MyCEOLife looks at real problems facing real businesses and provides real solutions from the perspective of a real CEO.
If you have a question you want answered, click here to email me.
If you want to receive emails when new articles are posted, click here.
I was chatting with a few folk the other day about different styles that CEO’s have. Some wander around and chat, some roll up their sleeves and get deep into the hot issues, some just look at the numbers from their desk, while others cant help but micro manage.
This got me to thinking, can a CEO really manage a business from his / her desk or do they really need to get out amongst the people?
You have to love the Nike slogan - it really does epitomise many things a business should do and often doesnt. How many times have you been frustrated by the speed of decision making within a business or the speed of response by a business to make something happen. Often decisions get bogged down in politics, lack of ownership, consensus building or just fear (of making a decision). I have often experienced this when dealing with external businesses (and sometimes internally too) where people seem to take forever to make what sometimes looks like a relatively easy decision.
I think that there is a different way to run a business and one the leads to faster decision making, more responsibility passed down through the ranks and the result is a place where people get on with it, take leadership for their actions and things happen!
Tags: Decision Making
The other day i wrote a post about politicians emerging where there is a leadership gap. (Click here to read it). In it i looked at some different types of people within a business and what happens when things change. The article identified 4 types of peope - worker bees, survivors, aspirants and politicians. Well the article stirred some discussion and Alain in Luxembourg wrote a great email all about the Worker Bee Politician Mutation. Here it is …
There are many different types of people that operate within a business. Based on my experience, here are some of them.
Worker Bees- These are hard workers who are happy with their lot in life and have few long term leadership aspirations beyond doing a good jobs and putting bread on the table for thier family.
Survivors - These are not so hard workers who do what is necessary to survive in the business and are either looking for something else or see work as a means to end - an enjoyable life.
Aspirants- Employees in this group truly aspire to be leaders in a business and believe that hard work and doing a good job will get them recognised. They let their work to the talking for them. Not everyone in this will become a leader in the business however their aspire to get there.
Politicians - Employees in this group also aspire to be leaders however they often look for opportunities to climb the corporate ladder by shamelessly promoting themselves, sometimes at the costs of others, and often are divisive in the business in an attempt to curry favour or use wedge politics to get themselves noticed.
I have come across people in each of these groups during my working life. The funny thing is that people often clearly fall into one of these categories although they often dont know it themselves. Of course as the CEO you want a great combination of Worker Bees and Aspirants in the business and should ensure that the Survivors and Politicians are shown the door as soon as possible.
Tags: Aspirants, Politicians, Survivors, Worker Bees
Now here is an interesting question - “How do you teach the employee’s within your organization about the company’s Core Values and at the same time ensure that your fostering that culture throughout the organization?“
I am not sure “teach” is the right word to use. I think that you can not create a culture however you must use your best efforts to shape the culture.
Now shaping a culture is quite difficult, especially once you go through 150 or so employees. (I have 350 employees today). Therefore it is important that while you are small, you get the basis of the culture right and as part of that, get the core values right.
So, firstly you must decide what type of organization you want to run. It can be open and egalitarian, it can be hierarchical, it can be dictatorial - it is up to you. Why? Well for one simple reason - what you do will determine what is acceptable behavior.
We see it in all walks of life. It is ok for the US Government to spy on its citizens so what do we see Hewlett Packard doing - spying on its Board members and even the press.
So, what ever you want the place to be, live it in everything you do. It is by experience that people learn what is right and wrong within the organization. Work on your lieutenants as they must also live the culture. If you it right, it will spread like wildfire.
So take my business. I think it should be egalitarian so i don’t have an office, i don’t fly business and the rest economy, i don’t have any special favors - we are all equal. We openly value great ideas not position. I openly chastise those that try to ingratiate themselves with me and we praise great ideas - no matter where they are from.
Other things i do is travel to other offices and just work there for the day amongst the team. I take people to lunch, shout them beers and just let them know, by action, that i am a normal guy and very approachable.
The best form of teaching is to live the culture and being a CEO, you are always under the spot light … 
One thing that i constantly do is read. I always have a stack of throw away reading for plane trips. I never read confidential materials about the business on a plane and really spend that time opening my mind to new ideas and thoughts - either about the industry we operate in or about new management techniques and thoughts.
