Dan Pascariu's Blog “THE CHAIRMAN’S PLAYBOOK’’

(Why good people — and good leaders — miss their own ethical gaps, and how to close them)

“When confronted with an ethical dilemma, most of us like to think we would stand up for our principles. But we are not as ethical as we think we are.” 

That unsettling line from “Blind Spots” by Max H. Bazerman and Ann E. Tenbrunsel explains why this book matters so much to leaders. Published in 2011 by Princeton University Press, it argues that ethical failure often begins not with bad intent, but with limited self-awareness. 

Most leaders do not wake up wanting to mislead, rationalize unfairness, or betray their values. Most believe they are decent people making sound decisions under pressure. That is precisely why ethical blind spots are so dangerous. They usually don’t emerge from villainy. They emerge from the ordinary human tendency to see ourselves as more principled, objective, and consistent than we really are. Bazerman and Tenbrunsel describe this problem as the gap between what we think we will do and what we actually do when incentives, pressure, and ambiguity are present. 

Why Blind Spots Matter for Leadership

This is where the book becomes especially relevant for leadership.

The higher one rises, the easier it becomes to confuse authority with clarity. Leaders are surrounded by performance pressures, institutional routines, personal ambition, and the desire to avoid disruption. In that environment, ethical compromise rarely arrives looking like compromise. It appears disguised as realism, loyalty, commercial necessity, or strategic judgment.

A leader might say, “I am protecting the company.”

A board might say, “We cannot overreact.”

A manager might claim, “This is just how business works.”

And slowly, what should feel morally troubling begins to feel normal. 

The Gap Between Intentions and Actions

One of the book’s most important ideas is “the gap between intended and actual ethical behavior.” That phrase is powerful because it moves the discussion away from moral slogans and toward lived behavior. 

Most organizations assume ethics is mainly a matter of rules, codes, and training. But, as one chapter title in the book bluntly puts it, “traditional approaches to ethics” will not save us. The problem is not only that people break rules. The deeper problem is that they often fail to notice, in the moment, that they are standing in an ethical situation at all. 

How Ethical Blind Spots Appear in Everyday Leadership

That is why ethical failures in leadership often begin in small, almost invisible ways.

A leader ignores early warning signs because results are strong.

A board excuses conduct that it would condemn in a competitor.

A senior executive relabels a moral issue as a legal or financial one.

A manager protects a toxic high performer because losing that person seems too costly.

None of this feels dramatic at first. That is the point. Ethical drift does not usually feel like collapse. It feels like management. Small compromises accumulate. Language becomes sanitized. Responsibility becomes diffuse. Concerns are delayed because the quarter is busy, the market is unstable, or the numbers still look good. By the time the problem becomes visible, the culture has often adjusted to it. 

Why Success Can Deepen Ethical Blind Spots

The book is also valuable because it challenges a flattering myth: that success makes leaders morally sharper.

Often, it does the opposite. Power reduces honest feedback. Status discourages dissent. Strong results create moral overconfidence. The more leaders are praised for performance, the easier it becomes to assume that good outcomes prove clean judgment. 

But success can hide as much as it reveals. It can make people less curious about the human cost of their decisions, less open to criticism, and more eager to interpret favorable results as evidence of virtue. That is one reason ethical blind spots are often found not only in failing organizations, but also in high-performing ones. 

Why Ethical Humility Matters in Leadership

This is why the best leaders cultivate not only intelligence but ethical humility.

They ask questions that successful people often stop asking. “What am I not seeing? Who is paying the hidden cost of this decision? What have we normalized because it works? Would I judge this differently if another company did it?” 

These questions matter because blind spots are sustained by self-protection. We want to preserve the story that we are fair, rational, and good. Yet leadership maturity begins when we accept that our moral self-image may itself be part of the problem. 

How Leaders Can Close Their Ethical Gaps

So how do leaders close the gap?

Not through moral grandstanding. Not through polished values statements. And not through the comforting belief that good intentions are enough.

Leaders reduce ethical blind spots when they slow down decisions with moral consequences. They invite dissent before consensus hardens. They examine incentives carefully because reward systems often reveal an institution’s true ethics more clearly than its official values. They create cultures where concerns can be voiced early, before silence becomes complicity. And they treat ethics not as a compliance exercise, but as a discipline of perception. In that sense, the leadership lesson of “Blind Spots” is simple but demanding: character is not tested only by what we believe, but by what we fail to notice. 

The Deeper Leadership Lesson of Blind Spots

This is why I find the book so valuable. It is not really accusing leaders of hypocrisy. It is warning them against innocence. It reminds us that “we overestimate our ability to do what is right” and that people can “act unethically without meaning to.” Those are hard words, but necessary ones. Because the greatest ethical danger in leadership may not be conscious wrongdoing, it may be the quiet confidence that people like us could never be the problem. 

The strongest leaders do not ask only, “Am I a good person?”

They ask, “Where might my goodness be blinding me?”

That is the more difficult question. And in leadership, it is often the more necessary one.

If you’d like to explore the book yourself, you can find it here on Amazon.

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