This summer, I finally enrolled in the strategic leadership program I had been eyeing for over a year. This intensive two-month program was designed to cultivate the mindset required for a CEO role. Over the course of the program, we delved into strategy, marketing, hiring, and partnering. It has been an invaluable experience.
As I’m still trying to process all the insights, I decided to summarize the key takeaways in this article.
1. All Problems are Interpersonal Relationships Problems
What does it take to become a CEO?
When you think about the CEO role, you generally believe that you have to be really smart.
You might think you need a couple of MBAs, an understanding of business models, macroeconomics, microeconomics, and other fancy terms.
You’ll need to pore over Excel sheets overpopulated with data, running numbers in your head.
Surprisingly, all this technical knowledge will barely help.
Because your success in a CEO role eventually comes down to successfully managing the relationships between different people.
Your customers. Your key employees. Various types of stakeholders.
Ultimately, a business is a community of people. And these people—just like any others—make mistakes, change over time, and get angry with one another.
Most of the CEO’s problems are interpersonal relationship problems.
You might design the best strategy in the world in theory, one that works for one region, but if your co-founders decide to move the business to another jurisdiction, you’ll have to deal with that.
All problems in business eventually boil down to interpersonal relationship problems.
It would be great to be a visionary sitting in an office and designing the best strategy in the world, but it will be the people with whom you need to agree on that strategy. It will also be the people who will be implementing this strategy.
The ability to become an effective communicator who can understand, persuade, and influence people is, therefore, key.
Which brings us to the next point.
2. We Don’t Rise to the Occasion, We Fall to the Level of our Training
In life, we sometimes face unexpected situations when we’re not sure at all how to deal with them.
In a senior leadership position, you will face such situations almost daily.
A popular misconception is that the main goal of education is simply learning something new.
The real goal is to change your behavior.
David Kolb created a model of human learning. His learning cycle comprises four steps and emphasizes the need for practical experience to learn something. In fact, practical experience starts the whole cycle. After that comes reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation.
It’s not coincidental. In stressful situations, we don’t rise to the occasion; we fall to the level of our training.
Dealing with a certain situation in your mind and in reality, especially when it affects a lot of other people, are two different things.
You might be very smart and have 5 MBAs from Ivy League schools, but what matters is facing your life tasks regularly so that you train a lot.
Every difficult situation on your way is training.
Even if the situation you face is not new, ask yourself: Did I really have enough training for it? How many hours did I train?
You’ve been to job interviews before, but is your training enough to tackle your self-presentation right now, at this given moment?
Don’t expect to magically find the right way when you’re stuck in a dead-end situation.
When you can, train ahead of time.
3. Robust Solutions Outweigh the “Right Ones”
Since childhood, we learn that most life situations can be resolved by applying the “correct” sequence of steps.
To go abroad, you have to get a visa according to the procedure. There’s plenty of information on how to obtain it.
To buy an apartment, you can take out a mortgage by following a specific series of steps. Again, there is a lot of information, and there is a right solution.
Most situations are pretty straightforward and come down to solving tasks. Even if you don’t know how to deal with some of them, it’s easy to obtain an algorithm or find people who can help you.
Yet life is not a set of tasks. It would have been awfully boring that way. Life is a journey.
So imagine life’s throwing at you some sophisticated scenarios:
- Your employee told you he has completed the task and later you discover he didn’t. What do you do?
- There are rumors that your manufacturer has started working with your competitor behind your back. What do you do?
We all resolve these situations according to our experience, level of training, values, goals, and the way we interpret other people’s behavior. In life, there are no “right” solutions, especially when it comes to human behavior and relationships.
It’s just some solutions are more robust than others.
For example, trusting that for your employee, that was the last episode of not telling the truth is wishful thinking. It might work, but as a senior leader, you don’t control your perimeter.
Confronting him constructively is a more robust solution, where you take control of the situation.
There’s no “best solution.” Yet the more robust your solution is, the fewer risks you bear.
4. There Are Many Paths to Success
I used to adore business biographies. I would go to a store, purchase a bunch of them, and then read, feeling that I was becoming smarter and drawing inspiration from them. The Starbucks story? Amazing. Girlboss? Hand it over.
Now, I barely read anything about real companies, and mostly it’s just for fun.
As a journalist, I care about the reliability of the story. If you think about it, who could tell a story better than the company itself?
However, a book is always part of the company’s marketing. It’s supposed to tell the story of the brand, hiding the ugly side and spotlighting the nicer one. And that’s the best-case scenario, if the story is even true. Essentially, to be relatable, it must present a superhero who overcame all the difficulties and achieved success. And it works according to the hero’s journey template created by Joseph Campbell.
A good story needs a villain for the reader to root for the main hero. The main hero has to be likable.
In addition, there’s survivorship bias.
Lastly, applying the lessons from a major enterprise to starting a business is generally a bad idea.
Many business people claim they knew what they wanted to do in life since they were five years old. Personally, I always take such statements with a grain of salt.
It might be true. Or it might not be. But hindsight is always 20/20.
We often strive to learn from others’ mistakes. We read business books and absorb valuable lessons that will help us follow the same path and build a business empire. We take expensive leadership courses, seeking answers in areas where we feel less confident or simply lost.
Yet, the truth is, no one has those answers. Not even Elon Musk.
You have to develop your own.
5. Built on Values, Built to Last
Core concepts always worth revising, as in our multiverse of daily errands we tend to steer away from their meaning.
We often confuse a strategy and a plan.
A plan is a series of steps designed to achieve your goal.
But what is a strategy?
An Oxford dictionary states that a strategy is a plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim.
Yet is it really a plan of actions?
Let’s say you want to design your career strategy. Can you possibly outline a plan of actions if your career comes down to decisions made by other people?
Seems like a strategy is something bigger than just a series of steps. Intuitively we all get that.
Most of what you generally take into account is external fit. Seems like it’s reasonable to align your business with the environment.
Yet as business owners and senior managers we tend to forget that we also need to align the strategy with the solid foundation.
And that foundation is you and your values.
This alignment fosters a strong, cohesive culture, attracts like-minded team members, and builds a resilient foundation that can weather challenges and changes over time.
What if a strategy of your business could be aligned with what you value in life?
- Do you have the strategy of your company written on paper?
- Do you have your own life strategy written on paper?
If the answer to either questions is a “no”, I’m inviting you to develop a robust strategy for your future.
Let’s create your unique proposition and develop your personal strategy today.
Book a consultation to start.