The CEO whisperer
In my coaching practice, I generally work with two kinds of clients: CEOs, and leaders who collaborate with CEOs closely. Among the second group, by far their most frequent topic for discussion is how they can influence their CEO's thinking.
Sometimes, the exec and the CEO have a clear disagreement about something important. In these situations, there is usually a time-sensitive decision to be made and they are able to have a direct conversation about it. However, this is not the most common or challenging case. More often than not, the exec wants to impact the CEO's thinking on a much wider spectrum of topics.
What influence looks like
As Textio's CEO, I once had a 1-1 with a customer success leader whose team was responsible for renewing and expanding our customer accounts. With limited resources, she could see that the best way to hit her overall account expansion goal was to focus the majority of her team's attention on our most engaged customers, and invest less time in the rest.
She noted that I'd told her that her account expansion goal was her top priority, so she came to her 1-1 with a key question: Are we willing to lose some of our less engaged accounts if it means we can significantly expand the rest? Or would we rather successfully renew all our customers, but probably expand very few of them?
To support the discussion, she shared detailed account data to back up her belief that focusing primarily on our most engaged customers would lead to better business growth overall.
In every way, this customer success leader got the discussion right. She:
- Expressed a confident POV about which of her goals was the most important to the business
- Backed up her POV with data
- Sought buy-in from me on the work she wanted to deprioritize, since that work interfered with her ability to hit what she saw as her top goal
It's easy to see why this exec was able to influence my thinking!
One way to limit your influence: Mess up the basics
By the time you're a senior leader, your functional expertise should far outpace your CEO's depth in your discipline. As a result, your CEO wants to be able to trust you fully on operational topics. Of course in real life, everyone needs help from time to time. But by and large, your CEO trusts you to handle the basics without their involvement, e.g.
- Don't talk about your plans to deliver stuff. Just deliver it.
- Don't spend time discussing petty issues. Be the adult who builds bridges.
- Don't complain about your team week after week. Show up for them, and manage non-performance.
I'll never forget the time I discovered that an exec on my team had cancelled all 1-1s with a struggling employee for several weeks running. As I dug in, I learned that it wasn't just this one employee, either; most team members were having their 1-1s cancelled last minute.
For the remainder of our time working together, 90% of our conversations were about basic personnel issues. Not only did this limit the exec's ability to influence CEO and Board thinking on critical business topics, but neither of us enjoyed it very much.
I guarantee that this stuff is not where you want your CEO to be focusing their time. Just get it right.
Focus on the CEO's #1 problem
We've talked before about why it's critical to focus your work on your #1 problem. This is true for everyone, not just execs and CEOs. However, this framework is especially relevant for a leader who is trying to influence their CEO's thinking.
Chances are you already know what your CEO's #1 problem is. If you don't know, you can just ask them. In all likelihood, they'll appreciate the question, and they'll be glad to align with you about it.
Execs bring a variety of topics to their 1-1s with the CEO. Like any good manager, the CEO generally supports the exec in whatever topics they bring forward; after all, execs usually know what's important to discuss. But in truth, the CEO is usually most interested in the #1 problem.
The bottom line: Be like my customer success leader. If you want to influence your CEO's thinking, focus on 1) conversations that help set the right goals, and 2) conversations that directly bear on the organizations's ability to hit them. Those have all the makings of #1 problems.
What do you think?
Thanks for reading!
Kieran
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