10 Leadership Blind Spots to Avoid
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Valuing Being Right Over Being Effective
By getting defensive about your "correct" decisions and stopping people in mid-sentence, you close yourself off to the possibilities of better strategies. -
Overlooking the Price of Victories
When your IT teams adopt a win-at-all-costs mindset, it can lead to destructive patterns. -
Thinking the Present is the Past
If your radar is tuned to only familiar patterns and processes, you won't recognize emerging possibilities. -
Avoiding Important Issues
It's easy to lapse into a routine in which you only address operational and administrative needs. But true leaders prioritize these duties behind the more impactful—and tougher —strategic challenges. -
Enabling Weak Team Members
If you don't address these employees, you'll forever limit the potential of your teams. And your top contributors will resent the situation—and possibly leave. -
Not Developing a Successor
You won't be in your position forever. Identify rising, internal stars who aren't merely capable to filling your role, but have the potential to expand it. -
Failing to Capture Hearts and Minds
You have to do more than get people to do what you ask. When they actually believe in their mission, they'll take ownership of their roles. -
Not Connecting With the Front Lines
Within any organization, the front liners get a first-hand read on how customers feel. Tap into this knowledge and adjust your strategies accordingly. -
Treating Opinions as Facts
Distinguish statements that are based upon personal perspectives from those that are grounded in credible, authoritative resources. Even allegedly "sourced" information can be altered as it gets passed around. -
Dismissing Internal Politics
While it's nice to think that no one "plays politics here," it's also entirely unrealistic. You have to know where influencers are—at all levels of your organization—and earn their allegiance.
It's all too common for CIOs and other leaders to lose sight of all the essentials which are needed to succeed. This could happen due to the wealth of never-ending little jobs that come with the territory, but get in the way of the accomplishment of larger, more impactful objectives. Or it could relate to the pure size of your organization, and the resulting hierarchies. Or somewhere along the way from the cubicles to your CIO office, you may forget about what it really means to stand out as an in-the-trenches team leader. The new book, Leadership Blindspots: How Successful Leaders Identify and Overcome the Weaknesses That Matter (Jossey-Bass), depicts how even strong executives can stumble due to a variety of unrecognized flaws. In the book, author Robert Bruce Shaw provides a large number of case studies to illustrate these situations, along with his recommendations for corrective action. The following 10 blind spots are adapted from the book, demonstrating how CIOs and other tech managers can transition from a narrow, self-focused perspective to one which takes into account the entire picture of an organization: from customers to team members to executive peers to the C-suite. Shaw is a management consultant specializing in organizational and leadership performance for executives and teams within industries such as telecommunications, financial services, defense, pharmaceuticals, power utilities and consumer goods. For more about the book, click here.