CEO Levers

Key Resources Often Overlooked or Underutilized

by Brian Gentile

One morning I received an email from Tom’s executive assistant, Sheryl, canceling our 1:1 meeting scheduled for that afternoon. “He’s just too busy writing performance reviews while preparing for both the QBR and Board meetings next week”, Sheryl explained. After a deep exhale, I replied “Sure, let’s find another time that works for Tom.” While my reply was polite, my worry for Tom was piqued. He had canceled or rescheduled most of our meetings during the past few months as he seemed to bounce from one urgent matter to the next. Was this pattern of last minute cancellations a symptom of something bigger?

As Board Chairman for two software companies and CEO coach with the 10X CEO practice, I work directly with about 14 CEOs who are building software and technology businesses. The demands on CEOs’ time and their need to constantly function at a high level are extreme. And, on the path to success or failure, many others must rely on the CEO’s ability to properly prioritize their time and energy - making the CEO’s ability to effectively marshal high-leverage resources all the more critical.

In my last article, I highlighted the CEO’s schedule as a common source of stress and energy loss. Scrutinizing a CEO’s schedule for content, cadence and control, therefore, is an important first step toward maintaining and optimizing energy and effectiveness. This second step is all about CEO levers: the critical people, processes and pacing often overlooked or underutilized by a CEO during the course of a busy week, month and quarter. Is there a positive correlation between successful CEOs who lead top-quartile companies and the successful use of these key levers? Conversely, are lower-performing CEOs more likely to overlook or underutilize key energy levers? In both cases, I believe so.

I’ve long noted that the CEOs who are most successfully building market-leading companies are also often the ones who are the most available. Their availability seems antithetical. If they are leading such impressive, high-growth companies, wouldn’t their schedule be constantly over-subscribed as they dart from staff meeting to executive off-site to customer event to product strategy session and on to countless Board interactions? Maybe not. These market-leading CEOs have fuller command of their time because they effectively use the high-leverage resources at their disposal.

CEO Levers

There are three categories of often overlooked or underutilized CEO levers:?

1. People who complement the CEO’s strengths and who should have the experience and responsibility to advance the many areas better suited to their different skills;
2. Processes that create reliability, predictability and determinism in the Company’s operations; and
3. Pacing which establishes rhythm in the business and clarity in the business model.

When worked earnestly and skillfully, these three levers allow the CEO to move productively throughout the business with more thrust and less drag - sustaining and even enhancing energy and effectiveness along the way. Let’s explore each of these Levers.

CEO Lever 1: People

Perhaps my biggest surprise in working with CEOs is to see firsthand their inconsistency in leveraging key, nearby people resources who are literally employed to make them more productive and successful. These people have skills and experiences different from the CEO and should be fully engaged in all areas where the CEO’s energy and time are less well used. Going back to my example, when I first spoke with Tom about his relationship and work with his Executive Assistant, he described poor performance and ineffective results. How could that be? Sheryl’s entire reason for existing was to create super-charged synergy with the CEO.

What is it about this CEO lever that causes such mediocre output? I believe the answer begins with the CEO and a better understanding of all the critical People Levers available to them.

There are at least three categories of People Levers available to a CEO: Amplifiers, Operators and Advisors.

?Amplifiers?

The most repeated CEO mistakes with Amplifiers are not seeing them as critical extensions of the CEO (i.e., an amplifier) and not treating them equally to and as important as the Operators. As evidence, my experience shows that CEOs rarely create clear job descriptions and performance-based objectives for Amplifier positions. They, then, fail to hold regular 1:1 meetings and provide periodic performance reviews for these roles. Highly experienced (and highly paid!) Executive Assistants often toil away with scarce meaningful interaction with the CEO which denies them needed context, feedback and insight to perform at a higher level. Even within the 10X CEO practice, few CEOs include their EA or Chief of Staff in the Leadership Team Scorecard (until this is pointed out). Treating Amplifiers equally to Operators, therefore, is an essential starting point in the CEO’s quest for leverage from nearby People.

My logic is simple: CEOs have few pure amplifying levers so they must ensure this vital people resource is in position to succeed more effectively every day. Amplifiers are every bit as worthy of coaching, mentoring and challenging to reach their fullest capacity. CEOs should lean in to make their Amplifier relationships the foundation for an effective People Lever.

