The tool that makes giving difficult feedback a little easier.

Twenty years of managing people, and I still missed the most important blindspot of all: my own.

I've been managing people for twenty years. Instinctually, without conscious thought, I'd assumed I had long ago crossed into earned wisdom. Recent events suggest I'm actually stuck a stage earlier, in that satisfying state where the muscle memory of management just works, right up until it does not.

I've been working with a talented, empathetic, customer-attuned member of our team for several years. Let's call her Gabriella.

I needed to move her from her previous role into a more product-focused position. She understood our product pain points better than almost anyone. I thought it was a brilliant managerial move: a new career chance for a dedicated team member, a steep learning curve, but the skill-to-role fit felt particularly well matched.

Then I got a frustrating surprise.

Management blindspots are specific gaps in how a manager perceives their team, caused by their own motivational profile.

On Attuned's platform we call these motivators: the underlying psychological needs that shape how people work, what makes them feel safe, and what drives their natural decision-making. Where Myers-Briggs assigns a personality type, motivators describe a value hierarchy: the small set of things a person is, often without quite knowing it, trying to optimize for in the work of any given week.

My motivators (Autonomy, Competition, Altruism) mean I find energy in ownership and speed. I am comfortable being wrong if I was decisive. Friction, especially persistent persnickety friction, feels like inefficiency.

Gabriella's motivators are different. She is strongly driven by Feedback and Status. The status that mattered to her was the human kind: knowing where she stood, having her contributions be visible, picking up the small daily signals that confirm a person is doing well in their work. In her previous role those signals came naturally. Customers responded. The team relied on her. Her value was legible by the end of most days. In her new product role, especially early on, the signals went quiet. The feedback loops lengthened. Expectations became less defined. The ground under her feet, in her own description of it, started to feel uncertain.

When she said "we need to align," the request underneath the request was a different one: Am I about to do something wrong? Is anyone going to tell me before it's too late to correct?

My natural management read was utterly wrong. My own motivational blindspots, my internal construction of how the world should work, had blindspotted me. I'd been blindspotted by my blindspot.

There is a name, in instrument flying, for the illusion in which the cockpit reads true while the aircraft is in fact pointed at the ground: the somatogravic illusion. The dials are honest. The body feels level. The horizon turns out to have been somewhere else the whole time. A motivational profile, in its quiet and respectable way, produces something close to the same effect on the way one person reads another. A note from instrument flying

The framing TalkCoach suggested was something I would not have come up with on my own.

"Gabriella, I want to talk about your move into more of a product focus. You've been carrying a heavy load in your previous role, especially with the harder customer situations and the team dynamics. I know that's been draining, and I appreciate how much you've held together there. The reason I'm excited about you in product is that your empathy and your understanding of customers is exactly what we need to bake into the product itself."

Then: clear expectations, framed as signals of trust. "I trust your judgment. What I need to see now is more of your judgment in motion." The message I was trying to convey was that decisiveness, in this role, would build her standing further. A call made with 80 percent of the information was more valuable than the 100 percent that three additional weeks of consensus would eventually deliver. A wrong decision was something we would fix together, with her authorship intact.

I used TalkCoach's output nearly verbatim. In Slack. In my 1:1 notes. In how I framed her next projects.

Her change was immediate. Gabriella found her footing. Her output accelerated. The requests for "alignment" gave way to what I'd really been wanting: actual proposals, followed by action. She began to drive decisions rather than waiting for the weather to clear. Her confidence steadily returned, and with it the qualities that had made her such a great team member in the first place.

This account, with the footnotes and a longer middle section, originally appeared on the Attuned blog. Read the full version, with author notes →