All CEOs have the same responsibilities, such as working with the board, engaging stakeholders, setting direction, and creating a positive culture. What separates the best from the rest is how they approach these tasks. All excelled at some, were good at the rest—and knew the difference. All are world-class integrators. And all applied a distinctive set of mindsets against these responsibilities.Here are six mindsets that characterize great CEOs.

What CEOs Do And Why

In times of uncertainty, it can be tempting to minimize the downside. However, that all but guarantees either mediocrity or decline. Successful CEOs want to avoid making mistakes, of course, but they also act boldly, actively seeking significant opportunities. They raise the aspirations of the company, and they look for intersections where the business and the market meet. In effect, they are excellent futurists and thus can define the right vision.While they will cut their losses if a move is a dud, they stick to the strategy. The vision comes first; financial performance flows from that.

Being Bold

Only one in three strategies is successfully implemented—in large part because change generates resistance. That is why the “soft stuff”—that is, matters related to people and culture—can be the hardest stuff of all to get right.Research has found that companies that solve the soft stuff are more than twice as likely (from 30 to 79 percent) to execute a strategy successfully.1 To carry their organization with them, leaders need to make the case for change, and then keep track of results.

Treat The Soft Stuff As The Hard Stuff

To build high-performing leadership teams, the best CEOs start with roles, not people, asking what the most important jobs are and then finding people who can do those jobs. And they design for overall functionality, bringing in a wide range of expertise. CEOs must engage with each individual while keeping some distance. And, again, the soft stuff counts.

Solve for The Team’s Psychology

The board is the CEO’s boss, but an awkward one—a lot of people, infrequently seen. Like any relationship, the bedrock is trust. That means being open, honest, and prompt about plans and problems. The bad news is, well, bad, but delivering it is also a chance for the board to help, which is its function. CEOs should establish a strong relationship with the lead director and check-in with other directors once or twice a year. Finally, introduce the board to the company by connecting the board to managers.

Directors Helping The Business

Purpose can be difficult to define. At the very least, it should be powerful enough to inspire people, simple enough to be readily understood, and make business sense. And purpose matters: companies with a clear social purpose have significantly outperformed the S&P 500 over the past 20 years.The best CEOs ask themselves why their company exists, and then make purpose an intrinsic part of the business model, knowing that testing strategy against purpose can open up new areas of growth. Leading with purpose can also <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/covid-19-and-the-employee-experience-how-leaders-can-seize-the-moment">enhance employee well-being</a> and build loyalty.

Start With 'Why'

Great CEOs make it a priority to manage themselves to ensure that they are not being pulled apart. That is obviously personal, but we did find some commonalities. The most important is self-discipline, particularly regarding the use of time. Old-school techniques such as lists, stars, and colour coding crop up often as time-management techniques. At the same time, the CEOs also build flexibility into their schedule—to respond to the unexpected or simply to think.Ultimately, managing personal effectiveness is about developing a sense of perspective, and then using that to see into the future.

Do What Only You Can Do

No book can create a great CEO, any more than a boxing manual can produce a Manny Pacquiao. But in business, as in boxing, there is such a thing as good technique. CEOs matter: we calculated that the 200 CEOs we identified created additional economic value of about $5 trillion. By identifying the mindsets that characterize great leadership, we believe that excellence can be cultivated—now and in the future.

The Bottom Line

What do CEOs do? Why do they do it that way? And what matters most?

Stashed ideas

How to be a great 21st-century CEO

<ul><li>You need to learn how to manage yourself before you can manage your business.</li><li>Communicate ideas and proposals in writing during the decision making process.</li><li>If you do it twice, write it down. Documentation is the key to building scalable processes.</li><li>Don’t ignore conflict. Be transparent, give/take feedback often, and be an active listener.</li><li>Be obsessed with learning about your customer. Do so by asking better questions.</li></ul>

The Great CEO Inside You: Key Takeaways

<ul><li>Find a partner who has complementary skills to yours. </li><li>Give up a large percentage of the company. It’s worth it.</li><li>Do not create a 50/50 partnership. While 50/50 sounds like an ideal, it actually leads to real pain if there is no easy way to break a deadlock.</li><li>Founding teams should never grow beyond six until there is a true product-market fit(PMF). </li><li>PMF is having created a product that customers are finding so much value in that they are willing to both buy it and recommend it later.</li><li>Metrics that show whether PMF has been achieved include: revenue, renewal rates, NPS (net promoter score).</li></ul>