Operators

One of the most common positive CEO behavioral traits is comfort with demanding greatness from oneself. A natural pursuit of personal greatness is probably what led them to become a CEO. Then, at some business phase beyond early-stage startup, a CEO must pivot to a very different behavioral trait: comfort with demanding greatness from others. A CEO’s ability to successfully lead a group of senior Operators tests their comfort with demanding and getting greatness from others and largely determines Company success or failure. Many CEOs never successfully make this behavioral transition because the strengths needed to demand and get greatness from others are: as much about EQ as about IQ, as much about nuance as about declaration, and as much about skill as about will. Being a CEO who demands and gets greatness from others, though, is a celebrated leadership parable and is practicable.

Tom’s leadership scorecard has included low scores for Avi, the Chief Product Officer (and also a Co-Founder) for most of the past year. Our coaching conversations about this leader consistently revealed yellow flags. Tom cited concern for Avi’s energy, engagement and alignment with Tom’s vision for the Company as well as questions about his ability to lead the growing Product team. While the combination of these concerns is probably sufficient to warrant replacing Avi, I asked a final question which put Tom’s decision to rest - does Avi have a vision for the future of the Product team which is superior to Tom’s vision for this team? In other words, could Avi describe what skills, strengths and structure the Product team would need in order for the Company to succeed during the next two to three years? Tom replied that he believed Avi lacked the ability to describe this future vision for his team. And, with that revelation, Tom made the difficult decision to find a new Product leader (and remove a Co-Founder).

Once a software company has grown through the earliest phases and has the potential to reach $100M revenue (and beyond), a CEO’s top priority is to constantly build the senior leadership team to become the leaders and Team the Company needs to succeed. Assessing whether a functional leader has the growth and upward potential to remain in that leadership role is massively nuanced and full of judgment. It is the CEO’s responsibility to make these decisions with all information available and then do so resolutely. A low performer at this senior level creates a negative cascade that is difficult to fully ascertain. Often a CEO will learn about even bigger problems caused by a poorly performing leader only after the leader is gone. Being the last to know adds insult to injury for the CEO; we get what we tolerate. By making clear, consistent and timely leadership decisions, the CEO reinforces the message that high performance and professional growth are critical Company values. Demanding and getting greatness from Operators is the CEO’s primary pathway to an effective People Lever.

Advisors

Among these three People Levers, effectively utilizing Advisors is the least consistent area for CEOs. I’ve learned that choosing and using key Advisors can become a super strength, which propels the business forward faster in the market.

In one of my first meetings with Tom, he described how he had successfully built and maintained a small network of advisors. Tom incented them through both a small stock option grant and some occasional consulting work (where deep expertise aligned with Company need). These advisors provide outside-in perspective in Product, Go-to-Market and Operational areas of the business. One of Tom’s advisors had become the first Independent Board member, a key role that brought balance and operational insight to his Board of (otherwise) investors. Also, Tom had built a small network of CEO friends with whom he regularly met to discuss specific business matters and swap advice about nearly anything. While this wasn’t a formal CEO peer group, these interactions invigorated Tom with affirmation and new ideas while helping him to feel less lonely.

My observation is that effective CEOs get everyone working for them. You speak with them for five minutes and you’re suddenly assigned a task. By creating a strong group of Advisors, a CEO builds a personal sounding board that provides ongoing help to the individual and the Company. Regularly stepping outside the business to gather objective, external viewpoints from trusted sources with additive experience and skill is a valuable use of time for a CEO. Putting these Advisors capably to work for the Company is the accelerant to an effective People Lever.

CEO Lever 2: Processes

Processes are good and don’t have to mean bureaucracy. Consider the simplest definition of process: “a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end”. Simple, lightweight processes can create predictability and determinism in any workflow or operation. These positive traits make the affected operation more reliable. When an operation is reliable, it typically requires less management (and CEO) intervention. Less CEO intervention means time and energy can be spent more valuably elsewhere.

Recognizing the rich potential for this CEO lever, Tom’s team has spent much of the last year building or improving simple, lightweight, documented processes in a variety of business areas, including:

• establishing basic meeting rules or protocol,
• onboarding and promoting an employee,
• providing performance reviews and feedback,
• onboarding new customers and renewing existing customers,?
• implementing new product pricing, packaging or licensing, and
• introducing new products (or features of existing products).

