Brainz Magazine Exclusive Interview
A sought-after leadership expert and executive coach, Marisa Murray is a three-time Amazon best-selling author of Work Smart, Iterate! and Blind Spots. She is also a contributing author to the USA Today bestseller The Younger Self Letters. CEO and founder of Leaderley International, and a TEDx speaker, Marisa has made it her mission to help people uncover their blind spots and achieve their full potential. Her revelation that “Blind Spots are the Key to Breakthroughs” led her to launch an AI-powered application FeedbackFriend.ai to enable everyone to get the feedback they need to address their development areas, better leverage their strengths and unleash performance.
Marisa began her career as an Engineer, then Management Consultant and Partner with Accenture and VP at Bell before founding Leaderley International. Leaderley is now an award-winning organization including being recognized as one of the Top 10 Emerging Executive Coaching Companies for 2023 by Manage HR magazine and on the Brainz 500 Global list of Influential Leaders. Her clients are among the top leaders in Fortune 500 companies. Whether through her books, coaching engagements, 360s, or speaking engagements, Marisa has a gift for connecting with people and inspiring them to make positive changes in their lives.
Your company Leaderley has created the first AI-powered website that anyone can use for free to gather feedback for their development, why did you decide to invest in this?
I built FeedbackFriend.ai because honest feedback for leaders is hard to come by. This is a major problem because without feedback leaders inevitably develop blind spots that perpetually plague performance. Feedback is the most effective accelerator of leadership development. I’m proud that Leaderley is helping people get the information they need to become better leaders in leading themselves, others and change.
When I work with executives to become better leaders, I’m hyper-focused on helping them understand their outcomes. A leader can be measured based on their positive impact on performance, on people and on the world. The challenge is that we are all blind to our impact without feedback. We know our intention because that is what we are focused on but there is very often a gap between our intention and our impact and that’s where our blind spots live.
You just published your third leadership book, this one is entirely focused on Blind Spots, why did you feel you had to dedicate an entire book on the topic?
All of my books are my attempt to help leaders get at least 1% better. Because when you are the leader of thousands of employees, being even a smidgen more effective, has an exponential impact. I have the privilege of working with extraordinary and successful leaders who invest in coaching because they always want to get even better. People at the top echelon of their industry, profession and companies that are always looking for the one thing that can help them get one skosh better. I help them figure out what that one thing is.
My clients have told me time and time again, that the greatest value they get from our work together is that I help them see their blind spots. I can relate to this myself and in my work with hundreds of leaders I have seen that it is our blind spots that cause leaders the most stress. When they can see the problem, they excel at addressing it. The problem with blind spots is that by definition they are hard to see. Leaders can sense there is a problem, but they can’t see it. They just feel like something is sub-optimized or isn’t working.
The engineer in me felt inspired to organize the patterns that I was noticing and I sought out to develop a framework. Over the last 3 years, I poured over my client’s data to identify the top 7 Blind Spot categories that are most common. The book provides this framework and many examples, to help stimulate reflection for individual leaders and executive teams to uncover their blind spots and unleash performance.
Your approach for uncovering blind spots and capturing feedback seems similar to 360 Surveys, is there something different about your approach?
Yes, because there are two major problems with the way that many companies conduct 360 processes. I have met leaders that have PTSD from past experiences with them, which is really a shame. The first issue is that too many organizations entangle 360-degree feedback with their performance management process. As soon as that is done it significantly dilutes the value an organization can get from them. Respondents end up being much less likely to provide honest feedback and leaders are immediately defensive when they receive it. They have to be - because their performance rating depends on it.
The second issue is that the scoring and/or comments received during the process are often confusing and triggering for leaders. Without context, people try to guess which responses come from whom, and they usually guess wrong, given the human tendency to assume that all of the criticisms come from our more difficult relationships. All this confusion distracts them from the required self-reflection to get value out of the process.
