An international management study conducted concluded that many of us have a false sense of our management perspective. In other words, we are blind to our strengths and weaknesses. They discovered that there is little relationship between managers perspective of their firm’s management practices and their actual practices (regardless of the firm’s performance). This certainly rings true to me. As I reflect on my experience as the CEO of two challenging technology companies, I see now just how unaware I was of some of the biggest risks we faced. Too often I was biased by a few key facts instead looking at the total picture. And now as an advisor, I see many companies with their collective heads buried in the sand.

The good news is that there are some simple ways to take of the blindfold and become more aware.

The first step is to check your ego and the door and eat a slice of humble pie. This is hard to do, but it gets easier when you assume that something is wrong and it is your job to find out what it is.

• Asking yourself what advice you would give to your business if you where an outside consultant hired to identify the most important issues that need to address.
• Finding an insultant—someone who will give you a clear, unvarnished outside perspective on your management practices.
• Joining an executive forum like Vistage, Renaissance, or YPO where you can get solid feedback from other executives.
• Finding a retired executive to mentor you.
• Creating an internal team whose job it is to take the outside perspective.
• Having quarterly “Start-Stop-Continue” discussions with your team.
• Going to lunch regularly with some of the "devil's advocates" that work for you.
• Having an independent group do a win-loss analysis of a sample of last quarters sales activity.