The 5 Qualities All Great CEOs Share — And How To Build Them

Okay. Welcome, everybody.

I'll take.

Let's wait a minute or two to.

Let everyone into the room.

And.

If anyone is able to follow Danny's lead by having your video on, that would be amazing. Thank you. Danny.

Certainly makes the experience a lot more interactive. So if you can put your video on, that would be amazing.

Thank you.

Thank you, Adam.

All right.

All right.

Okay, Excellent.

Very great.

Just going to put everyone on mute.

To let everyone into the room here. It.

Started in just a moment.

Maybe. While we're waiting, I'm curious where everyone's dialing in from.

If you wouldn't mind just putting into the chat where you're dialing in from. That would be amazing. Thank you. Sweden. I'm, I'm half Norwegian, Danny, so I know that. Neck of the woods.

Missouri.

Half American as well, so I know a lot of those places.

Okay.

All right.

And we'll go ahead and let some of these AI agents in knocking in the door.

Soon you'll just be able to send your AI.

Your AI agents will come to the meeting to talk to my AI agent. Nobody will do anything.

Okay. Okay. I think, I think we can go ahead and get started. Jakob, would you mind just taking over the.

The room admissions?

That would be great.

Okay. Welcome everybody. Thanks very much for taking some time out. We're doing these every Thursday, so we, we started last Thursday. We're picking a new topic every week. And all of these talks are in celebration of the CEO accelerator. So I'll put that link into the chat there and I'll talk about the accelerator and in just a second. But just a quick intro.

From me. So my name is Eric Partaker. We're probably connected either through the newsletter or on LinkedIn. And I started off my career as a consultant with McKinsey & Company, was then part of the early team at Skype helping build that before our exit to ebay. Then built a chain of Mexican restaurants, if you can believe it, having missed Mexican food growing up on it in Chicago in the uk and about three years ago or so moved down to Portugal. And these days I coach and mentor CEOs, helping them scale their companies. We invest in some of the companies as well. And then if you Follow along on LinkedIn.

A little less than two years ago, I started to post for the first time on LinkedIn as well and fell in love with kind of that whole realm and sharing my thoughts about various things there too. So the CEO accelerator. So what is this all about? And this relates to our talk today. And by the way, even if The CEO accelerator is not something for you. No worries. You're going to walk away with very tangible, very practical things that you can implement from today's talk for immediate benefit. That's what I always make sure with every single talk that I do. So you need not join the accelerator. If that's not something that you're interested in, you still will walk away with tons of value from today.

