One of the biggest blind spots I see in leadership isn’t effort, intention, or even care. It’s assessment.
Most of us are far better at judging than we are at assessing. We look at outcomes and quickly decide: success or failure, right or wrong, pass or fail. And while that kind of clarity can feel decisive, it often shuts down the very growth we say we want.
Judgment asks, “Did this work?”
Assessment asks, “What worked — and what do we build on?”
Those are very different questions.
I was reminded of this recently in a conversation with my daughter, who’s in college working on an astrophysics degree. (She feels like she got a “late start” to the field, at least compared to her peers, but I think what she’s doing is nothing short of incredible.) Recently, she walked out of an exam knowing she didn’t get the grade she wanted. And emotionally, that hurt. That disappointment was real and valid.
But it wasn’t the whole truth.
She didn’t get an A. That’s true.
She also didn’t get a zero. That’s true, too. (Spoiler alert: she got a 70.)
She showed up. She studied. She walked into a difficult room and stayed in the fight. She demonstrated understanding — not all of it, but some of it. And that matters more than we often acknowledge. Her gap is no longer 100%, but rather 30% — a much smaller problem to solve.
When we default to judgment, we collapse complexity into a single verdict. When we assess, we allow multiple truths to coexist.
This is where leadership lives.
Black-and-white thinking makes improvement impossible. If something is either a success or a failure, the only options are to celebrate or scrap it. But real progress doesn’t work that way. It comes from refining, adjusting, and building on what’s already there.
Great writers understand this. They don’t sit down expecting brilliance on the first pass. They write — and then they edit. The magic isn’t in what first appears on the page; it’s in the refinement. The same is true for leadership decisions, team performance, and personal growth.
When leaders assess well, they stop asking, “Was this right or wrong?” and start asking:
- What percentage of this worked?
- Where did we make progress?
- What do we adjust rather than abandon?
- What did we learn that makes the next attempt stronger?
Judgment tends to produce fear. Assessment produces engagement.
People are far more willing to take risks, offer ideas, and own outcomes when they know they won’t be defined by a single misstep. When leaders only look for what went wrong, teams learn to hide. When leaders notice what’s working, teams learn to build.
This doesn’t mean lowering standards. It means raising the quality of how we evaluate progress (consider this your invitation to my semi-annual TED Talk — just kidding — on the stop-start-keep method).
If I could change one thing for leaders across the board, this would be it:
Learn to assess, not just judge.
Because growth doesn’t happen when we label something a failure. It happens when we recognize that even imperfect efforts contain information — and opportunity.
Photo by Yume Photography on Unsplash
