Have You Ever Thought About a Term Limit on Your CEO Tenure?
With all the excitement the top job in a company brings, it’s also a very exhausting job. Act before it’s too late for you and your?company.
Customers. Employees. Investors. Directors. Partners. Suppliers. Everybody wants to speak to the CEO. Everybody has a legitimate reason for wanting to speak to the CEO.
And because the CEO is the last person in the chain of responsibility (and escalation), oftentimes a CEO has to divert energy and attention towards topics he or she didn’t want to focus on.
The Three Most Strenuous Roles Of A?CEO
1. Reacting to Unforeseen Events and?Crises
Much of a CEO’s work should be proactive : Anticipating problems, regularly working with customers and partners, working on strategy, creating company culture, and based on all those activities making sound and timely decisions.
However, reacting well to unplanned and unforeseen events and crises is some of the most important work a CEO has to master.
“Real” crises are easy to spot: Cyber attacks, employee accidents, litigations, etc. In such a situation, the CEO rather stands for Chief Emergency Officer than Chief Executive Officer. In times of internal or external crisis, the CEO is in the spotlight, and the whole company might be judged on the CEO’s behavior.
“Soft” crises are more difficult to spot: Those that brew slowly, or blow up because the CEO ignored an apparently small problem, instead of putting it into a wider context.
From my experience, a key element for a CEO to prevent “soft” crises is being accessible to the team. If you hide behind a fully booked schedule, people will never bring up issues spontaneously. That’s why I have given up time blocking .
2. Ordering?Chaos
The natural state of everything is chaos.
Remember the good old music tapes? How many times did they get tangled up, only for you to try to get them back in shape using a pencil? And whenever you thought you’d restored order, it took only a few minutes, and the tape got tangled up again.
That’s the natural state of everything, including your company.
It’s the CEO’s job to bring your organization back from the verge of chaos into an orderly mode of operation. Day after day. This means defining and redefining your priorities all the time, which adds to the daily struggle as well as to the daily strain.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not whack-a-mole all day long. Growth and scaling are only possible when a growing team is working according to established standards and processes. Processes help avoid chaos and hectic, thereby making life easier for both employees and customers. And finally also for the CEO.
But setting up orderly processes is just as strenuous as defining and redefining your priorities all the time.
3. Gaining and Keeping A Leading?Edge
Whilst whack-a-moling your way along, you need to gain and keep a leading edge on a variety of things. Cashflow. Sales pipeline. Product Roadmap. Administration. Team cohesion and culture.
Here is a typical situation: You worked hard to shave off 2–3 quiet hours to work on gaining and keeping your leading edge. You retreat to a quiet location, grab a cup of coffee, and open the laptop to start working. Your phone rings.
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Urgent bug.
Somebody resigned.
An escalation is induced by poor communication between your team and the customer.
A monster in your front door, which turns out to be a fly after you step in.
Your quiet hours are gone, and so is your leading edge. You handle the urgency, only to sink into your bed completely exhausted a few hours later. And you put in the 2–3 hours of quiet work on the weekend.
Not once, but regularly.
Not because you want to play the hard guy, or because you don’t want to spend time with your spouse and your kids. But because it’s necessary to keep your business on track.
Let Go, Do Something Else
Just speaking for myself, the efforts described above are utterly needed for the success of a company, but you can’t do this job forever. Either you burn out, or at some point, you will strangle somebody for the extra work he or she generated for you at the most inconvenient time.
Good democracies have term limits for their leadership, which means by definition that you will have to let go after 8–10 years. Although there isn’t such a constitutional limit on CEO tenure, I think it’s a good idea to let go at some point.
As the Founder & CEO of Yonder , I have led the company from its very first day. I think I am quite good at creating something out of nothing , but I don’t think I am the right guy to lead a large organization of over 100 people. Remember, that’s why I left a well-paid corporate job some ten years ago.
So that means at some point, I will have to step back from my role as CEO for the greater good of the cause. And hey, that’s perfectly fine for me. It’s about the success of the company, not about my ego.
Have you considered taking over a different, non-leadership role in your company after stepping down from the CEO role? There are many roles where a CEO’s experience adds value?—?especially when you can focus on one role with all those strains I described above. I’m thinking of product leadership, business development, or financial planning.
Step over your ego when the time has come. For the sake of your company, and the sake of yourself.
Growing a company ?? in troubled times ???? is a marathon.
As a tech entrepreneur ??, active reserve officer ??, and father of three ??????, I can help you with ?? practical entrepreneurship and resilience advice for all aspects of life. To the point ??, no fluff, because entrepreneurs are busy.
When I’m not busy, I get my rest and inspiration in the beautiful mountains ??? around Zermatt ????.