By C.J. Prince - October- November 2006 Issue

Five Ways to Compensate for Your Blind Spots

1. Know that you have them. “Successful leaders need to realize that blind spots are part of being human,” says CEO coach Susan Battley, of Battley Performance Consulting and author of Coach to Lead. It may be a tendency to isolate in the corner office or a reluctance to deal with the press or a general distaste for bad news. “Blind spots often occur in the areas of leaders’ greatest strengths,” she adds. A CEO known for being decisive, for example, can wind up making a decision prematurely because he or she thinks enough information has presented itself.

2. Seek out bad news. Nobody likes to disappoint the boss, so the natural inclination is to keep that news from you or to filter it on the way up. “You have to be relentless about being told what’s going on,” says John Alexander, president of the Center for Creative Leadership, “and then relentless about reporting that out to various constituencies.”

3. Hire a Chief Devil’s Advocate. Put somebody in place whose job it is to challenge you, says Battley. That person’s role is to say: What are the possible consequences? What is the upside and downside? Is this likely to adversely impact the company? How will this decision look to the outside?

4. Fire a friend. After years in office, it’s natural for CEOs to have lieutenants working for them to whom they are loyal, says Battley, but they often continue to keep them on long after they’re not performing. “In one case,” she recalls, “by the time the group president made the call to terminate his number two person, his own job was already so compromised that he was shown the door.”

5. Bust up your org chart. In order to facilitate free flow of information, CEOs need to ensure that nothing gets stopped by an inordinate number of lieutenants guarding the door. Try implementing a less hierarchical structure, favored by some of the newer breed CEOs. “They don’t have as closed a set of lieutenants,” says organization psychologist Dean Stamoulis, with Russell Reynolds Associates. “It’s a larger group that involves more dynamic information exchange. They tend to do skip-level and use both formal and informal methods of gathering information.”