The Initial Team

Inefficient leaders waste a lot of time reaching out about, or responding to, one-off issues in real-time. A much more efficient method is to batch your issues and discuss them all at once. Check email only twice a day: morning and afternoon.Schedule two hours each day to work on your Top Goal only. And do this every single work day. Period.The earlier in the day you schedule this Top Goal time, the better, so as to avoid other issues (and people) from pressing for your attention.

Inbox Zero: Work On Your Top Goals

<ul><li>Do not waste other people’s time. It is disrespectful and counterproductive.</li><li>When you anticipate being late, let the other party know as soon as possible.</li><li>Be present. Be focused on what’s being discussed. Do not check your messages. Phone and computer away.</li></ul>

On-Time and Present

<ul><li>Focus on the positives.</li><li>We perform our best when we are having fun and feeling good about ourselves.</li><li>Say or write down one thing that you’re thankful for each day.</li><li>Be appreciative. Tell people when they’ve done something good.</li><li>Set aside 1 hour a week to be intentionally appreciative. Follow up and outreach. </li><li>Do not feign humility by downplaying the act with statements like “It was nothing, anyone could have done it.” No. The person is trying to make you feel appreciated. Anything other than “thank you” will rob them of their goal.</li></ul>

Gratitude

<ul><li>If you can spend 75-80% of your time doing things that energize you – magic will occur.</li><li>Audit your time and figure out how much of it is spent on activities that energize you and what activities drain you. Outsource or delegate the things that drain you as much as possible.</li></ul>

Check Your Energy

Zone of incompetence: other people do better than youZone of competence: you can do it just fine, but others are just as good as youZone of excellence: things you are better at than others. You will want to keep doing these things, but this is dangerous. You need to move away from these things.Zone of genius: these are the things that you are uniquely good at in the world and that you love to do. This is where you should be driving toward spending most, if not all, of your time.

The Four Zones

<ul><li>Your physical health is paramount.</li><li> Take care of your mental health. Build a support group.</li><li>Get a therapist, even if you don’t think you need one. You will find it invariably useful.</li></ul>

Health

If you want the most effective and efficient decision-making process, require that anyone who wants to discuss an issue write it up, along with the desired solution, ahead of time.Two ways to do this:The hard way: Write an extraordinarily thorough analysis from the get-go.The easy way: Write a draft, circulate it to the meeting participants before the meeting, and invite comments and questions. This method, though time-consuming for the sponsor, yields extraordinarily thoughtful decisions in a very short amount of time.

Decision Making

<ul><li>You get buy-in when people feel they are part of the decision and their input matters</li><li>When people are given more influence, they feel more invested.</li></ul>The Three Methods:<ul><li>The manager decides, tells the team, and answers questions.</li><li>The manager creates a straw man (hypothetical answer designed to inspire discussion), shares it with the team, invites feedback, facilitates group discussion, and then determines the final answer.</li><li>The manager invites the team to a meeting with no straw man to discuss the dilemma from scratch. The final decision is made by consensus if possible.</li></ul>

Getting Buy-In

<ul><li>Don’t discuss issues verbally. It is both inefficient and ineffective.</li><li>Instead, require that anyone who presents an Issue at a team meeting do so in writing.</li><li>The write-up should include both a detailed description of the Issue as well as their Proposed Solution. They cannot say “I don’t know.” They must at least present a guess. It must be phrased boldly, in direct terms.</li><li>All issues should be presented at the weekly Team Meeting.</li><li>Allow 5 minutes to discuss each Proposed Solution. If consensus is reached in that time – great. If not, don’t spend more time debating.</li></ul>

Issues and Proposed Solutions

<ul><li>Be aware of who is in the room when you have a group discussion. Know that work titles will influence other people’s answers.</li><li>To avoid influencing other people’s ideas, have people write down their votes or thoughts before you share your perspective.</li><li>Let junior people speak and ask questions first.</li></ul>

