In general, CEOs do not become CEOs who do not have a clear understanding of their goals and do not feel a deep personal ownership of what they are doing. In addition, a CEO must be experienced enough or smart enough to make people want to work under him or her.
No one aspires to be a bad CEO, but no one can boast of a smooth and well-trodden path to running a great company. Whether it’s easy to be a CEO and how an executive can deal with nerves, we sort out with the book Difficult Decisions.
22 points out of 100
The main problem is that you can only learn to work as a CEO by taking the position. No internship as a manager, top manager, or any other position can prepare you to run a company. It means that you will inevitably face a number of problems for which you have no solutions and, moreover, do not have the necessary skills to solve them.
Nevertheless, those around you expect you to know how to do it – you are a CEO after all.
But even if you know what to do, it can be difficult to achieve what you want. Difficulties are inevitable because creating a cross-functional organization is very difficult. If it were possible to plot the success rate of a sample of CEOs on a hundred-point scale, its average value would be 22 points out of 100.
It’s hard for a person who graduated with A’s to perceive this. But it’s especially hard to take because no one will tell you that the average is 22.
If you’re managing a team of ten people, you may very well be able to avoid making serious mistakes and avoid doing bad things. If you run an organization with thousands of employees, this is almost impossible. Once you reach a certain scale of operation, things start happening in the company that are so negative that you could never imagine being associated with such incidents of incompetence. Situations when employees throw away the company’s money, waste each other’s time aimlessly and do useless work surely become the cause of your depression. If you’re a CEO, all of the above can even make you sick.
But it will add salt to the wound and make life unbearable for you to realize that it’s all your fault.
As founder and CEO, you influence every decision you make, every employee you hire, and everything that happens in the company. Unlike the hired executive who comes into the company and first blames his predecessors for every possible mistake and miscalculation, you simply have no one to blame.
If someone is promoted undeservedly, it is your fault. If you couldn’t meet your quarterly profit plan, it’s your fault. If the best programmer quit, that’s your fault too. If the sales people make unfounded claims about the product structure, this is your fault. If too many bugs are discovered in the software, that’s your fault.
Carrying responsibility for everything in the company and getting only 22 points on the success scale is very difficult psychologically.
Two CEO mistakes
Given the constant state of stress, CEOs often make one of two mistakes:
1) taking everything personally;
2
) not taking anything sufficiently personally.
In the first case, a CEO takes any problem extremely seriously and treats it as his own fault, so he immediately tries to solve it. Taking into account the number of problems, two outcomes are possible in this situation. If the CEO focuses his energy on others, sooner or later his terror will result in the fact that nobody will want to work in his team. If a CEO tries to do everything himself, he’ll get depressed and find himself thinking that he doesn’t want to go to work in the morning, where there are so many problems.
In the second case, the CEO tries to somehow muffle the sense of impending crisis for the company and looks for reasons to be happy even in the worst situations. Perhaps this is not the worst option. Based on this approach, no problem is as serious as it first appears, so it does not require an immediate solution. Emotionally detached from difficulties, the CEO feels better.
But in this case the problem is that the CEO and does not solve any problem in time, and the employees, seeing this, feel increasingly irritated because the management ignores even the most serious conflicts of interest. In the end, such a policy can lead a company to ruin.
Ideally, the CEO should act quickly but deliberately. He can be assertive and decisive without feeling guilty about the difficulties. If he manages to separate the awareness of the seriousness of the problem from the personal guilt for its occurrence, he is likely to avoid blaming himself or his employees for all the sins.
In situations of difficult choices, a person’s maturity is tested. A little advice for ambitious entrepreneurs: if you don’t like to choose between very bad and disastrous, don’t become a CEO.
A few ways to calm your nerves
1. Keep it friendly
While it’s almost impossible to get competent advice about difficult problems, from a psychological standpoint it’s extremely helpful to discuss them from time to time with people who have also had to make similar life-changing decisions.
2. Try to put your thoughts on paper.
To formulate a decision, detail the logic of your reasoning on paper. The process of writing this document will help to separate the logical component from emotions and quickly make a decision.
3. Focus on the opportunities, not the obstacles
When you are learning to drive a race car, one of the first lessons is that when you are driving in a circle at over 300 kilometers per hour, you cannot think about the wall – you have to think about the road. If you think about the obstacles, you will not be able to overcome them. If you think about the road, it will lead you along.
Running a company is like driving a racing car. There are always a thousand things that can go wrong and sink the ship. If you focus too much on them, you’ll drive yourself crazy and lead the company to ruin.
It is better to think about what needs to be achieved rather than what needs to be avoided.
4. Don’t be afraid of anything and don’t give up
Over the course of your CEO career, you’re bound to want to quit and quit many times. Many CEOs have tried to cope with stress through drinking, quitting, and even quitting. In each case, they could logically and convincingly explain their reasons for leaving, but none of them were among the outstanding CEOs.
Outstanding CEOs know how to take a hit.
They, too, had to sleepless nights, sweat profusely, and endure what legendary founder and CEO of BEA Systems, Alfred Chuang, calls torture. Asked how they do it, mediocre CEOs talk about their brilliant strategic moves, or deep business insight, or any other unique qualities of their own.
Outstanding CEOs turn out to be remarkably monotonous in their responses. They all say, “I refused to give up.”
Prepared from the book “Difficult Decisions”.
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