Joshua Fraser's former COO Larry Smith taught him to stop rambling in CEO updates. Fraser was sharing too many details that worried employees unnecessarily. He learned to cut meetings short, stay transparent, and tell people only what actually affects them.
Chapters
Foreign. This was one of the most valuable lessons that I learned. It is never say more than exactly what needs to be said. The context that I got this in was I'm a little bit of a talker sometimes I will ramble on. And we would do monthly and quarterly meetings with our entire team. And anytime that I would ramble on as a CEO, I was saying too much that my employees didn't need to know. I always wanted to lead with transparency and be open. But there are times as the leader of a company where you cannot over share. It actually creates like concerns within your employees if you over share. And so one of my mentors sat me down. He was the COO of our company at the time. And I'm really going to share these stories about Larry Smith and how he is saved my relationship with my CTO and then are kind of falling out in the end. It was one of the biggest lessons that I ever learned. He was the highest paid employee that I ever had and I don't know if I would have had the success without him. But one of his final pieces of feedback for me and during some of our team updates was never say anything more than exactly what needs to be said. Our meetings got a lot shorter. I was a lot more concise in my speech to what I shared with my employees. I was still extremely transparent about my business, but I would make sure that I was never rambling on about things that my employees don't need to worry about. Because your business is going to have tons of things that you and your C suite or your leaders need to deal with, but your employees don't need to deal with that. So that was another really critical lesson in my career that I will never ever forget.
