Chad Silverstein sold his company on his 25th anniversary and was hurt by how staff reacted. His advice for CEOs: genuinely care about your people and lead by example, even though it's emotionally risky.
So if you could give one piece of advice to a CEO who wants to build a better culture at his or her company, what would you say?
So I'd say outside of working on yourself and lead by example, you have to care. You actually have to care, and I think care about what other people about your staff like to the point where I don't know if it's possible, but, like, you got to care about other people as much as you care about yourself. And that's hard to do when they don't care about you and they'll stab you in the back, they'll quit on you. You know, I had a real wake up call when I sold my company. It was not the exit that I had hoped for. On my 25th anniversary, my staff was very upset with me. And it was really hard for me because I never saw that coming. Meanwhile, I've had people quit on me for 25 years, and I high fived them on the way out. I brought back some of them into my company. But the day that I told them that I'm built to leave, I didn't get the reaction I thought I was gonna get. And it's still hard to even think about for me because of how much I poured into everybody.
But it's the reality of, like, what kind of reaction.
They were upset with me, they were pissed that I was selling the company. I changed their life. You know, it's like I threw a ripple right through everybody. Everybody's careers changed and they didn't see it coming. And to be honest, I didn't see it coming until I made the decision to do it. But it was tough. It was really hard. And you find out who your real few are when you go through those kind of things in life and you have to make those tough decisions. And I always say now, when I'm not really caught off guard anymore, I'm just like, normal. It's just normal. So I would say for a leader, and the advice is, you gotta get used to feeling alone. You gotta have some truth tellers in your life while you're working on yourself. People who can point out your blind spots and help build you. And you gotta care about other people, and you gotta build into other people if you want them to rally around you and around your efforts. You gotta make sure that you're building into other people around you. I think that's a hard thing to do when you really don't care that much.
