Polarized

My car, Elke, has a heads-up display. It provides essential information in my field of vision while I’m driving so I don’t have to look down (and take my eyes off the road). Speed, navigation prompts, lane-keeping alerts—it’s all right there.

When I first got the car, I was stumped. Driving around town, the display was invisible; parked in the garage, it worked fine. I cycled through every setting. I turned it off and back on (the Microsoft solution). Nothing.

Then I figured it out. I couldn’t see the display through my polarized sunglasses.

When light reflects off a flat horizontal surface, it stops bouncing in all directions and aligns horizontally. This is what creates glare off the car in front of you or off a lake. The heads-up display works the same way: the projected light is polarized horizontally. My sunglasses have a coating aligned at the molecular level in a vertical orientation, which blocks horizontally aligned light. They block glare beautifully. They also blocked the very information Elke was trying to tell me.

The glasses were doing exactly what they were designed to do. That was the problem.

How many times have I been wearing the leadership equivalent of polarized sunglasses, blocking exactly the signal I needed most?

For me, the leadership glasses that have caused the most damage are experience and certainty. I’ve been doing this a long time. I know this company, this industry, these people. That knowledge is genuinely useful, the way polarized lenses are genuinely useful for driving into the sun. But knowledge and experience also create a filter. They tell me what I expect to see. And what I expect to see, I will see. What I don’t expect, I’ll miss completely, even when it’s right in front of me.

A few years ago, someone on our team was struggling. Not dramatically, not in any way that fit my mental map of what “struggling” looked like in that role. So I didn’t see it. People who were closer to the situation saw it clearly. I missed it because I wasn’t looking for it, and I wasn’t looking for it because I thought I already had a pretty good read on things. By the time I took the glasses off, I was behind. That cost something. It cost that person some time they deserved to have. I’m still bothered by it.

The heads-up display is a brilliant piece of engineering because it keeps the information in your line of sight. You don’t have to divert your attention, and you don’t have to look away from the road. The car is constantly surfacing what matters without asking you to hunt for it. But only if you can see it.

Leaders have a version of this display. The people around us are constantly projecting information: how they’re doing, what they’re carrying, and whether they’re uncertain, burned out, or quietly exceptional. It’s in their faces at the Monday morning standup. It’s in how they respond to feedback—or don’t—in the questions they stop asking, and in the energy they bring on a Tuesday versus six months ago. Most of that signal is available to us in real time. We just have to be able to receive it.

Which means we have to know what filters we’re wearing. Not to throw them away—expertise and pattern recognition are real assets—but to take them off deliberately when we need to actually see something. To resist the pull toward confirming what we already believe about a person or a situation. To stay genuinely curious about what’s happening now, not just what happened the last time something looked similar.

Sometimes I have to literally slow down, make eye contact, and ask a question I don’t already have an answer to. That’s me taking off the glasses. It feels a little uncomfortable, like when the glare comes back and everything goes bright. But then the display comes back into view. The person in front of me comes into focus. I realize the car was talking to me the whole time. The information was always there. Taking off the glasses to see it is the Bison Way.

amymason
863.370.0101

1013 Pasadena Drive
Brentwood, TN 37027