Rahul & Swati – Pune Startup Blind-Spot

    A Pune startup executive was certain he was almost entirely optimistic. His colleague's honest score told a different story — and the gap between the two nearly cost him a client relationship before it taught him the most important lesson of his career.

    Rahul & Swati – Pune Startup Blind-Spot

    Rahul & Swati – Pune Startup Blind-Spot

    Rahul was one of the most confident people in his Pune startup's leadership team — sharp, energetic, always telling people the glass was more than half full. So when a simple self-assessment exercise told him he wasn't quite the optimist he thought he was, he didn't just disagree. He was genuinely shocked. That shock became the turning point in how he worked with his team.

    In short

    Where this sits on your Winning Kite

    This story lives on the RQ (Relationship Intelligence) side of the Winning Kite (KITE Leadership Framework) — the right string that holds your career steady in turbulent office winds. Rahul's blind spot wasn't discovered in isolation. It surfaced only because another person, Swati, was willing to hold up an honest mirror, and Rahul was willing to look into it. That is Relationship Intelligence in its most practical form: using the people around you to see what you cannot see alone, and using that insight to build stronger, more accurate working relationships.

    The Story: A Confident Executive Meets an Honest Colleague

    Rahul was a senior executive at a fast-growing startup in Pune. In a city known for its churn of new-age companies — from IT services to D2C brands to fintech — Rahul had built a reputation as the person in the room who kept spirits high. When funding rounds got tense or a product launch slipped, Rahul was the one saying, "We'll figure it out, this is a small setback." He genuinely believed he was, at his core, an optimist through and through.

    So when Rahul was introduced to a simple but powerful self-assessment exercise called the Uffe Elbaek Model — named after the Danish innovator and leadership expert known for his work in organizational development — he expected the exercise to simply confirm what he already knew about himself.

    The Elbaek Model works like a personality map. You take an axis of opposing traits — say, Optimistic versus Pessimistic — and you rate yourself on a scale of 0 to 10 on each side, with the important rule that the combined score across the pair cannot exceed 10. Rahul sat down and, without much hesitation, rated himself a 9 on optimism and 1 on pessimism. To him, this wasn't even a close call. He was, in his own mind, almost entirely an optimist, with barely a trace of caution or doubt in his professional makeup.

    Then came the second half of the exercise — the part that makes the Elbaek Model genuinely useful instead of just a feel-good self-quiz. Rahul asked a trusted colleague, Swati, to rate him on the exact same axis, based purely on what she had observed of him at work.

    Swati's numbers came back very differently. She scored Rahul only 6 on optimism and 4 on pessimism — a gap of three full points on each side of the axis, and a strikingly different overall picture of who Rahul was at work.

    The Moment of Shock — and What Came After It

    Rahul's first reaction was disbelief. He had walked into the exercise so certain of his own self-image that Swati's numbers felt, at first, almost like an accusation. This is a completely normal reaction, and it's exactly the moment the Elbaek Model is designed to create. The gap between self-score and other-score isn't meant to make you defensive — it's meant to make you curious.

    To her credit, Swati didn't just leave the numbers on the table and walk away. She backed up her rating with specific, concrete examples — real situations where Rahul had, in practice, leaned toward the cautious option rather than the bold one. Times he had delayed a decision to "gather more data." Times he had quietly hedged a commitment to a client instead of going all-in the way he believed he always did. Times he had let a risk-averse instinct guide a call, even while telling the team out loud that everything would work out fine.

    None of these were dramatic failures. Individually, they looked like ordinary, sensible business decisions. But stacked together, they told a story that Rahul himself had never noticed: underneath his loud, visible optimism, there was a real and consistent streak of caution shaping his actual choices.

    This is exactly the pattern the Elbaek Model is built to surface. When you rate yourself much higher than someone who works closely with you rates you, it's rarely because the other person is wrong. More often, as I tell participants in my own workshops, it's because ego has quietly inflated your self-image — the same instinct that makes so many of us privately believe "main hi sabse best hoon," until reality, or a colleague's honest feedback, asks the blunt Hindi question: "Teri aukaat kya hai?" That gap between self-perception and reality is where friction, misunderstanding, and — eventually — broken trust quietly begin.

    Why the Gap Mattered More Than the Numbers

    It would have been easy for Rahul to argue the numbers, to insist Swati had misjudged specific incidents, or to simply dismiss the whole exercise as unscientific. Instead, once the initial shock passed, Rahul did something much harder and much more valuable: he sat with the discomfort and asked Swati to walk him through her reasoning in detail.

    That conversation is where the real transformation happened — not in the numbers on the axis, but in the honest back-and-forth that followed them. Rahul began to see a pattern he had been blind to for years: he talked like an optimist in public, but he often decided like a realist in private. Neither version of Rahul was wrong or bad. The problem was that he only knew about one of them.

