How to find the right help and support as a CEO
Introduction
It’s not easy being a CEO. You have a myriad of stakeholders to keep happy. You’re expected to know everything and have all the answers. You’re the one that everyone turns to for leadership, advice, help and support. You have to be the referee when your Sales Director and Finance Director can’t play nicely together. And ultimately, you have to make more sales and more profit each year, or you’re out of a job.
For many, it’s that much harder because you’ve never had any formal training for the role you’ve found yourself in, and you probably don’t have a job description either. There’s no manual, no documented procedure, for what you do. So you end up making it up as you go along, but you keep wondering what you’re missing.
Who’s there to help you?
In most businesses, when you have a legal problem, you call your firm of lawyers. Finance or tax questions, you call the accountants. Whether it’s health and safety, product compliance, HR, regulatory, or production issues, you have experts on hand when you need them. But who do you have for running the business?
It is our belief that all CEOs or MDs need to purposefully create a support network around them. A chat with a friend in the pub is great, but it’s not enough. We will be publishing a series of articles aimed at helping CEOs like you (and people who might want to become CEOs) to run their businesses better. What will set these articles apart from the oceans of advice that you will find on the internet is that they are built around a structure, a framework for managing your business that has worked successfully across many industries. Each article will provide practical help and advice – but will also slot into the bigger picture. We’ll introduce this framework in the next post.
But to start with, this post is focused on you: where can you find the right help and support?
Where can you find genuinely useful help and advice for you and your business?
There’s a range of options available to a CEO for support. None of them are mutually exclusive, and different ones work for different situations. Knowing yourself is important – what would you get most value from? For example, extroverts tend to think best with others, so should surround themselves with thinking partners. Introverts think better on their own, but should find people who can challenge their conclusions.
There are some things that you just can’t speak to your direct reports about. Here are some of the key places you should look for support.
1. Chairman
A Chairman should be your first line of support. The days of a chairman just turning up for board meetings, and beef wellington and claret after it, are long gone. A chairman should provide both high challenge and high support to their CEO, and they usually bring a wealth of business experience.
Their interests are highly aligned with yours – you both want to see the business thriving – so you should be able to forge a proper partnership. Make sure that you spend regular quality time together, monthly is ideal.
Honesty is key to getting the best out of your chairman. The danger here is that they are also the one that can sack you. But making your problem a shared problem makes that less likely.
Sometimes you are stuck with a poor chairman: they may be the founder or majority owner. For that, and other reasons, you may want to look at other options.
2. Mentor
A mentor is an individual who has experience that you can benefit from. Whilst a Chairman’s primary responsibility is to the company, a mentor’s is to you and your performance and wellbeing. Typically, a mentor adds value by bringing their experience to bear on your problem.
Many people find mentors from among their personal connections, but there’s nothing to stop you approaching a stranger that you find inspirational and believe you could learn from. Look for someone who has relevant experience for where you want to go. Make mentoring formal rather than ad hoc. Set up regular sessions – monthly is ideal – and make sure you come prepared to talk about your key issues.
3. Coach
Like top sportsmen, many CEOs have a personal coach. A coach is different to a mentor. The traditional coaching mantra is that ‘the brain with the problem has the solution’. Coaching therefore proceeds through a series of questions to help you understand how you can solve the solution. A coach can help you understand yourself better, and so you can improve your own performance.
The line between mentor and coach can often blur. A good mentor will provide coaching as well as experience; a good coach can share their own experiences and train as well as coach. There are different types of coach out there. Some are originally business people; others have a psychological background. Choose one that matches your needs.
4. Peer advisory group
A peer advisory group is a group of MDs and CEOs who meet regularly to help each other learn and improve. The idea of such groups is very old – think of Aristotle’s Lyceum, or Benjamin Franklin’s Junto. The concept is that bringing many brains to bear on a problem, with their own experiences, knowledge and perspectives can identify better and more creative solutions than one brain on its own, and often very quickly.
Peer advisory groups work because businesses have so many issues in common with each other. All businesses have staff issues, suffer from lack of sales, or very rapid growth, or need funding, or make acquisitions, and so on. As a result, members of the group are very likely to have experienced and resolved issues like yours. Choose a group that includes businesses and individuals that you can learn from, but also be prepared to give as much to the group as you take.
One thing that all these approaches have in common is that they will challenge you. How someone responds to challenge is a real test; you should be prepared for it and welcome it if you are to improve.
Where have you found quality support? What’s worked for you and what hasn’t? Please leave your comments – we would love to hear your experiences…
In our next article, we will be exploring the idea of a theoretical framework to underpin how you run your business.
igesia Consulting helps businesses and the people in them to become peak performing. We understand what the very best organisations do, and work with companies like yours to give you the skills, plans and structures to do the same.
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