Why two accurate diagnoses can still miss the problem.

I was reviewing my budget recently and realized I might be wasting money.

I have two programs. I know roughly what each one does, I’ve seen the pitch, skimmed the feature list, used them enough to feel settled. So I kept paying for both, confident that was the safer call. But I never actually checked whether either one fully covered what I needed. And as much as it pains me to say it, that “safer call” turned into two subscriptions that make me wince with each monthly charge.

The same thing happens with people in the workplace.

There are people with a wide range of skills, and they may feel confident they’ve already shown what they’ve got. You know the “this is my lane, this is my range, people know what I bring” mentality. Meanwhile, an organization may feel just as confident it’s making the best use of its people. Both sides feel settled. Neither has actually checked.

But that’s not all there is to it.

A resume tells you what someone has studied. It doesn’t tell you what they can do with it. A job description works the same way in reverse, it tells you the job is getting done. It doesn’t tell you what else the person could do beyond it.

We Blame the Wrong Side First

Now, you may be thinking, okay, we gotta get leadership in here to do something about this. That’s really tempting. Especially with all of the articles and training that focus on how influential leadership is. Except, leaders are often already doing something. Training, listening sessions, one-on-ones. They are putting in  effort to understand what’s happening on the ground. And that effort unfortunately creates false confidence. The effort turns into the mentality of “we addressed this, we did the work” without ever checking whether that work lines up with what the other side is experiencing.

I’ve seen this play out the same way across more than ten organizations, working both sides of it as a military spouse who kept relocating into new teams. Leaders would gather, name the communication problem, and go get trained on how to fix it. Meanwhile, the individual contributors were naming the same problem — and pointing at leadership’s actions as the reason it wasn’t resolving. Both diagnoses were reasonable, but neither side ever translated their read to the other. Same problem, two solutions, and aimed in different directions.

But It’s Not Just Leadership’s Blind Spot

It would be easy to stop there and call it solved. Leaders should check their work against reality, end of article.

Except the individual contributors in those same organizations weren’t short on insight either. They could point to exactly what leadership was doing wrong. When your reading feels that clear you know what’s wrong (all the time), it doesn’t occur to you to check it against what’s happening on the other side, such as the pressures, the training, the effort you can’t see.

I watched both groups build accurate pieces of the same picture, and defend them like the whole picture, without ever comparing notes.

What Actually Closes the Gap

For leaders, to close the gap requires an exploratory conversation, but not as a way to uncover hidden skills. The conversations happen as a way to understand the person, beyond their job description.

For the individual, it’s the same, but in reverse: given what you know you can offer, figure out what issue or challenge needs to be addressed. It won’t always be the easiest to see from your own seat, but it will hold up once you check it against what’s happening on the other side. 

A simple comparison that confirms or sheds new light. Sometimes it shows you were both right, about two different parts of the same problem, and neither read was ever going to fix it alone.

While you may be confident in your lens, that’s only half of the perspective needed to see clearly.

What does the other side see that you can’t from where you are ?