When I asked one client to walk me through his To Do list, I realized why he never wrote one down: It was too long. Scarcely pausing for breath, he rattled off 120 items. Now, it's perfectly natural in times of stress to fall into bad habits, such as huge To Do lists. And the stress facing top managers cannot be overestimated. Still, executives don't have the luxury of indulging bad habits. They need to become aware of the problems and start dealing with them.

To help with that first part—awareness—here is a list of some of the most common managerial problems I've seen in two decades of consulting with senior executives on how to be more effective:

THE DEVIL OF DETAIL: When you face intense scrutiny from all directions, the temptation to keep busy-or to be seen to be busy-can become overwhelming. Senior executives who have forged successful careers by getting things done may respond to pressure by saddling themselves with exhaustive and exhausting action lists, demanding their hands-on involvement in everyday detail.

This reflex must be avoided. When your nose is pressed to the grindstone, it's not possible to keep an eye on the big picture. In today's flattened hierarchies, where delegation is the norm, the length of an individual's To Do list should be inversely proportional to his position within the company.

With the client who had 120 items on his list, I gradually got him down to three items a day, and he saw an enormous increase in his effectiveness, but it took a bit of time in detox.

THE TYRANNY OF INFORMATION: On the frontier of the Information Revolution, executives are acutely vulnerable to information overload—the scourge of our age. Like all good things, information must be consumed in moderation. I've witnessed extreme cases where individuals pig out on information like adolescents with an eating disorder.

My sessions with a senior executive of an international investment bank revealed that he was receiving an average of 50 e-mails every hour of his very long working day. Confronted with the problem, my client established clear protocols—and quickly—among staff who wished to communicate with him by e-mail.

Overindulgence is simply an outward symptom of inward insecurity. The risk of appearing uninformed is the stuff of executive anxiety dreams. But don't bite off more information than you can chew. Alerting people to the risks of overindulgence, and raising their awareness so that they distinguish between haute cuisine and junk food, are two key steps toward establishing a healthy, balanced information diet.

THE PROBLEM OF LIP SERVICE: It's not surprising that vision statements are becoming almost universal. There's nothing like a shared goal to galvanize people into action. But executives often undercut their vision statements.

One executive team called for frank feedback from the staff, some of whom suggested that executives spend a day a year on the shop floor, taking a hands-on approach to customer service. The executives panicked, rejected the idea out of hand, and stopped soliciting suggestions.

Another preached that its employees were its best asset—as so many companies say, with justification. This company actually tried to put its ideas into practice. Rigid hierarchies were abolished. Empowerment was rife. The spirit of enterprise thrived. Unfortunately, profits didn't. Management reintroduced command-and-control mechanisms, assumed sole responsibility for decision making, and promptly cut all middle managers out of the communication loop. The result? Mass exodus and slow death from the head down.

Executives must eat, breathe, and sleep their values. And then be seen to do so.

THE AVOIDANCE OF FEEDBACK: I was a guest at a senior management away-day where the I/T director consumed 27 scotches in an evening. His fellow executives said nothing. When top management is behaving with such alarming excess, what hope is there for the health of the body corporate?

Yet the ability to offer constructive criticism is a rare gift. One simple exercise that often helps is to ask members of an executive team to communicate three simple things: what they would like their fellow team members to start doing, stop doing, and continue doing.

The results can be illuminating. For example, executives at a pharmaceutical multinational felt free to ask one team member to stop cracking jokes. He was trying to lighten the atmosphere at management meetings, but his flippancy made him appear lightweight. Once he was aware of the problem, he carefully picked his spots for his jokes. (His punch lines are still lousy, but what can you do?)

THE MISREADING OF CULTURE: Multinational executive teams are becoming the norm, creating the possibilities for cultural misunderstanding. A message written with the characteristic frankness of a German may seem inappropriate to his more circumspect colleague from England. E-mail, while it brings numerous benefits, does little to soften communications.

Working with a multinational team at one of the world's premier investment banks, I suggested that coaching was now one of top management's prime responsibilities. But team members had different ideas about what a coach should be. The Americans envisaged a larger-than-life, domineering individual barking orders and shouting encouragement. The Japanese saw coaches as sages dispensing wisdom. The Europeans saw the coach somewhere in between.

Even when executives are from the same country, they increasingly come from widely different backgrounds, creating other opportunities for misunderstanding. Everyone taking a new job brings in pieces from other cultures.

There's no easy fix to cultural misunderstanding, but awareness goes a long way.

DISCOMFORT WITH LEADERSHIP: Traditionally, executives achieve their position through the expert application of functional skills. Then they are asked to reinvent themselves as gurus and visionaries. Their reaction may be less than favorable, and understandably so. Few of us are born leaders.

The first way to deal with this issue—and all the others—is, of course, to become aware that there may be a problem. In fact, awareness often is all that's needed to cause change—assuming executives are encouraged to discover the problems, rather than being lectured about them, and assuming that executives then have room to learn and experiment without fear of immediate censure if a small mistake occurs. Big assumptions, but not unreasonable ones if attention is paid to constructing an environment in which people are encouraged to learn.

The real question is how to make executives aware. That can be hard. The fish, after all, doesn't see the water it swims through.

Graham Alexander is founder and chairman of Alexander, a London-based consultancy specializing in transforming leadership in major organizations. He can be reached at galexander@alexander.ins.co.uk.