So I in, in my day job, if you will, I Coach and mentor CEOs as I mentioned. And one of the things that I always tell a new CEO that I'm working with is look, if you want to scale your company, you have to recognize that that's the hardware. And if the hardware is operate correctly, we need to code the software correctly. And the software are two other pillars that you need to scale in parallel to the company. The leadership of the person at the helm and are they operating to their fullest potential. So really to scale, to grow efficiently, you need to scale a company, your leadership and, and yourself all at the same time. And I'm just going to do a very quick screen share here before we get into today's talk. So this is the accelerator again, the link is in the chat. If you have not seen it, you could check it out on your own. We are opening up for our next cohort in January. So the first cohort is going on right now, next cohort opens up in January and, and we're taking a limited number of wait list applications right now. And the accelerator delivers three outcomes. It's going to help you scale your company, become a great CEO, unlock your full potential. And who is this for? Well, it's just, it's very similar to today's talk. It's for the same group of people. So either you are a CEO, you are, you are a senior leader who's aspiring to reach that level at some point, or perhaps you are a general manager, you know, operate your own P and L business unit and you have CEO like responsibilities. So if you fit any of those criteria, then the accelerator would be a great fit for you. And it's built on which very much relates to a lot of the subject matter in my talks on the intersection of three circles. Right. So company building, leadership development and peak performance. And why these three things? Because I've seen countless times where you look from the outside in and a company appears to be doing great, but when you get in on the inside, the leadership is toxic. Or I've seen many situations where the company looks great on the outside, then you get in on the inside, the leadership looks great as well. But when you dig deep with the leaders, you find that they're struggling, they're not as productive as they want to be, or on the verge of burnout. So you really need to scale once again all three of these pillars which very much relates to the content in my talks and the things that I teach online and within the programs. And I'll give you just a one more minute overview of this and then of course you can look at it on your own. You'll find on the website, on the CEO Accelerator site a bunch of testimonials from existing clients who I've helped with the scaling of their companies. Plenty of testimonials here. Everything from so ali is a YouTuber, has built an incredible business off the back end of becoming the world's most followed productivity expert Aid here runs Cooper Perry in the UK big business 265 million in revenue. 65 million EBITDA. Leah on the other hand is other end of the spectrum. So it's a pre revenue startup, you know, disruptive, deep, deep tech, you know, not, not there with those types of numbers yet, but certainly there with the ambition and in the program. And I'm going to be giving you a taste of some of the things that you would learn in the CEO accelerator in today's talk. But in the program it consists of four main components. So over 12 weeks together which again starts from mid January, but you can join the wait list already. Now in the course of 12 weeks together there are 12 master classes in each of the three pillars, scaling the Company, Leadership and Self. Those occur on Wednesdays at 03:30 UK, 10:30 Eastern. On Fridays there's a weekly coaching and mentoring session where I coach and mentor all the participants directly. There's tools and frameworks in the program and then you're joining a community and also getting the accountability of being with a group of like minded peers. Guest speakers as well, always in the program and every cohort. This is the current guest speakers in the current cohort. We'll, we'll have these guest speakers and many more in the second cohort to come. And if you go to the site you will find a very detailed week by week overview of the curriculum. So what is it that you're going to learn, why is it important and what are the actual learning outcomes from every module? So everything from strategy to systems to attracting, retaining, developing talent to leadership and management essentials, some of which we're going to be going through today. How to master difficult conversations, conflict and Feedback and also the self. So what do you have to do to develop the right sort of mindset? How do you strengthen your awareness? Antifragility, time management, productivity? How do you surround yourself with wisdom? So I'll stop the share there, but that is the CEO accelerator once again. And if you are interested, we are accepting wait list applications for the January cohort. And that means if you join the waitlist, what that means is that once enrollment opens, you're first in line because we have limited capacity, of course, so you're first set to protect the experience for everyone. So you're first in line when the enrollment period opens again, which is very soon. So without further ado, today I wanted to talk about five qualities that I have recognized.

That all world class CEOs share. These aren't the only qualities that are important, but these are the ones that I've found universally across the best. And again, even if you're not a CEO, this is super relevant because all these, if you are a leader or a manager, these qualities still apply. If you develop these and become proficient in these qualities, I'm going to be talking about what they are. I'm going to give you very practical, tangible ways to develop. Each theory is great, but only if it translates to practice. So that's why we always focus on practicality.

