If you’re a chief executive
officer, your job is to execute. It’s written right into your title. But what
does it mean, in terms of daily tasks, to be the company’s top “executer?”
After all, CEOs don’t actually build factories or sell products.
It’s tempting, therefore, to
view the CEO as primarily a thinker; someone who mulls and shapes
strategy. That is a part of the CEO’s job, of course. But the best CEOs know
that strategy is just theory unless it’s actually translated into frontline
routines―unless the rest of the company actually is executing the
strategy.
The CEO’s job is to make sure
that happens. The best CEOs focus primarily on four things: communication,
communication, communication, and overseeing resource allocation to ensure that
the priorities they’re communicating are actually the ones getting funded.
The problem with the first
three of those tasks: It can be incredibly boring. The same
messages must be repeated again and again ad nauseam. But the best
CEOs resist the desire to chase the next shiny object. They stick maniacally to
their communication role to guarantee that the strategy is baked into frontline
routines and behaviors.
And just because it’s
repetitive doesn’t mean it’s easy. First-time CEOs often feel like their own
company is conspiring to drown out those messages. Based on our research and decades of
experience working with CEOs, here are six tips for CEOs who want to get the
boring—and most important—stuff done:
Liberate yourself from your
own staff. Your time
and your energy are your most valuable resources. Focus them on what’s most
important and start saying “no” to people—starting with your immediate staff.
The average CEO inherits a staff committed to serving the institutional
requirements of the office of CEO, not the CEO’s strategic agenda. If you don’t
ruthlessly protect your time, you will watch your calendar rapidly fill up with
retirement parties, ribbon cuttings and other corporate tasks that have nothing
to do with advancing the strategy.
Many CEOs apply a 60/40 rule:
They devote 60 per cent of their time to “must-do” tasks like governance and
investor relations and the other 40 per cent to personal focus on strategic
execution. And they constantly review the 60 percent to decide if really need
to do them or can delegate them to others. One pharmacy retail chain CEO who
wasn’t particularly good at investor relations simply hired people who were
better and entrusted them with that duty.
Disentangle yourself from the
Byzantine bickering of the professional managerial class. Most companies have a
professional managerial class that absorbs way too much time and energy and
distracts CEOs—and others—from focusing on customers and the front line. CEOs
can waste a massive amount of time simply tending to the egos and petty
squabbles of professional managers―time better spent connecting directly with
the front line and solving their needs. I recognize this sounds harsh; it is.
Of course, every organization needs professional managers, and many of the
great value-creation stories of business can be traced to their efforts. But we
have to be honest: If we can point to companies that are under-managed, we must
also point the finger at companies that are over-managed, where the
professional managerial class appears to spend as much time perpetuating its
own agenda as it does supporting the front line.
As part of the ongoing
research effort for our book, The Founder’s Mentality, we’ve studied why companies
retain or lose the characteristics that help them avoid growth-killing
complexity and stay focused on their insurgent mission to serve customers. Our
surveys, research and extensive interviews
suggest that this sense of mission fades first and fastest at the upper and
middle layers of the company as they become diluted with professional managers.
Professional managers tend to
worry most about stakeholders somewhere in their own office. They are more
likely to tell their family about face time with the CEO than about solving
some faceless customer’s problem. Avoid becoming a dinner table boast and
instead spend your time maintaining the energy and sense of mission of the
frontline employees who devote their day to serving customers or supporting
those who do.
Laminate your “strategy on a
page” and find joy in talking about it for the thousandth time. The best CEOs create
some sort of strategy on a page. I’ve known some who laminate it to survive the
1,000 conversations they initiate. They constantly remind everyone what matters
in the simplest terms possible. How a CEO spends his or her own time sends a
powerful message about what matters to the business, but that doesn’t let them
off the hook on the boring part of the job: They still must repeat that message
over and over and over again.
We even argue that CEOs should
focus on a “strategy on a hand” (which liberates them from
their laminates). The thumb represents a simple, jargon-free description of
“why we exist,” and the fingers are the three to four ways the company must
excel to make that happen. At Indian consumer products company CavinKare, the
thumb is “Whatever a rich man enjoys, the common man should be able to afford,
and our job is to find a way to solve this.” At one Brazilian retailer, it’s
“To give aspiring lower-class consumers the opportunity to own furniture,
‘white goods’ and consumer electronics by helping them solve their financing
needs.” At Google, it would be “To organize the world’s information and make it
universally accessible and useful.”
