t arrive suddenly, but accumulates gradually, like a slow‑tightening rope. It’s not the pressure of deadlines or the volume of decisions; those are familiar. The heaviness comes from something more subtle, the widening gap between what leaders believe is happening around them and what is actually unfolding beneath the surface.
One of the quiet paradoxes of senior leadership is that the higher you rise, the less honest feedback you receive. Not because people lack courage, but because seniority changes the room. Colleagues become more careful, more selective, more attuned to your reactions. What reaches you is filtered; what doesn’t reach you becomes the very thing that shapes your blind spots.
And when blind spots widen, the fires begin to spread.
The managing partner who became the firm’s firebreak
Consider a composite example drawn from patterns I see across senior leadership teams.
Michael, a Managing Partner, is commercially sharp and widely trusted. He prides himself on being steady under pressure. He steps into complex situations without flinching. He believes this steadiness is one of his greatest strengths.
Yet over the past year, his role has shifted in ways he didn’t fully notice. He finds himself stepping into client escalations that should never have escalated, smoothing over tensions between senior colleagues, re‑making decisions that should have stuck, and absorbing the emotional fallout of underperformance.
From his vantage point, he’s helping the firm move faster and avoid unnecessary disruption. But the impact of his behaviour is different from his intent.
This is the blind‑spot pattern in motion. His work load compounds quietly, not through mismanagement, but through the natural consequences of a leader whose intent and impact have drifted out of alignment.
Why the fires keep coming
At senior levels, firefighting is rarely caused by incompetence. It’s caused by misalignment, subtle gaps between how leaders think they’re showing up and how others experience them. These gaps often emerge from strengths that have tipped, almost invisibly, into overuse:
- decisiveness becomes bypassing
- pace becomes dependency
- high standards become re‑doing work
- calm becomes emotional distance
- helpfulness becomes disempowerment
The commercial cost of firefighting
This heaviness isn’t just emotional; it’s operational and financial:
- Leadership misalignment reduces productivity
- Broken trust causing employee disengagement
- Cultural drag increases attrition and reduces client confidence
Leadership feels heavy not because leaders lack capability, but because they are carrying the weight of misalignment they cannot yet see.
A question to consider
What fires are you absorbing that your organisation should be preventing and what might that reveal about what you’re not seeing yet?
If the weight you’re carrying feels heavier than it should, it’s worth understanding why. You can explore that here by taking our blind spot leadership assessment.