Now these, what is this based on? So this is based on my time working with Fortune 50 CEOs at McKinsey & Company, working with their leadership teams, building my own companies and also the over 100 CEOs that I've helped with the scaling of their companies to date. So it's a pretty significant large data set and it spans a lot of different industries as well as sectors. And the quick overview is that we're going to go through today. Three cognitive abilities. Okay, one key interpersonal skill and one key character trait. Okay, so three cognitive abilities, one key interpersonal skill and one key character trait. The first thing that we're going to talk about first, cognitive ability. You may not think of it as a cognitive ability, but it is. And the one word distillation is visionary. Now Marcus Buckingham, one of my favorite authors, he once said great leaders rally people to a better future. Or to put it another way, a great leader has the ability to paint a picture of what's ahead and get everyone excited about achieving it. Now this was critical in my own journey when I was part of the early team at Skype. Our tagline was the whole world can talk for free. It wasn't become the number one voiceover Internet telephony application. It was the whole world can talk for free. It was a much, much, much bigger vision. And that helped us in our David versus, you know, Goliath situation. We were a very, very small software company, but we went from nothing to a multibillion dollar exit in the space of just three years. And certainly there was a lot of factors, obviously that, you know, help, power, that, that incredible trajectory. But the vision was absolutely critical and being visionary. So what does that mean? That means having the ability to, to see the big picture and plan for the future. Such as, like painting the vision. It's about seeing the big picture and planning for the future. So how do you strengthen your visionary leadership? I want to give you four different ways that you can strengthen this, this muscle, this visionary leadership muscle. Number one is define your inspiring why. You know, if you've seen, for example, Simon Sinek's Golden Circle, very, very famous, you know, talk, it's all about, you know, what is the why that extends beyond the company? What is the why that creates some kind of social impact, you know, that does some kind of good in the world? Again, back to the Skype days. The whole world can talk for free. That extended beyond, you know, the revenue and the profit of the company. When we were building the restaurant chain, we sold burritos and tacos. But that wasn't our vision, right? That wasn't, you know, our purpose. That wasn't the, the thing that we said that we were all about our seven words there. Because the whole, whole world can talk for free. Just seven words. Our seven words here were make the world a more vibrant place. Now, that might sound like soft stuff. And does that really matter a hundred percent? Because if you think about things purely from a financial point of view, for example, well, equity ownership in a company is, you know, often quite limited. It doesn't necessarily extend to every single person in a company. There's varying rates of compensation throughout a company. So you can't. Not everyone will have the same financial incentive so, for example, to become number one or number two in every market that you operate in. This is GE's old.

You know, BHAG or Big Hairy, audacious goal. That's great. It's great for the shareholders, perhaps that's great, maybe for the senior leadership. But does that really inspire the person on the front line that, you know, doesn't have their, you know, a piece of the pie in the same way that those other folks do? I hardly think so. And so we have to think, you know, much bigger than that what, what's the good that we're doing in the world? Extend. And the simple, the simple tactic or the simple tool that you use here is what are we doing that extends beyond, you know, the company, you know, what, what, what's the positive impact that we are having, you know, in the world? With the CEO accelerator as an example, which this, you know, this talk is, is, is celebrating the CEO accelerator, our vision is to help the most important part of the global economy. You know, SMB leaders or SME, if, you know, if you're in, if you're based in Europe, small and medium sized enterprises or small and medium sized businesses in the U.S. same thing. These are the, these are the backbone of the global economy. But they're often underserved and overlooked. Right. The VC money tends to not flow in the direction of these companies, yet they account for the majority of global employment, they account for the majority of entities and they account globally for the majority of gdp. If you look at individual GDP across all the major markets. So you want to define your inspiring why? Number two, we have to, with our vision in mind, we have to break it down into visionary goals, right? We need a roadmap to achieve that vision. We can't just state the vision because if it feels so lofty and unachievable, it might be nice to hear in a moment. But people won't truly be inspired by. And that's a key thing of that you're trying to do with visionary leadership, especially in an SMB environment where resources are incredibly limited. Right? We need to be able to tap deeply into the people that we're leading, right? To get to the potential that perhaps isn't yet out there and on the table. And when it comes to setting clear goals, even if your vision feels insurmountable, the key thing here is to just think about driving at night, right? If I'm driving from New York City to la, I don't need to see the whole distance there. I just need the lights in the car to illuminate the next 100 yards ahead. And that's just going to keep going. And eventually with the vision in mind, the destination in mind, eventually I will get there, but I don't need to illuminate the entire way. And so the key thing that your people need clarity on is often what are we working on next quarter and how does that relate to say, the annual plan? Of course you can take this up a degree to a three year plan in a five year, but it's often clarity on that next hundred Yards ahead, which is the most important to make crystal clear throughout an organization and critical to bringing your visionary leadership to light.

