Cameron Herold says COOs and CEOs fail by managing tasks instead of people. Three daily habits fix it: praise employees constantly to build trust, stay aware of what each direct report struggles with so you can coach them, and delegate most of your to-do list so you lead through others instead of doing the work yourself.
Chapters
You may not agree with this as a COO or a CEO, but if you don't agree with it, you're wrong. Let me explain what the 3 big things are that you need to be doing as a leader every single day. And it's probably not what you're doing today. The first thing you need to do is to praise people a lot more often than you do today. It's kind of like our ears and our mouth. God gave us 2 ears and 1 mouth. We need to use them in that ratio. We need to listen twice as often as we talk. Well, we need to praise our people a lot more than we're currently doing inside of our business. Now, if you were married or you're in a dating relationship, let's say you have a girlfriend or a wife or a husband, whatever. How often do you tell your partner or your spouse that you love them? Once a quarter? Once a month? Once a week? No, you tell them every day, multiple times a day, so that they know that they're loved and appreciated. And then that inevitable fight that happens once a week or once a month, whenever you have that disagreement or a fight, it's built off of a foundation of trust and love. Well, if you're constantly telling your employees, fix this, this is broken, add this, set another goal, do this, but you're forgetting to praise them and say thank you and to show them all of the stuff they're doing well, to show them when they're living the core values, to celebrate all the little successes, then you're really missing the point. Number 2 is to be aware which projects your direct reports are struggling with so that you can actually show up to coach them, to problem solve, to praise them, to mentor them, whatever they might need, applying situational leadership, which I actually cover as the very first module in my Invest in Your Leaders training. It's a core skill that you need to be really good at. But if you're so busy managing emails and doing your projects and just being on phone calls and you forget that your core job is to grow people and grow their confidence and grow their skills and grow their connections, you're really, really missing the point. The third thing you need to do is delegate a lot more than you're doing today. Your to-do list does not have your name on the top of it, right? My to-do list doesn't say Cameron's to-do list. It's just a list of a whole bunch of things that need to be done. I was laughing about it a couple days ago. I said, whenever I go on vacation, I'm sure my team loves it because they don't get bombarded with a whole bunch of action items. And then all of a sudden I come back to work and they must get bombarded with Hey, here's a project, here's a project, here's a project. Thanks for doing that. But they get overwhelmed with a lot of the stuff that I'm delegating because my job is to delegate 80% of what's on my to-do list and then be there to coach them and support them and problem solve for them. My job is not to do work. My job is to get results through others.
