Blind spots are a fact of life for every leader. Focusing on the big picture makes it easy to miss small details crucial to your and your team’s success. Blind spots can lead to missed deadlines, wasted money, poor morale, and more. But by being intentional about leading yourself and your team—especially if you’re in a C-level executive role—you can find and address these issues before they turn into full-blown problems. Here are some tips for finding and managing blind spots in your company:
Be Present as a Leader
One of the easiest ways to address blind spots is to be present. Present in the moment and with your team, family, friends, and even yourself. Being present means having an eye on what’s going on around you. It’s not just about noticing what others are doing wrong. It also means being aware of your actions and reactions so that when you get off track or make a mistake, you can take responsibility for it instead of blaming others for things beyond their control.
How do we become more present? By practicing meditation! Meditation helps us stay focused by calming our minds so we can breathe deliberately through daily challenges. You don’t have to be a perfectionist to meditate effectively; plenty of guided meditations are available online if you want some help getting started.
Join Peer Advisory Groups
It’s not just about finding a group who can advise you on improving your company. Peer advisory groups are also a source of inspiration and encouragement. It helps to know that others have been through the same thing and come out stronger for it if you feel like you’re in a rut.
You might even find someone working on something similar in their organization, which could lead to a partnership opportunity or other collaboration down the road.
In addition to providing support and being an outlet for problem-solving ideas, peer advisory groups can help you find new ways to approach problems or solve them entirely differently than before.
When leaders attend meetings as equals instead of superiors trying solutions on subordinates, they get exposure to new ideas that they might otherwise not have considered. Those fresh perspectives can help them come up with solutions that might not have occurred otherwise because they weren’t aware of all their options beforehand!
However, finding the right CEO peer advisory group is challenging to achieve. You need to find a group with CEOs with at least some similar ideas and visions. While having CEOs with a distinct vision is vital to getting the best value out of the group and understanding others’ perspectives, it is also important to have some things in common. If you don’t relate with others in the group entirely, the discussions might not bring out something fruitful.
You can start or join a CEO peer advisory group with LXCouncil’s guidance. LXCouncil can get you access to a CEO peer advisory group that can prove to be a resource to help you out with every situation and difficulty while enabling opportunities for strategic alliances.
Listen to Your Employees
To begin, you’ll need to ask questions. Ask your employees what they think about the company’s mission statement or how they feel about a particular product or service. Ask your employees for their opinions on current and impending issues facing business today. Ask them for feedback on how to increase productivity in the workplace, and then listen carefully to what they say—even if it’s not what you want to hear! You must be open-minded enough to listen with an objective ear when hearing new ideas from others to incorporate them into future business decisions.
Suppose you find any blind spots where your team needs improvement. In that case, this is where asking for help comes into play. Ask each employee how they would like their roles defined so that everyone knows exactly what responsibilities fall under their job descriptions. Also, ask any disgruntled workers why they’re unhappy at work; even go so far as asking, “What do we do well?” or “What could we improve?”
Recognize When You Need Help
There are many ways this can happen, so let’s look at some examples. Maybe it’s a problem that keeps coming up, but you don’t know how to solve it. Or maybe there’s a challenge that requires expertise outside of your professional realm—perhaps someone else on your team could handle it better than you would.
Think about those moments where the answer seems clear in our minds but isn’t the right solution for whatever problem we’re trying to solve. Asking for help is not only okay but necessary for addressing blind spots and building relationships with colleagues and customers. If you can’t find a solution within your team, you can also outsource the task to someone or enter a strategic alliance if the problem arises frequently.
If we wait too long, these problems may turn into bigger issues—and our reactions might become destructive rather than constructive. Hence, it is vital to ask for help till we have time.
Set Expectations for Yourself
While it’s important to set expectations for your team, you must also set expectations for yourself. It requires a lot of self-awareness—you must know what you can achieve before setting the bar too high. If you don’t know what’s possible, why would anyone else?
For example: Say you decide that your sales team will generate $100 million in revenue by next year and save 20% on product costs without raising prices. Your leadership might think this is an ambitious goal—but if it were easy to achieve, everyone would do it! However, this is an expectation you have set for the team; what about you? How will you help your team achieve this?
You can set an expectation for yourself that you will conduct timely feedback sessions with your employees to find out if there’s anything that can prevent them from achieving the goal you have set for them.
Conclusion
We know it can be hard to confront the fact that you have blind spots. But it’s also important to remember that when you lead an organization, you don’t have to do everything yourself. You can gain insight into your blind spots by intentionally listening and asking for feedback from others, joining a CEO peer group, and asking for advice from people you trust. When you start being a team person and focusing on even minute details, you can find blind spots and eliminate them.