Leadership is one of my hot buttons … here is a list from a management magazine of the top 8 tips for leaders
Tags: Leadership
I was recently thinking about what makes a great person in the business i run and the common trait that kept coming to mind was PASSION.
It seems to me that my team members who are truly great are those that display unflagging passion for what they do. They don’t focus on what is in it for them, they focus on what they want to achieve for the business.
It was then interesting when i read a recent article that compared GE’s approach of rating people as either in the top 20% or bottom 10% with hiring people that are passionate. It basically proposed that simply rating people based on quantitative measures may miss the one vital ingredient - passion.
I agree with this. I think you need to employ passionate people as they will go above and beyond, they will more often than not make the right decision, and they will be very loyal allowing you to change the direction of the business. The other good thing about passionate people is that they will tell you what they really think. This allows you to get true and honest feedback from all parts of the business.
So the lesson i have learned is that sometimes a person may not be a top performer but if they have passion that is well intended and well directed you should probably work hard at finding the right role for them in the business rather than letting them go.
Have you ever wanted to leap across a table and throttle someone? Well i had that experience yesterday - the desire, not the action.
I was called to a meeting for the launch of a new internal project. Now i was aware of the project as it is closely tied to a recent acquisition we had made. However, what i was not prepared for was the statement of the obvious.
Prior to the meeting, documents were distributed - volumes of them. Now i don’t know about you, but i don’t have time to read every thing that comes across my desk so i tend to ignore long email or send a polite response back asking for a summary.
So at this kick off meeting, i was expecting to be taken through the scope of the project and to have them seek my sign off so that they could get on with it. No, they decided to waste my time and that of other senior managers on telling us how they are going to run the project. What a waste of my and other senior management’s time.
The bottom line is that i trust them to run a project (otherwise i would not have appointed them) and what i am interested is in knowing what you are going to do, when it will be delivered, how you are going to keep me in the loop and finally HOW MUCH it will cost!
So we had a clash of cultures - the project management / external company justifying their existence versus the high speed, rapid progress, small company that believes in see forgiveness don’t beg permission.
The way we addressed it is to call the meeting to a premature halt, explain that we all know about project management and then gave them 30 min to prepare a more focused, problem solving meeting that will actually be valuable to the business.
I cant see the point in politely sitting there and then walking out and saying - what was that all about. Carpe diem - sieze the day!
I had one of those days yesterday. A while ago we employed someone into our customer care center. He was a good worked. After a while he came upon hard times and due to a separation from his partner, he was about to be deported.
Instead of letting him go, we decided to sponsor him back into the country and to give him a chance to get his life together. We did not have to do it as the role was able to be replaced but we thought he deserved better.
How does he repay us?
Well get this. By accident, he was given accept to a domain name registry key for one of our sites. Now a normal employee would pass this information on a senior person so that we can ensure that it is safely kept in place. What does this guy do, he sits on it and then blogs to the world about how stupid the company is and how he can redirect the website etc. He basically threatened the business.
What he didn’t know is that we have a fail safe mechanism with the company who manages the DNS and they need a separate confirming password before anything is done.
The bottom line is that no matter how much you put your faith in people and try to help them, there is always the chance that they may turn around and try it on. That is generation Y for you!
Tags: Trust
Have you ever had one of those days when nothing, i mean absolutely NOTHING, goes right. Well yesterday was one of those days.
The day started with one of our rocket scientists confusing an “=” sign with a “>” sign and bring down a stack of websites. Now that would be bad enough however, they were our customers’ websites. Guess what - the customers went through the roof.
So, just like fighter control in WWII, we scrambled the guru’s and attacked the problem. Half a day later and a heap of customer comforting, we finally got the problem resolved. To ensure that we kept the customers happy, we gave away some free product and i ensured that a senior person called each of the customers to apologise and to ensure that they knew that the issue had been resolved.
So … what lessons can be learned
Ensure that people think before they do - especially when they are playing with a live environment. This is really a part of the culture and something that we are working on. Passionate, caring people will take responsibility and ensure that what they think before they do. Building that passions is sometimes a challenge.
Great comebacks can be achieved. We worked on the theory of being very open with our customers, kept them informed and gave them a little thanks you for putting them out. Most understand but still, our objective was to recover graciously and have them think more of us at the end of the experience than at the beginning. TIME WILL TELL!!!
Recent Comments