The Roving CEO

Posted on February 11, 2007

As time passes and your business grows, challenges hit departments unevenly, and the laggards will need help. Your job as CEO is to keep an eye on each department in your company, sense which one is struggling the most, then dive into that department to pull it forward.

Business requires that you do a lot of things right. Just like an eight-cylinder engine – when all eight cylinders are firing perfectly, you’ve got the most power. In my mind, the different business functions of a company are just like the cylinders in an engine.

It takes constant tending to keep them all working perfectly in harmony, and the CEO must be the chief mechanic. They get out of whack when the business changes and systems and/or managers are outgrown. They get out of whack when new products or services are added, stressing some departments more than others. They get out of whack from wear and the passage of time.

On a regular basis, you must assess the performance of each department and take action to assist the department that is lagging the most and is threatening to hold the company back from its objectives. You’ll be acting like a consultant (but with real organizational power), fixing the problems that exist and bringing the department forward so that it is one of the better-performing departments. Once accomplished, you can neglect it a bit while you change the focus of your attention to the next lagging department.

Depending on the size of the business, and the strength of the department’s leadership, you will get your hands more or less dirty. More than likely, you’ll get involved with hiring and firing people, reviewing processes and assumptions, assessing hard-to-assess factors (like the marketplace), and making some decisions that your managers are too afraid to make. Since you’re the CEO, you naturally do all this in the context of the bigger picture.

Don’t misunderstand: You’re always playing coach, guiding the people you have in charge of each department. It may be that if you have a star leader of a department, they rarely become your lagging department. Wonderful! That’s the kind of department leader you want to have in all your departments. In fact, if the same department keeps lagging, then you probably do need to look at changing that department’s leader. But with growing companies in particular, the problems and challenges are not evenly distributed in all departments. Put your energy in where it counts.

But don’t get sucked in. The CEO should not get too tied down with day-to-day operations. (This is all relative to size, of course.) Coming in to help a department doesn’t mean that you end up doing their job for them for any length of time. It means you go in, innovate and assist, pass the knowledge on, then get free of it so that you are free to move on.

Having said all this, don’t make it worse by making your own wrong decisions. Most CEOs are not great at all things. If you see that a department needs help but your skill set isn’t up to it, then find someone you trust who does have that skill set and work together with them to dive in. You still make the key judgments and are deeply involved, but with a person at your side advising and assisting you.

Takeaways:

• Know that as time passes and your business grows, challenges will hit departments unevenly, and the laggards will need help.
• It’s your job to act as an internal consultant, diving in when needed to effect lasting change and improvement.
• As soon as possible, you must pull back out of the details of that department so that you are ready to help the next lagging department or tackle other challenges.