    Once Rahul became aware of this blind spot, something important shifted. He didn't try to force himself to become either purely optimistic or purely cautious. Instead, he learned to consciously balance optimism with practicality — leaning on his natural bias toward hope to rally the team, while deliberately acknowledging, out loud, the cautious instincts that were already quietly guiding his real decisions. That honesty made him more predictable to work with, and paradoxically, more trusted — because his team started to see the whole Rahul, not just the highlight reel he had been unconsciously projecting.

    How the Elbaek Model Works — So You Can Try It Yourself

    The beauty of what Rahul and Swati did is that it costs nothing and takes less than thirty minutes. Here's how to run it with your own team:

    1. Choose Relevant Trait Pairs

    Pick two to four axes that matter in your specific work context. Beyond Optimistic vs. Pessimistic, common ones include Selfish vs. Helpful, Dishonest vs. Honest, and Independent vs. Collaborative. You can also customise pairs like Honest vs. Diplomatic, Analytical vs. Creative, Introverted vs. Extroverted, Risk-Taking vs. Cautious, Innovative vs. Conventional, Assertive vs. Passive, or Detail-Oriented vs. Strategic Thinking — whichever traits are most relevant to your role.

    2. Rate Yourself Honestly

    On each axis, split 10 points between the two opposing traits — for example, 7 on Optimistic and 3 on Pessimistic. Don't overthink it or try to guess the "correct" or most impressive answer. Authenticity is the entire point.

    3. Get an External Rating

    Ask someone who works closely with you — a colleague, a direct report, a manager, or a mentor — to rate you on the exact same axes, based only on what they've actually observed. For a richer, more reliable picture, involve more than one person; two or three independent external ratings will show you patterns a single opinion might miss.

    4. Compare and Discuss Openly

    Overlay the two sets of scores. Wherever the gap is largest, that's your blind spot — a trait visible to others but invisible to you. Don't defend the number. Ask for the story behind it, the way Rahul asked Swati. That conversation, more than the score itself, is where the growth happens.

    What This Means for Your Relationships at Work

    Rahul's story is really a story about relationships, not just self-awareness. His blind spot wasn't dangerous because he was secretly pessimistic — plenty of successful leaders balance hope with caution. It was risky because his team was operating on a false picture of him. They trusted his loud optimism, planned around it, and were occasionally blindsided when his quieter, cautious instincts took over a decision without warning. That mismatch — between the Rahul people expected and the Rahul who actually showed up in a crunch — is exactly the kind of gap that erodes trust over time, even when every individual decision was reasonable.

    This is why exercises like the Elbaek Model belong squarely on the RQ side of the Winning Kite. Strong relationships aren't built on how you see yourself — they're built on how accurately the people around you can predict and trust your behaviour. Psychologist Daniel Goleman's research on emotional intelligence has long pointed to accurate self-perception as a foundation for social effectiveness; Rahul's experience with Swati is a very Indian, very workplace-specific illustration of exactly that principle in action.

    The professionals who rise fastest at India Inc. aren't the ones who never have blind spots — everybody does. They're the ones who build relationships strong enough, and egos open enough, that a colleague like Swati feels safe telling them the truth, and who are secure enough to actually hear it.

    Try This at Your Workplace This Week

    Rahul's next step, and yours, is simple:

    Using the Elbaek Model isn't about proving yourself right or wrong. It's about building the kind of deeper, more accurate relationships that let you see the version of yourself your colleagues already see — so you can decide, consciously, what to do with that picture. If you want a structured way to bring exercises like this into your organisation, explore Avinash's Signature Corporate Training Programs or browse the full list of Corporate Training Topics. You can also read the companion piece on the Elbaek Model as a relationship-building tool for the complete framework behind Rahul and Swati's exercise.

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    Avinash Chate

    TEDx Speaker · Founder, The Future Corporate · Author of Stars at India Inc.

    Avinash has trained the Indian Army, BRO, RBI, BARC, JSW Steel and 1000+ corporate leaders across India. His work focuses on leadership, emotional intelligence and behavioural training rooted in Indian values and modern business needs.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What is a workplace blind spot?

    A workplace blind spot is a trait, habit, or pattern of behaviour that colleagues can see clearly but you cannot see in yourself — because self-perception is filtered by ego, memory, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.

    What is the Elbaek Model used for?

    The Elbaek Model, developed by Danish innovator Uffe Elbaek, is a simple self-assessment tool that compares how you rate yourself on personality traits against how a trusted colleague rates you on the same traits, revealing blind spots in the gap.

    Why did Rahul's optimism score create a blind spot?

    Rahul rated himself 9/10 optimistic and 1/10 pessimistic. His colleague Swati rated him only 6/10 optimistic and 4/10 pessimistic, based on specific decisions where Rahul had quietly chosen caution over risk — a pattern Rahul himself had never noticed.

    How does this connect to Relationship Intelligence (RQ) on the Winning Kite?

    Blind spots are relationship problems as much as self-awareness problems — the gap between how you see yourself and how a colleague experiences you directly shapes trust, delegation, and collaboration. Closing that gap is core RQ work on the right side of the Winning Kite.

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