The best CEOs instinctively
distill an often complex strategy into a few clear elements that can easily
cascade through the organization, and they revel in making that happen. “The
role of a CEO is to simplify the complexity and stick to a few themes that are
easy to understand,” the CEO of one luxury goods company told us. Or, as an
airline CEO reflected in a recent conversation with us, “In any company I’ve
been in, there haven’t been very many people who are capable of standing back
and making the complicated things very simple. Yet that’s where the real value
is.”
Celebrate the doers. Every company needs
thinkers, but CEOs need to fight the natural tendency of corporate hierarchies
to glorify them. Instead, they must remind everyone that it is the doers—the
key employees who directly support customers—whose actions advance the mission
of the company.
“My sales force are the heroes
of my business,” the CEO of one consumer goods company told us. “I want them to
sell all day, outhustle the competition, get our products onto the right
shelves at the right width and height. I’ve told them over and over that they
are not the brains of the company, but the arms, legs, ears and eyes.”
He continued: “For example, if
the sales reps see new competitive activity or something interesting in-store
that worries them or presents an opportunity, they take a photo with their
smartphone, write a few lines about the issue and send them off to the heads of
sales and trade marketing. Then they go back to selling. The thinkers back at
headquarters get about 150 pictures a week, some of which get translated by the
marketing staff into new sales initiatives. And every month, the company gives
an award for the best new sales initiative―not to the marketing department, but
to the sales rep whose photo triggered the new initiative.”
Be the question guy, not the
answer guy. Thousands of issues can distract a CEO from what really matters. You
don’t need to solve every problem. As the CEO of one food company told us: “I
need to know about those issues and I would be cross if I didn’t. But I don’t
have to fix them.” If a problem is getting in the way of the doers, you should
make sure it gets solved. Otherwise, it can probably be delegated to someone on
your team to figure out. Most CEOs start the job believing they need to have
all the answers, but over time they realize they need to have good questions,
such as “How does this activity help translate our strategy into frontline
behaviors and results?” There it is, the boring part again.
Ignore the conventional wisdom
of coaches. CEOs hear a lot of bad advice urging them to stay in their box and
work through the management structure. Watch
out for these phrases:
- “The CEO should look up and out.” This is the notion that the CEO’s job
is to manage the board and outside stakeholders, leaving day-to-day
operations of the companies to others. This is poppycock. One would hope
the CEO attained his or her position by being one of the best operators in
the business. Why abandon that strength once they are in the ultimate
position to exercise it throughout the company?
- “The CEO should work through the layers and not connect directly with
the front line.” Nonsense. Messages must be delivered directly. We’ve all played
the game of telephone as kids and know the twaddle that emerges at the end
of the chain. A CEO who communicates through layers is a CEO who dooms the
organization to drivel. This doesn’t mean you ignore the management layers
in between – bring them along, share the stage and debrief and coach them
afterwards. But deliver messages directly.
- “The CEO must rise above the details of the business.” Total nonsense.
Revenue comes from customers, and customers care massively about the
details of the business. Deep customer loyalty is born of the infinite
decisions required to get these details right. The CEO must live here.
- “The CEO’s job is to set the strategic direction and then leave the
execution to others.” Utter nonsense. Strategy is meaningless without execution. Execution
is where strategy turns into results. Do both.
And yes, execution by
communication can be boring. Yet you will often find that the messages need
repeating—and that each time you do, you learn a lot about what’s working and
what isn’t in different parts of your company. In the long run, these simple
messages make your job much easier. Performance management gets linked to these
simple themes. That, in turn, encourages leaders throughout the organization to
absorb and live the same priorities. It shows employees that their own path to
success is tightly linked to strategy. And clear, simple themes win over
investors and analysts, too.
Here’s the rub. Ultimately,
you need to find joy in this. And there is joy. Each
conversation is an opportunity for mutual discovery, for mutual insight. You
can be successful as a CEO only if you can mobilize the hearts and minds of
thousands, so you must love this mobilization and take joy in helping each
group and each individual discover what the strategy means for them. CEOs don’t
lead companies, they lead a collection of people who all need to move in the
same direction. And that demands a thousand conversations.
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