3 Key Focuses of a CEO

A CEO gets advice from everyone, so I’m here to pile on. Not really, instead I’m trying to help focus a CEO. Investors, employees, and customers all offer advice. I was very surprised by just how many outsiders were willing to offer advice on how a CEO should operate. The challenge is that these inputs and the operational demands of a company can become distractions and cause a CEO to lose sight of their real day to day job.

While a CEO is responsible for everything but a good one actually owns nothing, for me the the job is about ensuring three things are right on a day to day basis.

1. Strategy

Big topic. Don’t overthink this one. Ask key questions. Do we have a mission we believe in and can build into the business we want? Are we offering the right product, to the right customer at the right price to meet that mission?

Mission is critical and a CEO should not revisit every day. However, they do need to check the activities of the company against the mission near daily. They need to ensure the team is focused.

Often people will say its important to focus on a differentiated offering. While I agree that’s important, the reality is that a differentiated product doesn’t matter if it’s not the right product being sold to the right customer. So I believe that a CEO must first focus on the right product and then look at the differentiation question. Also a CEO must be willing to do the hard thing and change any of the strategy fundamentals as needed.

2. People

This is where everyone makes mistakes. The company may have a great vision, wrap that in an outstanding mission and then build the greatest product ever. But if the CEO doesn’t fill the organization with great people, all is lost. Notice I didn’t say “top performers”. Sometimes you don’t the best of the best for every role, sometimes you need a great player, but they have to fit this company.

The CEO has to set a tone and ensure the company invests in the interview process. Don’t short cut and don’t allow that in the organization. This means forcing a process where job specifications are required and real, where time is spent planning the interviews, and where there is real discussion and debate about candidates.

Invest in on-boarding. No company will regret the time the company invested in training new people. The effort will build an affinity for the company, allow new and existing employees to build relationships and result in the new employee’s being productive faster.

Also, do the hard thing and get rid of poor performers. This may even mean pushing an executive to make a change in their team that they don’t see. In several instances I’ve had to have hard conversations with an executive on my team (sometimes multiple conversations) offering my input and suggesting to them that they make a change. I would never go around them to make the change, but invest time in either helping them see what you see or in understanding their view as to why they don’t remove someone from the organization. I’ve often beat myself up over not moving fast enough on getting rid of a poor performer or organizational cancer. A former CEO I used to work with would say “I never got rid of someone too soon”, very true.

It’s especially hard to get rid of high performers who are bad fits for the culture. However, failing to attack those areas and deal with those will hurt the company, maybe not right away, but over time the impact will be clear. Again a mistake I’ve made, being unwilling to move that type person out and I regretted it.

I highly recommend processes where executives have open conversations about performance of leaders and key employees across the company. These are hard conversations but will provide great input for others on their team and give you as CEO a view on how people are performing.

3. Culture

So much has been written on company culture that I’m not even going to go down the path of trying to define it myself — instead I will offer this:

“Corporate culture refers to the beliefs and behaviors that determine how a company's employees and management interact and handle outside business transactions. Often, corporate culture is implied, not expressly defined, and develops organically over time from the cumulative traits of the people the company hires.”

As the CEO goes the company goes. If the CEO is a yeller, that behavior will be acceptable across the organization. If the CEO is obsessive with details, it will catch on. Be intentional. A CEO has to be sure they are behaving the way they want the organization to behave. I’ve seen the challenge of a CEO saying yes to culture elements that they can’t live themselves or not taking it some behaviors seriously, guess what, the company won’t take it seriously. So the challenge for a CEO is not only dedicating the time to helping define how they want the culture and really the day to day interactions across the company to work, but then translating that into how the CEO does their job each day.

The definition points out that a company culture will often be undefined and evolve over time, my advice, don’t let it! Again, be intentional. It dictates how people get things done, how they adapt to change, how they serve customers. Those are all too important to leave to implied evolution.

Culture takes time, more than you think, so spend the time and effort and outline the culture you want, define the behaviors that will get you there and live it.

This means daily you need to ensure that you behave in ways you want others to behave and call people on bad behaviors. From time to time revisit the culture and be sure it’s still working.

The CEO job is complicated. There is no one right way to do things and every situation is unique and requires different approaches. However, these three fundamentals are universal. If you look every day and ask yourself, do we have the right strategy, people and culture, you will make great progress towards a successful company.