If you are blind to improvement opportunities, you will never improve. How blind are you? Let’s look at the evidence. Here are 10 signs that you can’t see the enormous opportunity before you to improve productivity, profits, and engagement:

1. You speak in treadmill verbs.

If you use words like review, report, discuss, communicate, update, and inform, to name a few, you are blind to the lack of clarity in your requests and agendas. I call these words “Treadmill Verbs” because they have no destination. “Reviewing” is like running on a treadmill. You can always run a little farther, just like you can always review a little longer. There is no way to know when you are done. You can review, report, discuss, communicate, update, and inform forever! But you won’t necessarily get anything done.

2. You start meetings without knowing what must be different when they end.

People who know I detest wasteful meetings are quick to tell me about a great meeting they’ve attended. When I ask what made it great, I typically get three answers:

• The topic was at least mildly interesting.
• Everyone stayed focused on the topic.
• No one dominated or engaged in uncivil behavior.

My next question is inevitably met with stunned silence: “What was accomplished? With what did you leave that you didn’t have when the meeting began?”

I don’t care how focused, well-behaved, or entertaining a meeting is. Unless you move the needle and get one step closer to achieving a clear goal, all you’ve done is talk.

3. You list pros and cons when making decisions.

Listing pros and cons is simply a stupid way to make a decision. Why? Because every alternative has numerous pros and cons, many of which are irrelevant. If the goal were to maximize pros and minimize cons, then listing both would be sensible. But that is not the goal. The goal is to achieve an objective. Instead of listing pros and cons, itemize the decision criteria that will allow you to distinguish good alternatives from bad ones. (Learn how to SOAR through decisions here.)

4. You implement “solutions” that aren’t really solutions.

You can’t solve a problem without eliminating whatever causes the problem. That means you have to identify the cause of the problem. Then you have to identify a means of eliminating that cause. Then you must confirm that whatever method you tried does indeed eliminate the cause. But that requires effort, time, and discipline. Instead, most people simply glom onto an idea that sounds promising. As a result, they waste tremendous resources implementing a “solution” that solves nothing and leaves the problem to be “solved” again and again.

5. You and your employees have more than 3 priorities at any one time.

If you have lots of priorities, you don’t really have priorities at all. And at any given moment, your brain can do only one thing at a time. Sorry, but this is simply a fact. We don’t have dual processors. Multi-tasking is a bad habit that involves jumping from task to task. The consequences include mistakes and/or wasted energy as you ramp up after jumping away and back again. The more complicated the task, the more wasteful is every distraction. People with more than three priorities typically accomplish the least. They spend more time trying to decide what to do than actually accomplishing anything.

6. You think it is important to achieve consensus.

What leaders need is engaged employees who will commit to decisions. This does not require achieving consensus. Achieving consensus often means you’ve found an alternative that upsets no one. That is a lowest common denominator approach to decision making that rarely leads to exciting ideas that foster engagement, commitment, and determination.

And while I am at it, let me dispel the myth that employees want to be involved in all decisions. That is simply false. Most employees have far too much to do to attend meetings that aren’t critical to their top priorities. The reason it may appear that employees want to be involved in every decision is because they don’t trust you to make decisions without them. They don’t trust your process. They have reason to believe you won’t seek input from the right people at the right time. While they would rather get their work done so they can go home at a reasonable hour, they want to be involved because they are afraid you will make a stupid decision without them.

7. You think people hate change.

People don’t hate change. If they did, they would never, ever:

• get married,
• have children,
• move, or
• change jobs

to name a few! No, people don’t hate change. What they hate is being yanked around without warning by someone who doesn’t understand the impact of their decisions and hasn’t bothered to explain why any change is needed at all. As long as you believe people hate change, you will waste your time and energy tiptoeing around your employees. Or, even worse, your focus will shift to controlling and manipulating them.

8. You are dragged into decisions that others should be able to make without you.

If you keep getting dragged into decisions you think others should be able to make without you, you’ve got a problem with clarity! In particular, a problem with delegating with clarity! I recommend reading this guide to what no one ever told you about delegation.

9. You can’t understand why others “just don’t get it.”

I hear this complaint frequently. Two scenarios come to mind. In the first, you repeat yourself. That generally won’t do the trick!

The second scenario is more complicated. The answer is to create clarity.

10. You can’t see that increasing clarity represents a huge opportunity to improve productivity, profits, and engagement.

In every one of these examples, the answer is greater clarity, especially greater clarity of purpose and process. Clear, shared objectives and methods for obtaining those objectives allow everyone to contribute their best. Greater clarity leads to greater productivity, profit, engagement, commitment, and confidence. But you won’t achieve any of this if you can’t see the lack of clarity surrounding you and don’t appreciate the magnitude of the opportunity for improvement.

Ann Latham is an expert on strategic clarity and author of The Clarity Papers. Take The Clarity Quiz and download a free copy of The Clarity Quiz Collection.

This article first appeared on Forbes, March 25th, 2018.