If you can co create those goals, by all means you should. Because when people have the chance to weigh in, they are far more likely to buy into whatever it is that you're trying to achieve. And trust me, if you're going for something truly visionary, it will feel daunting. And so that means uncertainty and doubt can run rather high. So again, getting people, giving people the chance to co create and quarterly planning sessions at least put their 2 cents in. If people are able to weigh in, they are more likely to buy in. Number three for visionary leadership is just staying informed. And if I were to open up your calendars, for example, I would be curious to see what percentage of your time is going to keeping abreast of market trends. Perhaps, you know, attending a conference or two, having networking, discussions, speaking with other external stakeholders. Because sometimes you get so caught in what you're doing that you don't keep the antenna up for what's going around you. And that's often where you'll pick up key visionary cues or clues that can illuminate the grand vision ahead. If you look at my calendar, probably on a given week, because I color code these, they're all purple. Anything that deals with like staying informed, whether it's, you know, me doing some self study or me networking or meeting with another person, that gets color coded purple. And it's probably anywhere from, in a, depending on the week, it could be anywhere from 10 to 30% of my week, right? But it's there and it's in the calendar. And then the last thing with visionary leadership.

You'Re not, you're not leading in a visionary way if nobody understands the vision or if nobody remembers what it is. And so the key thing here is to communicate, right? So we need to communicate your vision and it needs to be communicated repeatedly. When we were building the restaurant chain, when we were building Skype, everyone in those two examples, everyone knew that we were respectively, you know, making the world a more vibrant place or the whole world can talk for free. Everyone in the company knew that. They knew what the vision was about and they knew why we were going for that. And that created a deeper motivating force in people than you would have if you're purely pursuing a financial goal or trying to maximize your KPIs.

I like to, I wrote in a little, you know, metaphor here. I like to think, I like to think of visionary leadership as, as a lighthouse keeper, right? That's what you are as a visionary leader. And, you know, you're like a lighthouse. You're, you're guiding ship safely to shore. You're illuminating right the way forward. And, and that's, that's the essence of it. So cognitive ability number one is develop your visionary leadership. You can do that in four ways. By defining your inspiring why, by setting very clear goals. Don't get obsessed with going A to Z, at least go A to B. Get the first 100 yards, like driving at night. That's, you know, that's what you need. Make sure that you're staying informed, networking, staying abreast of what's going on and over. Communicate that vision in team meetings, in one to ones in town halls. Constantly remind people of what you are doing and why it matters for the world, for your customers or key stakeholders.

Okay, we said we're going to go through three cognitive abilities. One key interpersonal skill and one key character trait. So we're going to go to the second cognitive ability, and it's all about critical thinking. My obsession with critical thinking started as a, before I was an entrepreneur, as I mentioned earlier. So before, you know, building my own companies, before helping build Skype.

I was a consultant. So I worked at McKinsey and Company. And one of the things that got drilled into my head at McKinsey & Co. Is how to take just about any problem out there and break it down and solve the component parts. It's an incredibly valuable skill and it's incredibly important as a leader. But how do you actually do that? How do you develop your critical thinking? You can kind of think of critical thinking as a chess game, right, where you have to constantly monitor what your opposition is doing, what you're doing, and you're constantly thinking, you know, several moves ahead. A couple of things that help in this regard. One is to make sure that you're tuned in to the entire organization. Okay? You can't. You, you need to benefit from all the perspectives that form, you know, what your company, what your team is. And it's, it's on you to make sure that you're connecting with those people. You're soliciting their thoughts, their feedback, their opinions. And it's very, very important to recognize the differences in people. Right? Some people are extroverted. They're gonna, you don't even have to ask them. They're gonna tell you.

Introverted people, they're, they're the quiet ones in the room. They might not feel comfortable speaking in public. It's on you to make sure that in your one to ones, if you want to get feedback and input on something, and why on earth wouldn't you that you're soliciting that input and you're making sure that you're adjusting that solicitation or the amount of effort that you need to put into to get that to the people that you're leading. Because everyone is different. So benefit from all the voices in your company that will help you think more critically. Why? Because it allows you to take in more perspectives. And this is not, you know, decision making by consensus. That's not what I mean. But when you're able to consider multiple angles, you're able to kind of have that debate in your head. Do the bit of the, the trial, if you will, and then make your judgment and make your decision. And it's never based on perfect information.

