Vincente looked like the ideal CEO: polished, steady, logical, and composed. But the emotional neutrality that made him seem professional also made him inaccessible. His team couldn’t read him, hard truths stopped surfacing, and what he thought was calm leadership slowly became organizational disengagement. Through Blindspotting Coaching, Vincente learned that leadership requires emotional presence — not emotional perfection. Even small moments of expressed emotion reopened trust, clarity, and cultural alignment.
Vincente stepped into the CEO role with every traditional leadership credential in place: operational excellence, strategic intelligence, and a reputation for unshakeable composure. To the board, he looked like stability.
But his executive team experienced something entirely different.
Meetings with Vincente were polite but empty. He listened quietly, offered rational commentary, nodded appropriately — yet people walked out feeling unheard. When someone raised a concern, he responded with logic instead of empathy. When tension surfaced, he steered around it rather than through it. When the team needed conviction or belief, they got information instead of connection.
There was no explosion. No harshness. Just emotional vacancy.
Over time, the patterns became unmistakable:
Vincente believed his neutrality was professionalism. His team experienced it as distance. What he saw as steadiness, others experienced as absence.
Vincente’s blindspots didn’t show up as volatility or conflict.
He wasn’t reactive, or emotionally out of control. In fact, he had perfectly reasonable emotional self-control. His challenge was not regulation, but awareness.
Vincente was described as emotionally shallow and unable to connect. He had so little emotional understanding that he struggled to recognize what he was feeling and failed to notice how others were experiencing him. He regularly defaulted to logic, avoided emotional engagement, and consistently failed to read the room.
In Blindspotting: How to See What’s Holding You Back as a Leader, author Martin Dubin explains that leaders who flatten or avoid emotional signals often believe they are being professional or helpful. But when leaders fail to recognize emotional cues or engage emotionally with others, they create distance, uncertainty, and disengagement.
Vincente wasn’t angry, intense, or volatile.
His blindspot wasn’t too much emotion. It was a lack of emotional awareness — of himself and of others.
As Dubin writes:
“Weak emotional presence without awareness creates vacancy. People don’t know who you are, how you feel, or how to connect to you.”
That gap between Vincente’s intention and his impact quietly eroded trust and connection across the organization.
→ Read more about the Emotion Blindspot
Blindspotting Performance Coaching didn’t ask Vincente to become expressive, dramatic, or performative. It asked him to become emotionally present enough for people to understand him.
Working with his coach, Vincente began examining moments when he defaulted to logic:
His coach asked a pivotal question: “What do people need to feel from you in order to trust you?” He had never considered this.
Three tools shifted everything:
He practiced simple, human framing:
Small emotional signals — but signals nonetheless.
His coach encouraged him to say the things he assumed were obvious:
Neutrality had become a shield. Clarity became a bridge.
He practiced responding with:
Before fixing, he connected. These shifts didn’t make him emotional. They made him human.
→ Explore Blindspotting Coaching for Leaders & Teams
As Vincente began showing small but meaningful emotional presence — concern, conviction, empathy, frustration, belief — everything changed.
The culture re-engaged because people could feel their leader again.
Vincente didn’t become dramatic.
He became authentic — and the organization followed.
Vincente’s story illustrates a core Blindspotting truth:
Avoiding emotion is not leadership composure — it’s leadership absence.
Emotional neutrality may feel safe to the leader, but it leaves teams guessing, hesitant, and disconnected. When leaders build emotional awareness and express even small amounts of genuine emotion, trust accelerates, clarity increases, and alignment becomes possible.
→ Learn more about Behavior Blindspots
Ask yourself:
If your steadiness is creating silence, you may be in your own Emotion Blindspot.
Your logic is a strength — until it becomes disconnection.
Emotional awareness turns steady leaders into trusted ones.
Explore Blindspotting Coaching →
Blindspotting →Identity →Behaviors →Traits → Intellect → Emotion → Motive →