Any business operation that is done regularly and repeatedly probably deserves a simple but well-thought-through process. Documenting processes and making them known to everyone can be a game changer for operational improvement. An added advantage is that a process requires an owner which allows a leader (at any level) to exercise and share a useful skill. These personal skills, which when made visible, build greater professional respect while improving determinism in the business. In rewarding such reliability, the CEO reaffirms this key lever.

If you don’t like the word process, you can often accurately replace it with rituals. In the book, The Power of Full Engagement, the authors, Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr, describe the value and power of creating habit-forming rituals within the business day.

Look at any part of your life in which you are consistently effective and you will find that certain [rituals] help make that possible. If you eat in a healthy way, it is probably because you have built routines around the food you buy and what you are willing to order at restaurants. If you are fit, it is probably because you have regular days and times for working out. If you are successful in a sales job, you probably have a ritual of mental preparation for calls and ways that you talk to yourself to stay positive in the face of rejection. If you manage others effectively, you likely have a style of giving feedback that leaves people feeling challenged rather than threatened. If you are closely connected to your spouse and your children, you probably have rituals around spending time with them. If you sustain high positive energy despite an extremely demanding job, you almost certainly have predictable ways of ensuring that you get intermittent recovery. Creating positive rituals is the most powerful means we have found to effectively manage energy in the service of full engagement.

As Company culture embraces simple processes, operations become more efficient and more thrust is applied to those business areas which can create real market distinction. No CEO intervention required.

CEO Lever 3: Pacing

Every business has a cadence or rhythm to its operations. That rhythm being smooth, jagged or syncopated depends on many things, not the least of which is CEO energy. Developing and implementing a documented operating rhythm sets the tone for business execution strength and allows for less stressful and more efficient business planning. The many benefits of conscious pacing are often overlooked by the CEO.

After recognizing that our 1:1 meetings were consistently rescheduled, canceled or frazzled with urgent last-minute topics to discuss, I raised the concept of Pacing with Tom. Surely the Quarterly Business Review and Board meetings have been on the calendar for many months, right? I further wondered whether the content for these gatherings were a mystery and if the steps toward their preparation were well understood.

I was surprised to learn that each quarter at Tom’s company had its own distinct pace and schedule of events. The agendas, attendees, and even the protocol for preparation, execution and follow-up for each meeting would vary. While Board meetings were scheduled in advance, establishing an annual Board calendar that projects a top-level theme and logical agenda for each meeting was not in place. Further, regular and recurring executive meetings were mostly scheduled quarterly and the agendas were often being developed and reworked just days before. As I look back, I wonder how Tom made any time for 1:1 meetings with me.

I encouraged Tom to step back and make a written inventory of all the needed recurring meetings already in place and those that should be in place (the most important of which involve him). After he developed this list, we began to construct a rhythm and pacing for these meetings that allowed an entire year to be scheduled in advance. This Pacing exercise also energized Tom and his leaders to develop basic, top-line agendas and/or “themes” for each meeting (where it can be known in advance) to help reduce the mystery about the specific emphasis of each gathering. Wherever mystery can be removed, time and energy can be reclaimed through better preparation and conscious orchestration.

To further inspire Tom, I introduced him to Dan Rodrigues, the CEO of Tebra. Through my work with the 10X CEO practice, I learned that Dan created an excellent Operating Rhythm manual that guides all leaders at Tebra and establishes the Pacing of their business throughout the year. By scheduling and describing all regular, recurring meetings, Dan and his team have eliminated surprises and dramatically improved the preparation for and the success rate of these important meetings. An unexpected benefit emerged as Tebra’s leaders and teams began collaborating on travel schedules and activities which drove better use of time they spent together in any gathering or location (and which is even more valuable in today’s mostly virtual work world). Most importantly, Dan has gained back all the time and energy he previously spent wondering and worrying about these critical meetings.

My hope is that Tom will have the same result by focusing on his Company’s Pacing as a key CEO lever. He and I are currently scheduling our 1:1 meetings for the full year.

Designing a better CEO Schedule and more effectively utilizing CEO Levers are the first two of three steps toward building, maintaining and optimizing CEO energy and effectiveness. The third and final chapter in this series will focus on helping a CEO to scale the business by creating a more Advanced Leadership Environment. I will debut this chapter in slide form at the 10X CEO Accelerate Conference in September 2023.