Five dysfunctions of a CEO

In this episode, we’re diving deep into the five dysfunctions that often hinder CEOs from reaching their full potential. Understanding and overcoming these dysfunctions can transform your leadership and elevate your business.

Dysfunction 1: Stuck in a Subject Area CEOs often come from specific backgrounds like finance or tech, which can limit their perspective. They treat every problem through the lens of their expertise, but true leadership requires a broader view. Learn why letting go of subject matter expertise is essential to becoming a well-rounded leader.

Dysfunction 2: Being a Bulldozer Some CEOs drive their ideas with sheer force, pushing through their strategies. While this can be effective in the short term, it’s not sustainable. Being the only driving force leads to burnout and can alienate your team. Discover alternatives to bulldozing and how to harness the power of your entire team.

Dysfunction 3: Over-Focusing on Lagging Indicators Focusing solely on lagging indicators like sales and profits can be misleading. These metrics are results, not the drivers of success. We’ll explore the importance of upstream activities, such as sales calls and marketing efforts, and how they create the conditions for success.

Dysfunction 4: Surface-Level Conversations Many CEOs only scratch the surface in their discussions with senior leaders. It’s crucial to delve deeper and understand the underlying issues and emotions driving these conversations. Learn how to read between the lines and get to the heart of what’s really happening in your organization.

Dysfunction 5: Avoiding Tough People Choices The hardest decisions often involve people who are performing at a mediocre level. They’re not bad enough to fire but not great enough to excel. We’ll talk about the importance of making tough people choices and why settling for mediocrity can be detrimental to your company’s success.

These dysfunctions are more common than you might think!

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Transcript

0:05

Hey, let's talk about the five dysfunctions of a CEO. Maybe you recognize some of these, maybe you fall into some of these chaps, maybe you don't, but I would love your feedback to know if this sounds like this is you. Or a CEO you've come across. So dysfunction number one. They are trapped in a subject or discipline area. So maybe they have come from finance or product. And they are stuck in that way of thinking. They treat every problem, like its finance problem, every problem like it, sir. a product or tech problem. The reality is CEOs need to be leaders, not subject matter experts. You need to let go of that subject matter expertise to really, truly elevate yourself into leadership. What got you in that chair is not going to keep you there. You need to jettison a lot of the thinking. And being a subject matter expert to be truly a great leader, because product thinking can't solve everything, finance thinking, can't solve everything you need to understand and know enough about the disciplines across your business. But disciplines are only part of the problem. The reality is leadership is a human challenge because all business, challenges are human challenges. At the end of the day, you need to let go of your subject matter. Excellence. Dysfunction Two. You're a bulldozer. You have got a strong will. You are great at convincing about your way of doing things, your idea, your strategy, you push things through your sheer force of energy is truly amazing and exceptional. It gets you through it gets things done. Now that again, may have got you into that chair. But the reality is that's not sustainable for you or for the business. There is only one of you. You may well have been able to do that in a particular area, you've come from in a different part of the business, or maybe you're a founder whose business is growing. You can't do that longer term. Being a bulldozer and being that one person in the room who's driving the energy and everything forward is exhausting. It needs to burn out from you and it needs resentments in others. You try and hire senior experienced great people. They don't want to be bought out. And they really shouldn't. They'll have a diversity of views and experience that you need to hear. You can no longer be that bulldozer because it's not good for you. And it's not good for the business. You have permission to turn that off. There are other alternatives to lead. If you're not sure what that might mean, we can have a conversation, but the bulldozer is only one tool in your tool belt. It doesn't have to be everything. Okay. Dysfunction number three. This is looking and focusing overly on lagging indicators of success. So let's talk about them. These are things like sales. turnover. Profit conversion. These are all lagging indicators as this class. Ultimately, you have no control over these. You don't. You might like to think that you do. What you do have control over? However, I think it's further up stream. Okay. How many sales calls are your sales team doing? How many visits are they? How is your marketing working? You have control of elements that are upstream. You can make those things happen. But you can't control the results. You can't control sales. You can only control things upstream or create the conditions for success in a very different place. And if you're overly fixated on the numbers, you can't see what's going wrong somewhere else. Further upstream in your business. Look upstream for what is going wrong rather than focusing purely on the results. of course it's important to measure these results, but purely focusing on them as KPIs is not going to lead to success. Okay. It relates back to being a bulldozer in part to bulldozers, look at this stuff and do it that way. The reality is you need to look further upstream to see actually what's really going on. Number four. This is looking at and focusing only on the surface level conversations. So when you're sat with your lead senior leadership team or your, one of your C-suite team comes to you with a particular challenge. The reality is, what you're talking about is not the real challenge that's going on right now. What do I mean by that? I alluded to it or I talked about it in the last one about looking upstream. But the reality is, when you're having a conversation, you're witnessing conversations in terms of either your board of directors, your senior leadership team is for you to understand really what's going on in this conversation. And that's to look beyond the surface level detail of what's being discussed to look underneath, to see what the motivators are of the human beings, having that conversation, right? How are they feeling? Where are they coming from? Are they scared? Are they nervous? Are they angry? What emotions are on show here? How are people responding? Who's speaking, who isn't speaking. You need to look at the dinner mix of the conversation to truly understand what's happening in a room, not focusing on a surface level problem that's presented to you. You often see this in terms of people spending a lot of time talking about strategy. And the reality is it's not the strategy. That's the problem. It's the implementation of that strategy. You need to really understand what's going on below the surface of your conversations, if your C suite team and your organization, generally to really know what's happening, don't settle for just the surface level. Okay. And five, and I'll give you the most important dysfunction of all is not making the hard but important people choices. Now it's easy enough. Silly again. If you think about your C-suite or your board of directors, there are people. If people are three out of 10, they're only performing as a three out of 10 on that board or in that C-suite, it's easy enough to know what to do about those people. Right there. Haven't got a place in the organization anymore. It's time for them to go, you know what you have to do. And equally if they're a 10 out of 10, You can appreciate what makes them great. The real challenge you have is all those bits in between. And the reality of that is the folks who are seven out of 10. Those are the hardest people to deal with.'cause, they're not awful. But they're not exceptional. Maybe they're just doing enough to get by. Maybe they have moments of greatness every now and again. Into disperse with long periods of just being average at what they do, those, the harder people to know what to do with. And it's very easy to. Think, oh, they'll get better or we can put them on an improvement panel or coach them, or do something to get them to be better at what they do. But underneath it, you, your instinct is telling you that they're not, the person needs to be in that seat right now. Okay. If your instinct is telling you that. Then it's almost certainly true and you can spend time and effort trying to improve that person. And maybe that would work for them. Maybe that would work for you. But the reality is it's probably not. And the biggest challenge of dysfunction that I see is CEO's not doing anything about the folks who are seven out of 10. These people who sit in their job for year after year, just doing okay, but never doing. Things in an exceptional way. If you're at the C-suite or a sat in a board of directors, there is no space for the seven out of tens in any way, shape or form a leadership in any organization. You know what you have to do. Your instinct is telling you the right thing to do. You need to act upon that. And again, a big dysfunction is just not doing that. Maybe you've spotted something in there that you have got a handle on. I'd love to know what it is that you've got a handle on and what advice you could give to other CEOs. Maybe there's something in there that you've spotted that you think, man, maybe I should try and address that, drop me a line and give me a call and we can talk about that, but I would love to hear some feedback from you on this video. Thanks again for your time. Bye bye now.