Loudest Voice in the Room: Ensure Fairness In Meetings

<ul><li>Sloppy agreements are when people don’t show up on time, don’t complete the goals that they declare.</li><li>The antidote is Impeccable Agreements. They are 1) precisely defined and 2) fully agreed to (which almost always means written) by all relevant people.</li><li>There must be consequences to breaking agreements.</li><li>If you can’t meet the agreement, then you have an obligation to let other members of the agreement circle know as soon as possible.</li></ul>

Sloppy Agreements

<ul><li>Don’t hide negative information.</li><li>Our imaginations are much more powerful than reality.</li><li>Share all relevant information with your team, both negative and positive. Let them adapt.</li></ul>

Transparency

Interpersonal conflict is almost always due to people:<ol><li>Not fully sharing their thoughts and feelings</li><li>Not feeling heard</li></ol>Prove to people that you have heard them by summarizing what you just said back to you until they say “that’s right!” Once you assure them that you’ve heard them, then, and only then, will they be open to what you have to say in response.

Conflict Resolution

<ul><li>Ask each people to pretend that they’re the CEO and answer “What are the most important issues (max 3) for me to solve in the next 90 days?</li><li>Ask people to write down their thoughts about the company when they source their Joy, Excitement, Sadness, Anger and Fear.</li></ul>

Issue Identification

<ul><li>You don’t choose your values. You have them.</li><li>Use your values as a guide to who you hire and when you fire.</li><li>Print and distribute your values</li><li>Don’t underestimate the value of FUN as a value.</li><li>Don’t forget to celebrate. Make an effort to publicly acknowledge achievements</li><li>Don’t measure hours. Measure output. However, it’s still key that there is a core period of time when everyone shows up to the office so that collaboration can happen.</li><li>You prevent office politics by never allowing lobbying to be successful.</li></ul>

Values And Culture

<ul><li>Never assign someone an action without them agreeing to it verbally or in writing.</li><li>Encourage people to use their own individual tools for tracking their specific actions. Keep the group goal tracker high level.</li></ul>Areas of Responsibility:<ul><li>When more than one person shares a responsibility, it often does not get done well, or at all. </li><li>One person is assigned to each function in the company. This is the AOR list. Maintain and update it as responsibilities shift.</li></ul>

Goal Tracking And Responsibility

Every successful large company uses a system of “Objectives and Key Results(OKRs)”.<ul><li>Set vision and goals for the company, each dept, and each individual on a regular basis (usually quarterly).</li><li>Communicate that vision and those goals to every team member.</li><li>Tracking and reporting progress towards those goals on a regular timetable – usually weekly.</li><li>Elicit feedback on what’s going right and what needs to be changed.</li></ul>

Collaboration: OKRs

Target is 3 objectives with 3 key results for each.The Objective: Where do we want to go? Not necessarily measurableKey Results: How do we know that we’re getting there? These should be measurable.<ul><li>Gather your leadership team and have everyone come to the meeting with their ideas for what the OKRs should be for the quarter.</li><li>Much better to let individuals come up with their own OKRs. They will be more invested. </li></ul>

Tracking Of OKRs

<ul><li>Be efficient, or risk grinding all other processes to a halt.</li><li>Spend as little time as possible with the candidates that you don’t hire (quick evaluation) and as much time as possible with the candidates that you want to and do hire (building a relationship, onboarding/training).</li><li>Be fast. In recruiting, you would make an offer to the candidate “pending reference interviews”.</li></ul>

Recruiting

<ul><li>Ask the customer about them.</li><li>Listen actively and reflect back on what they say.</li><li>At the second meeting, show that you remember what they said at the first.</li><li>Be explicit about NOT talking about your company.</li><li>“Before we talk about what we do, I’d like to start by getting to know your situation, to know if we’re even the right solution for you.”.</li><li>Ask for a limited amount of time, so the burden is low:</li><li>“Let’s have a short introductory call for 10 minutes.”</li></ul>

Sales: Building Trust With The Customer

<ul><li>Identify the customer’s specific challenges by asking the right questions.</li><li>You need to understand your customer’s pain before you present your solution.</li><li>Over time, you will want to build an inventory of problem and solution statements for the different kinds of customers and different product features your product serves.</li></ul>

