A theme in my work with CEOs is the necessity of seeing yourself clearly and cultivating the capacity to rigorously assess your weaknesses and your strengths. You have to be both your toughest critic and your biggest fan. This is good advice for executives at any level, but it's particularly important for CEOs because the nature of the role makes it difficult to get candid feedback from people in a position to offer relevant and trustworthy guidance. [1]
The people who have your best interests at heart and who you trust to be candid, such as family and friends, may not be in a position to offer a meaningful critique of your performance. The people who are in such a position, such as Board members, investors and senior employees, may not be candid, or they may have obligations that at some point diverge from your personal interests. And the mentors you relied upon to fill this gap earlier in your career may no longer be available to you. So what can you do?
1. Clarify How You Add Value
You're undoubtedly busy with a great deal to do. And yet in my experience CEOs add the most value and have the greatest impact on the business by leading, not simply by doing. Seeking to add value by merely doing more may actually be counterproductive in your efforts to lead at scale. [2] The goal here is to ensure that any self-assessment is focused on your most meaningful activities.
It's no longer the case (if it ever was) that you can assess your impact by the number of hours you put in or how many items you've crossed off your to-do list. As Andy Grove once wrote, "My day always ends when I am tired and ready to go home, not when I'm done... A manager's work is never done. There is always more to be done, more that should be done, always more than can be done." [3]
Instead, if you're like most of my clients, at any given moment you have a relatively small number of responsibilities that are both important and urgent--perhaps three to five. [4] It's tempting to add to that list, but rigor matters here--if too many things are important and urgent, than nothing really is. If you succeed at these key tasks but others slip, you've still succeeded. And if you fail at these key tasks, then success elsewhere won't matter.
2. Make Reflection a Practice
Early in their careers many people imagine they'll finally have a more spacious work life when they obtain a more senior role and have greater control over their calendars. They often fail to realize that the more senior the role, the more people want your time and attention. You likely face some version of this challenge, and it can feel difficult or even irresponsible to dedicate time to yourself. But reflection is like a good night's sleep or regular physical activity--it's not an indulgence, but an investment in your capacity to add value. [5]
It's also not the type of activity that fits neatly into brief segments of free time between other activities. While there's no single best approach, I do recommend making reflection a regularly occurring item on your calendar. Every individual's needs differ, and you will have to experiment to find the routine that's most productive for you. Consider the length of time and the setting that are most conducive to meaningful reflection, as well as the frequency with which you can reliably block off and protect such activities on your calendar. [6]
I know CEOs who do their best thinking on solo retreats over a long weekend, although that may only be feasible several times a year. I've also known a CEO who did his best thinking at the driving range, and he made that a weekly routine. The idea isn't that reflection must occur on a rigid schedule, but like all important-but-not-urgent activities, it won't happen with any consistency if you don't make it a practice.
3. Find the Signal in the Noise
As noted above, it can be challenging to obtain useful feedback as a CEO, but I'm not suggesting that you should ignore others' feedback or fail to solicit it. And yet feedback from others isn't necessarily "the truth" about your performance. As I've written before, "feedback always says as much about the giver as the recipient. It's filtered through their reality-distortion fields, reflecting their personal values and priorities." [7] Many organizations try to correct for that distortion via a 360 assessment, and if that's available to you I recommend taking advantage of it. At the same time such processes can be time-consuming, occur only at periodic intervals, and are subject to some predictable biases of their own. [8]
There's also feedback available to you in the form of organizational results, which likely matter much more than anything else. But here, too, is plenty of noise in the form of what psychologists call the "fundamental attribution error"--we routinely assign leaders more credit for success (and more blame for failure) than they deserve. [9] Further, the feedback loops for a CEO are extremely long, as Jeff Bezos has noted: "When somebody congratulates Amazon on a good quarter, I say 'Thank you,' but what I'm thinking to myself is, 'Those quarterly results were fully baked about three years ago.'" [10]
Ultimately, all of the feedback you might obtain, including but not limited to direct input from others, 360 reports, and organizational results--are forms of data, which is comprised of signal and noise. It's your job to determine which is which.
4. Tolerate the Dissonance
Self-assessment isn't merely an intellectual task--it's also an emotional one. This is true for all executives, but, again, it's particularly true for CEOs because of the obligation to be your toughest critic and your biggest fan. If you're like my clients, there are any number of parties who are watching to see if you stumble, and when you do they'll be quick to find fault. If you shrink from a candid assessment of your weaknesses and missteps, your critics won't hesitate to do so, and you may find yourself unpleasantly surprised by how they leverage that information.
But senior leadership also entails maintaining a high degree of confidence in your capabilities and an optimistic view of what you and others can achieve. As I've written before, "There's a positive correlation between optimism and effective leadership, in part because the optimistic leader has a contagious effect on others, attracting talent and resources and making success more likely." [11] And as you've no doubt experienced as a CEO, there are moments when you can't look to anyone else for encouragement, because everyone is looking at you.
Putting this into practice and acting as your toughest critic and your biggest fan is likely to evoke what psychologists call "cognitive dissonance," a form of stress deriving from the difficulty of holding in mind seemingly incompatible realities. Most people have a low tolerance for such dissonance, to the extent that they may dramatically alter their beliefs and behavior in order to reduce the stress. But as a CEO you can't afford to do that. I've previously discussed how to better manage the dissonance that inevitably accompanies this job, and my guidance is consistent with what we know about emotion regulation more generally: Expect it. Get comfortable with it. And talk about it with people you trust. [12]
Footnotes
[2] How to Scale: Do Less, Lead More
[3] High Output Management, page 47 (Andy Grove, 1983)
[5] Investments, Not Indulgences
[6] How to Think (More on Open Space and Deep Work)
[9] I first learned about the fundamental attribution error as an MBA student from Roberto Fernandez, who described it as "ascribing causality to personal characteristics when causality actually lies with the situation." The original research was done by Stanford psychologist Lee Ross: The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process (Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 1977).
[10] Jeff Bezos interviewed by Michael Beckerman (Internet Association Gala, 2017). The passage above begins at the 7:07 mark in this video.
[11] This line is from The Ruling Out of Possibilities (On Failure). For more on the research on leadership and optimism, see Dispositional Affect and Leadership Effectiveness: A Comparison of Self-Esteem, Optimism, and Efficacy (Martin Chemers, Carl Watson, and Stephen May, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2000), and Impact of Leadership Style and Emotion on Subordinate Performance (Janet McColl-Kennedy and Ronald Anderson, The Leadership Quarterly, 2002).
[12] The Cognitive Dissonance of the CEO. For more on emotion regulation, see The Tyranny of Feelings.
Photo by Slim via Pixahive.