Right. So how do we strengthen our critical thinking muscle? Going to give you three ways. One is try to think in components. So when you're looking at a problem, try to break it down into its constituent parts. When you're performing an analysis, try to, you know, break the analysis into its segments. When you're looking at a group of customers or clients, try to categorize them. Try to think in components. There are natural categories and groupings that emerge in the world and if you just look for them, you will see them. And when you get into the habit of doing this, it really starts to simplify everything. It's almost like seeing the matrix in a way. You start to see things that everything that appears to be complex suddenly feels a bit simpler. And let me give. And you can use this literally for, for anything.

So I will. Let me think of a very. Okay, so I mentioned earlier at the start of the talk that I started a post on LinkedIn last year and the beginning in January 2023 and one of the, and it's been a rocket ship of a journey. I think I had like about 20,000 followers, had never posted anything and now it's 800 something. And one of the key things that I started to do was recognize patterns, right? So, and, and, and, and, and see the components. So I'll just give you a very, very quick example and whether or not you want to, you know, start to post on LinkedIn doesn't even matter. This is just to illustrate the point. So with, with LinkedIn, for example, you'll see posts in your feed and probably you look at them and you go, oh yeah, that's a post. I, I see components in those posts. And so the Components that I see. And each of these components could lead to vi and a lot of attention and a lot of engagement or might not. And so you have the image, right, of a post. You have the hook or the, like the first two lines of text or so right before you click see more to expand the caption, right? That's a component, a standalone component. And then you have the compact, the caption itself, right? And then you might have a call to action in that caption right at the very, very bottom. So there's four different components there and success. If I see like a post take off, I know it's not taking off for no reason. There's there, there, there's a reason and it's contained in my mind. It's, you know, critically thinking about it. It's something to do with those components, right? And, and I will look at those components and, and try to deduct what are the viral success factors that are powering each of those viral components. That's just one quick example. Number two, critical thinking. 80, 20 thinking. So again, the world is non linear.

20% of the success that you experience in life. Sorry, 80% of the success that you experience in life is going to come from 20% of your decisions. Probably, you know, 80% of the pain you feel from the mistakes in your life will come from 20% of your decisions. Right. 20% of the people in your network will account for 80% of the benefit that your network provides.

So you have to look for the leverage is the point. Right? Because things are non linear. And why, why this is important is because otherwise you'll be boiling the ocean to get like a single hot, you know, cup of tea. And by constantly looking for the 20% of things that are driving 80% of the activity, it allows you to focus on the components that are most important. For example, if you look at your customer base, you will often find that it's a small segment of the customers that are driving 80% of say the revenue or the, and, or the profitability. And then the last thing to help with critical thinking, remember the scientific method from, you know, high school. So be hypothesis driven in your thinking and that includes being dispassionate about the results, right? So you don't care what the answer is. You just, you're in the humble pursuit of the truth. And so what I mean by being hypothesis driven is that if you're not sure on a particular course of action or if something may work or not, state a hypothesis and then seek to prove or disprove It So again, I'm trying to think of very, very super practical in the moment examples. So take this webinar. Take this webinar as an example. So I was trying to get the word out to get maximum attendance to the webinar. Why? Well, because it's a lot more fun than talking to a blank screen. Right? So I wanted to get the word out as much as possible. And I track everything. I know exactly where all the I know exactly where all the registrants on this call have come from. I know if they've come through the newsletter. I know if they've come through the CEO accelerator company page. Right. Send DMS from my account. Right. To people who were engaging on the post, on my post who I thought might enjoy a talk like this. Hey, I saw that you engaged in the post. I think you might also like this talk. I thought my hypothesis was that since I had gone from like nobody to having a voice on LinkedIn that, oh, well, my hypothesis is that even though Nobody responds to LinkedIn DMs, people will respond to my DMs because I've created this personal brand. Of course they will. Well, there was 246 registrants for this webinar in total. How many, how many do you think came through the LinkedIn DMs? 1.