Sales: Customer Development

<ul><li>Don’t hire sales people right away.</li><li>In most cases, salespeople will never be able to sell better than the founders and they won’t be able to sell the product if you are not able to.</li><li>To thrive, salespeople need to have a very clear product offering to sell and a very clear direction on who to sell to.</li></ul>

Sales: Hiring The Sales People

Seeds : Seeds are generated from word-of-mouth, usually from customer referrals or prior relationships.Nets : Nets are generated from your marketing, such as events, SEO, white papers, and ad campaigns. They are called Nets because you are going for “quantity over quality”.Spears : Spears are generated from direct outbound outreach by your Outbound Reps, usually through email outreach or LinkedIn mining. They are called Spears because they are hyper-targeted and you are going for “quality over quantity”.

Lead Generation: The Three Kinds Of Leads

<ul><li>The greatest risk is not moving too slow. It’s spreading scarce resources too thin.</li><li>Start by concentrating all of your efforts on the low hanging fruit – the small customer segment that has a particular problem that your product solves 10x better than the competition.</li><li>Only move on to the next customer segment after you have the resources to do so.</li></ul>

Marketing

<ul><li>You need to document everything.</li><li>Be more interested in learning than in being right.</li><li>You are not making a product. You are solving a customer problem. It is critical that you continually live that customer problem.</li><li>Assign each new team member a buddy with whom they’ll check in each day for fifteen minutes for the first two weeks.</li></ul>

Great CEOs Use These Handy Tips

Matt Mochary coaches the CEOs of many of the fastest-scaling technology companies in Silicon Valley. With The Great CEO Within, he shares his highly effective leadership and business-operating tools with any CEO or manager in the world. Learn how to efficiently scale your business from startup to corporation by implementing a system of accountability, effective problem-solving, and transparent feedback. Becoming a great CEO requires training. For a founding CEO, there is precious little time to complete that training, especially at the helm of a rapidly growing company. Now you have the guidance you need in one book.

The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

To be a founder, you have to be world-class in something. Make sure you’re spending the majority of your time doing that thing; this is your ‘zone of genius’.
<ul>
<li>Not compromising will allow you to be a valuable contributor for a much more extended period of time and avoid burnout.</li>
<li>Believe it or not, there are passionate people that are world-class in the work you don’t enjoy doing. Outsource this work to the right people.</li>
</ul>

No Need To Be a CEO To Be an Effective Founder

Free time is an incredibly valuable asset – a full calendar can be good for productivity but not creativityCreativity starts with an empty calendar, but eventually, your calendar gets filled up with execution and a busy calendar is the death of creativityHaving control of your time in a creative job, assuming you’re self-motivated, is the ultimate hack.

Time Is More Valuable Than Money

The companies that succeed are always reinventing themselves and their productsRegardless of positional title, creative people within a company need to have the opportunity to control their time in a way that optimizes and maximizes their creative potentialIf you let operations bog down the subconscious mind of a creator, their creations will never come to fruition.

A Creative Person Needs Space

Be free of mind and free of time. Boredom leads to creativity.

<ul><li>Traditional CEO: raise money, communicate the strategy, recruit and retain the team</li><li>Product CEOs: provide product vision</li><li>Sales CEOs: provide sales leadership</li></ul>Discussing burdens as a CEO is hard as our board could lose faith in you and your employees could stop following youThere is incredible pressure, because many times the investors are investing in the founder just as much as the product.

Being A CEO

CEO is the job you take because there is no other choice, you don’t trust anyone but yourself to make the venture successful<ul><li>CEO is a high-stress, people management role.  </li><li>The CEO is the company psychiatrist, always dealing with people issues.</li></ul>

A Profile Born Out Of Necessity 

If you’re the founder of a company, you’re probably world-class in somethingThere is someone out there that is world-class in the things you don’t want to doDon’t just hire off of skill though, you will only truly hand over the reins if you believe they have a like-minded ‘founder mentality’Recruit founders who have failed through no fault of their ownAn example could be a founder who had the best product in a category that just didn’t have a market fit. These people have a ‘founder mentality’ and haven’t been burnt out yet.

