You don’t know what you don’t know about your own bias. That’s not a flaw. That’s the design.
The Johari Window has a quadrant called the Blind Spot, things others can see in you that you genuinely cannot see in yourself. It’s not denial. It’s structural. No amount of self-reflection alone closes that window. Only other people can.
Now put that inside a neurodiverse team, different cognitive styles, different processing speeds, different sensory and attention patterns, neurodivergent and neurotypical people working side by side.
Every blind spot gets amplified. The colleague who needs silence to think gets read as “disengaged.” The one who thinks out loud gets read as “unfocused.” The one who needs more processing time gets read as “not keeping up.” None of it is true. All of it damages trust, and trust is the entire foundation of psychological safety.
Here’s the uncomfortable part: the bias isn’t the problem. Not knowing it’s there is.
Three ways to start spotting your blind spot:
1. Notice your first reaction, not your explanation.
Your gut response to a colleague’s behaviour happens before your reasoning does. If someone’s pace, silence, or directness irritates you before you’ve thought about why, that’s data. The explanation you build afterward is often a justification, not the truth.
2. Ask what “professional” secretly means to you.
Most bias hides inside unspoken norms. Eye contact. Fast replies. Talking in meetings versus writing things down. Ask yourself who those norms actually serve, and who they quietly penalise.
3. Actively ask people how they experience you.
Not “any feedback?” ,too vague, too easy to deflect. Ask specifically: “Is there anything about how I communicate or run this team that makes things harder for you?” That’s the only door into the blind spot quadrant. You can’t open it from the inside.
Awareness isn’t the finish line. It’s the entry fee.
This is exactly the work we do inside our Neuro-Inclusive Leadership Programme, our psychological safety workshop is built specifically to help teams surface these blind spots together, safely, before they quietly erode trust and collaboration.
