1 Job of a CEO

If you're the kind of leader who is drive, drive, drive, and always pushing for more and always pushing for bigger and always pushing for better, and you know, that relentless drive to improve, and you're only going to be happy when you kind of hit that next big milestone. You will never actually be as successful as you could be if you do what I'm going to tell you to do. Right now, the number one role of the leader is to be that Chief Energizing Officer. Now, I first heard that term about 20 years ago from a friend of mine, Jack Daly. He said the CEO stands for Chief Energizing Officer, not Chief Executive Officer. And I thought a lot about it, not just what he said, but then over the years, you know, one of my very, very first business books that I ever read, and I urge you all to read it now, it's called the One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard. He and Dr. Paul Hersey created situational leadership, which is used by the top companies on the planet. It's all around praising people to success. The core role of every CEO, and really every CEO is to grow the competency, the skills, but the confidence and the energy of our employees. And most CEOs and most entrepreneurial leaders don't praise people anywhere near enough. Now, if you ever said to your spouse, well, you know, I don't have to tell my wife or my husband that I love them. They know that. Pretty soon they wouldn't know it anymore. You're constantly reinforming, you know, reaffirming them that you love them, that you care about them, that you're thanking them. You know, you're praising them for all the little things to make sure that they, they see that you notice those. Well, you need to do a lot more of that in your company as well. The leader's job is to praise people and thank people and to be telling people constantly what they're doing. Well, to be constantly telling people. Thank you. To be constantly looking for the, the areas to praise people on. So I'll give an example. If you were to look at my home right now and you see the siding in my home, you probably see a bunch of brown wood there, right? Well, not only do you see the brown wood, but you also see all of the actual gaps in between the wood. Now, if I was only ever focus on this wood and see the gaps, I would see them all. But really we don't. We just see the wood siding. Well, the problem for most CEOs is we're always finding stuff that's broken stuff that needs to be fixed, stuff that needs to be improved on, driving towards that next goal and our job as the CEO and that COO is to say thank you and praise people for each of the tiny little milestones that we see along the way. And if you're only going to be happy, as Dan Sullivan says, when you get to the horizon, you're caught in the gap. Because the reality is the horizon keeps moving on you. So while you keep stretching and while you keep driving and while you keep moving forward towards those bigger goals and driving towards being more successful and making the company a little bit better, you need to praise people and thank people for all the little things you're doing along the way. So you need to drive towards the horizon, but see how far you've come in that rear view mirror. So a little tip that I use is to constantly praise people. Every time that you see one thing that they're doing wrong, try to praise them for two things they're doing. Well, not necessarily in that shit sandwich kind of way, like praise and then criticism and then praise, all in the one sentence, but twice as often in the day. Praise people twice as often in the day. Thank people twice as often. Say, hey, we did a good job on xyz, because you know that you're going to be giving people 10 more things to improve or work on or get better at. So try to at least say 20 positive things along that path. And I think if we were to do that more as leaders would be much more successful. Any entrepreneurs out there that think they can keep growing the company by driving hard, pushing hard, pushing hard, you're actually burning your people out. They don't feel appreciated, they don't feel loved, they don't feel like their anything is going to be good enough and you're actually getting less results from them. But if you really, really work hard to praise people, to thank people, to give them that kind of boost in energy constantly, you'll see huge results for you. And I think there's entrepreneurs and CEOs out there that if all they did for the next six months was praise people and say thank you and celebrate, their businesses would grow way faster than what they're doing today. Worth trying, worth thinking about. It's actually built into our DNA that we respond really well to that stuff. Try it inside your company, you'll have huge results.