Follow The Leader

 By far the most difficult skill I learned as CEO was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring, and firing were all relatively straightforwrd skills to master compared with keeping my mind in check. I thought I was tough going in to it, but I wasn't tough. I was soft. In the end, the mind is the most personal and important battle that any CEO will face. 

If I'm doing a good job, why do I feel so bad?

Generally, someone doesn't become a CEO unless she has a high sense of purpose and cares deeply about the work she does. In addition, a CEO must be accomplished enough or smart enough that people will want to work for her. Nobody sets out to be a bad CEO, run a dysfunctional organization, or create a massive bureacracy that grinds her company to a screeching halt. The first problem is that everybody learns to be a CEO by being a CEO. No training as a manager, general manager, or in any other job actually prepares you to run a company. The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company. This means that you will face a broad set of thins that you don't know how to do that requires skills you don't have. Neertheless, everybody will expect you to know ow to do them, because, well, you are the CEO. 

Everything is hard when you don't actually know what you are doing. 

and even if you do know what you are doing, things go wrong. things go wrong because you are building a multifaceted human organization to compete and win in a dynamic, highly competitive market. 

Too much broken stuff

Given the stress a CEO faces, often they make the following two mistakes: 

1. They take things too personally

2. They do not take things personally enough

In the first scenario, the CEO takes every issue incredibly seriously and personally and urgently moves to fix it. Given the volume of the issues, this motion usually results in one of the two scenarios. If the CEO is outwardly focused, she ends up terrorizing the team to the point where nobody wants to work at the company anymore. If the CEO is inwardly focused, she ends up feeling so sick from all the problems that she can barely make it to work in the morning. 

The CEO must learn to separate the importance of the issues from how she feels about them so she does not end up demoralizing and demonizing her employees or herself. 

It's a lonely job

In your darkest moments as CEO, discussing fundamental questions about the viability of your company with your employees can have obvious negative effects. On the other hand, talking to you board and outside advisors can be fruitless. The knowledge gap between you and them is so vast that you cannot actually bring them fully up to speed in a manner that's useful in making the decision. You are all alone. 

Even if you seek advice from the greatest minds in the field, ultimately the decisions you make for your company you make completely alone. Nobody will have the answer for you. 

Techniques to calm your nerves

The problem with psychology is that everybody's different. Some helpful tips I used: 

1. Make some friends. 

Although it's nearly impossible to get high quality advice on the tough decisions that you make, it is extremely useful from a psychological perspective to talk to people who have been though similarly challenging decisions. 

2. Get it out of your head and on to paper.

When I had to explain to my board that, since we were a public company, I thought that it would be best if we sold all of our customers and all of our revenue and changed the business, it was was messing with my mind. In order to finalize that decision, I wrote down a detailed explanation of my logic. The process of writing that document separated me from my own psychology and enabled me to make the decision swiftly. 

3. Focus on the road, not the wall

There are always a thousand things that can go wrong and sink the ship. If you focus too much on them, you will drive yourself nuts and likely crash your company. Focus on where you are going rather than on what you hope to avoid. 

Follow the leader

What makes people want to follow a leader? 

1. The ability to articulate the vision
2. The right kind of ambition
3. The ability to achieve the vision

Can the leader articulate a vision that's interesting, dynamic, and compelling? More important, canthe leader do this when things fall apart? More specifically, when the company gets to a point when it does not make financial sense for any employee to continue working there, will the leader be able to articulate a vision that's compelling enough to make people stay? 

Truly great leaders also create an environment where employees feel that the CEO cares more about the employees than she cares about herself. In this kind of environment, employees believe it's their company and behave accordingly. As the company grows large, these employees become quality control for the entire organization. They set the standard that all future employees must live up to. 

The final leg of our leadership stool is competence, pure and simple. If I buy into the vision and believe that the leader cares about e, do I think she can actually achieve the vision? Will I follow her into the jungle with no map forward or back and trust that she will get me out of there? 

Each attribute enhances all 3

If people trust you, they will listen to your vision even if it is less articulate. If you are super competent, they will trust you and listen to you. If you can paint a brilliant vision, people will be patient with you as your learn the CEO skills and give you more leeway with respect to their interests.