Scott Dietzen on how CEOs and boards work best together: stack your board with people strong in your weak spots like sales or finance, let them coach your team directly instead of filtering everything through the CEO, and treat board meetings as strategy reviews, not crisis management. The CEO stays accountable either way.
Chapters
What do you wish more CEOs understood about how to get real value from their board? And what do you wish more board members understood about the CEOs they work with? I think first of all, when you step into the CEO role, it's the one job where you have to build both above yourself and below yourself. And I think you want to think carefully about trying to build a board that fills in your gaps or helps your leadership team. I love to have like a sales guru or a marketing guru or a finance guru on the board. Certainly as you start scale, you need finance represented as well. And it's almost like your leadership team can have a board member coaching them in their particular function, since no CEO knows all these different areas deeply themselves. And then foster really open communication between your board and that leadership team to get full value out of your board. Too many CEOs try to be the conduit between the board and the leadership team. And I find you can get a lot more value with open communications. See, the board meeting is an opportunity. Too many CEOs approach it like it's a proctological examination that they have to be scared about. When I go into a board meeting because I'm really looking to make the company better, not try to defend my particular position. Never use a board to problem solve. This is one of the big mistakes CEOs make is they'll pose a problem and then try to get advice real time. To get the most out of a board, you want to do your own deep diagnostics on the situation and the issue and then have a plan go in with. Here's our proposal for what we're going to do about this issue and let the board help you course correct rather than try to problem solve in real time because you can't get great value out of a board. And then lastly, remember, you're in charge. If you disagree with your board and you follow the board's advice, if it turns out that you were right and the board was wrong, it's still your fault. So ultimately, you know, you've got to follow your internal board conviction if you're sure that's the right path. I mean, take all the board's guidance into account, but you've got to be the one.