The Founders Mentality

You want to spend all your time on that thing you are good at. Everything else is a necessary evil that should be outsourced.

If I had to articulate how happy I am today, you’d have to lock me up, you can’t have people this happy running around in society.

Naval no longer keeps a calendar but is busy all day long. But, he prioritizes whatever feels most important to him at that moment.<ul><li>Even when you have to do unpleasant things, at least you do them without them being forced upon you.</li><li>You can only live this lifestyle if you’re willing to disappoint people’s initial expectations of you.</li></ul>

Naval's Calendar

In this episode, Matt Mochary and Naval Ravikant (founder and former CEO of AngelList) talk about why you don't need to be the CEO. Naval explains how he realized it wasn't the role he wanted at AngelList, what he did to get over his fear of stepping back, and how much more value he can (and does) create now that he is no longer in that role.If you are not loving being CEO, know that there is likely someone who can do the job better than you, and you can create much more value in the role that you actually love. FULL VIDEO 🎥https://youtu.be/WJuQLzr6PJQRESOURCES ✨- Zone of Genius: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11UVWJox31Ani8Cq6Ymhm6DiVUiv5vPkOQd8ZdGpYmbs/editSOCIALS 🐦- Follow Naval on Twitter: https://twitter.com/naval- About Naval: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Ravikant- Check out Naval's Website: https://nav.al/- Follow Matt on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattmochary- About Matt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Mochary- Learn More About the Method: https://www.mocharymethod.com- Podcast produced by: https://www.twitter.com/_rpgbx- Podcast edited by: https://twitter.com/MedleysMindWant to join the Mochary Method software team? 💻- Apply at https://mocharymethod.com/careers

Podcast: Naval Ravikant, co-founder of AngelList, explains why you don't need to be CEO

It's vital to keep decisions in writing as we seldom remember things the way they went down. It could be tough to handle disagreements or wrong actions after the fact if you did not write it down. It's clumsy to talk about, for example, who gets what percentage of the company.

Not writing things down

Whatever skills a co-founder has when they join the company are not the only skills they'll ever have. You learn also everything on the job, so it's better to work with someone you know and like and learn together than someone you don't know.

Looking for founders with a skill match

Every relationship has ebbs and flows. When you disagree, you don't have to come to a resolution. Instead, you can pause for a while. Understand how your co-founder deals with stress. Some people deal with stress by striking out, and some by retreating. If you understand your co-founder, you can better interpret what they're doing.

Take arguments with your co-founder seriously

When co-founders cannot have honest disagreements and have not had a real conversation in a long time, there might come a time when a breakup is inevitable. The CEO's job is now not how to repair the relationship but how to separate most effectively and least destructively. It is best not to have a 50/50 deadlock. It might be reasonable for the CEO to have an extra share in the event of a 50-50 deadlock.

Breaking up can become inevitable

Adding co-founders later on can cause them to think that it's not their company. However, doing things together in the earliest stages will help people step up when they go through hard times. Figure out the co-founder first before you raise money or come up with the next idea, then you can truly have collective ownership as you do things together.

Reducing co-founder mistakes

In the first episode of Rookie Mistakes, Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel discuss co-founder mistakes. To create Rookies Mistakes we asked YC founders: Is there a simple fact you wish you knew when you started your company or a rookie mistake you wish you could take back? https://twitter.com/daltonc https://twitter.com/mwseibel

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

#ceo

IDEAS ABOUT #ceo

How to be a great 21st-century CEO

The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

It's time to

READ

LIKE

A PRO!

Podcast: Naval Ravikant, co-founder of AngelList, explains why you don't need to be CEO

Co-Founder Mistakes That Kill Companies & How To Avoid Them

Bite-sized knowledgeto upgradeyour career

#ceo

IDEAS ABOUT #ceo

How to be a great 21st-century CEO

The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building

It's time to

READ

LIKE

A PRO!

Podcast: Naval Ravikant, co-founder of AngelList, explains why you don't need to be CEO

Co-Founder Mistakes That Kill Companies & How To Avoid Them

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career