Right. So I was dispassionate about, you know, the results, but I employed the scientific method to test a hypothesis. I wanted to prove or disprove it. And so far it's disproving that trying to get the word out by DMing on LinkedIn is a, you know, viable or attractive channel, but it doesn't matter. I'm just being hypothesis driven. So be a critical thinker. Number three, cognitive trait, ability. And then we're going to move into the one key interpersonal skill and the one key character trait. And again, if you're joining late, these are five qualities that I have found that are shared by all of the world's, you know, the best CEOs that I've, that I've worked with and certainly were important in my own journey as a CEO. So the number three cognitive ability is being decisive. You know, it's one thing to think critically about a situation.

And you know, you gather and you evaluate the right information, but then you still need to make a decision. And too often what I see is that people just sit on the fence. They take too long to make decisions. And especially if you're in a leadership position, you know, one of your key roles is you are In a way, a decision making engine, right? You are helping the organization rocket ahead and keep moving, keep that momentum going by helping them make decisions. It also is a pretty wise move to develop this decisiveness muscle or skill. In a study of over 2,600 leaders, this is in the book the CEO Next Door, decisive leaders were 12 times more likely to be successful than their peers. 12 times more likely to be successful than their peers. Okay? And I like, I want you to consider.

A quote from Theodore Roosevelt. In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The next best thing is the wrong thing. And the worst thing that you can do is nothing. Okay? So move. You know, you have to prioritize speed over precision and momentum over stagnation. You know, this is part of being decisive. You want to keep moving forward, doubling down on the right decisions, course correcting quickly on the wrong decision. So how do you actually become more decisive? Because many of you can be sitting there thinking, yes, but, but, but I tend to sit on the fence all the time. I, I agonize over information, I go into analysis, paralysis. You know, I boil the ocean for the hot cup of water.

And that's not going to get you anywhere fast, right?

So number one is, recognize that human beings, we have something called a complexity bias, right? We tend to make things more difficult than they are. And a simple question that you can use to help fight this natural tendency is, what if this was easy? Literally ask yourself when you're sat there looking at this key decision that you have to make, should we enter this market or not? Should we develop this new product or not? Should we kill this and create more of that? Well, what if this was easy? And just ask yourself that question and see what emerges. Because often your intuition will communicate something important. And that leads to number two, trust your instincts. So Colin Powell has a, a 4070 rule. The rule is if you have less than 40% of total information, and if you make a decision on less than 40% of total information, it will probably be a poor decision. However, if you have greater than 70% of total information, you know, in that pursuit of knowing perfectly for sure what to do, if you have greater than 70%, you probably have taken too long to make the decision. So you have to get comfortable operating in that zone of uncertainty, knowing that you can always course correct right if needed and make another decision. And then the last thing that you can do that can help with your decisiveness is to create distance. And one of the ways that you can create distance so the former chairman and CEO of Intel, Andy Grove. So intel went in a single year from 198 million in sales to 2 million. They were almost about to go completely out of business. And Andy said to, I think it was his CFO at the time, well, pretend that we got fired.

What would we do? What would our replacement do? And then his colleague said, well, we get out of the memory chip business and we go straight into processors. And so Andy said, well, why don't we walk out of the door right now and walk back in as if we're our own replacements? So ask yourself, if I were fired from my role.

What would my replacement start doing and what would my replacement stop doing? Because creating that distance can often illuminate the road forward and help make you more decisive. Often what can impede our ability to be decisive is because we have too much history or baggage attached with the decision making, too much emotion. Once again, if you've just joined the talk, I just put into the chat, this today's talk. These talks are in celebration of the CEO accelerator. And the next cohort opens in January to help CEOs, senior leaders scale their companies, become world class leaders and operate at their full potential. And you can join the waitlist for that right now.