At Leaderley, we are very clear with our clients that 360 processes need to be non-evaluative and focused on growth and development. Leaders should be measured by their metrics but not by their 360s since this data is intended to inform what the leader can do more or differently to enhance their effectiveness. Seeking out and receiving feedback is a vulnerable and humbling process so it needs to be conducted in a way that creates social safety. We also help our clients focus on the key themes. In my executive coaching programs, we embed interview-based 360s so that the coach can be the filter in identifying the themes and supporting pertinent reflection for the leader. If an electronic survey approach is preferred, the coaches customize the questions and build customized results with extracted key themes for the client. Interpreting the feedback is critical to powerfully supporting clients in identifying and acting on their growth opportunities.
Tell us about how FeedbackFriend.ai works!
For individuals or organizations that are not in the position to invest in the interview-based or customized survey 360s with a coach, I wanted to be able to offer a way for them to request feedback and rather than receive raw responses, have the key themes summarized and extracted from the survey data. This better protects the anonymity of the respondents and makes the feedback more actionable and palatable for people. I was impressed to see that AI natural language processing models like ChatGPT are quite good at analyzing responses and with the right coding, summarizing key strengths and key opportunities from survey data. I like the idea of anyone being able to seek out feedback from their stakeholders at any time for their development. At Leaderley, we believe that your journey to your best leader is your journey to your best self in every aspect of your life, so the idea of having a self-service 360 is pretty exciting.
The application is quite simple: You simply go to FeedbackFriend.ai and enter the email addresses of the people from whom you would like to request feedback. They receive a notification to answer a few questions and as soon as the responses are in (up to a maximum of 10 days) you receive a report summarizing your top strengths and potential areas of development or growth. This is a great start to helping you identify where your blind spots might be lurking.
Based on your research, what do you think causes blind spots?
Blind spots are caused by our biases and assumptions - and we all have them. Throughout your entire life, your mind is constantly filtering data and creating unconscious algorithms that drive your behavior. Your mind forms a pattern because that pattern has led to perceived success in the past, but the problem is, the present is not like the past – and yet the pattern persists. That’s also why Blind spots are linked to our strengths because when our strengths are taken to an extreme they eventually become our Achilles heel. Sometimes making us behave in ways that are the opposite of what we are striving to do.
For example, in one of the case studies in the book, the leader’s blind spot was intimidating people with his intellect. He was often the smartest guy in the room, but because he wasn’t aware of that perception, he often said things that made everyone feel stupid, so they didn’t like working with him. He just needed to be aware of that perception so that he could adjust his behavior with his team. He learned to be more inclusive and to showcase other people’s ideals and contributions. He made space for them to look smart too and that made all the difference.
When we become conscious of how we are impacting others, we can then choose to behave differently and create a new algorithm so that our strengths are no longer our Achilles heel.
As a Leadership Development Expert, what is the one thing you suggest people do to enhance their leadership?
To use an athletics analogy, think of yourself as a top athlete, who is always concerned, dedicated, and wants to be their best. Understand that you need to keep developing to become your best and be open to finding out what is the one thing that is blocking, preventing, or hindering you. This is how the top 1% keep getting 1% better. Most of us are worried about having an “oh no moment” where we realize we are doing something we are not necessarily proud of. Sometimes I joke with my clients if they are feeling pretty burdened or trapped by the feedback by saying: “The truth may not set you free, but it will bring you closer to becoming the leader you want to be.”
The results of addressing your blind spots are abundant and worth it, it benefits you in all aspects of your life. My clients rave about the outcomes they drive both professionally and personally and say things like “Even my family likes me better”. Their teams often say that they are more open, accessible, and authentic following our programs. Once they can see their blind spots, the transformation can happen fast, I've been amazed at how fast it can change with just a little bit of tweaking, and they start to feel more influential, connected, and impactful with their teams. It is just like: “I was blind but now I see.”
My favorite picture to share with my leaders is this:
Great leaders have incredibly noble intentions, but they are often blinded by their intention. We all need to be more deliberate and more curious about our impact to overcome this. That means continuously seeking data so that we can narrow the gap between our intention and impact. To do this we need to: listen more. Be even more curious about our impact on others and even more courageous in seeking out ways that we can enhance our impact on others.
When I was reading Blind Spots, I found the examples so helpful. I felt like I totally knew people just like the ones in the case studies. It made me curious if I’m one of those people too. Thanks for taking the time for this interview.
You're very welcome. My advice is: Get curious and get feedback.
