Parent Post
Chance
I don’t want you to be me, you should just be you.
If you follow the
If you follow the first rule of leadership, not everybody will like you.
Let them go ahead and hate. Be okay with that. You don’t have to be cool. Just be you.
In order to be
In order to be a great leader, you must be yourself.
If you try to be someone else, not only will you not be able to lead, but you’ll be ashamed to have people emulate you.
Similarly, a board member
Similarly, a board member may say to a CEO: “I don’t think your CFO is as good as the CFOs of other companies I am on the board of.”
This is a super tricky statement for the CEO to deal with.
The common and wrong thing to do would be to go back to her CFO and tell him to be better in front of the board.
At that point, the CEO has refused to have a point of view and make a stand. She is trying to be what the board member wants, but not really succeeding.
Very few managers can
Very few managers can be themselves in business.
For example, an excellent co-worker gets his first promotion to manager.
But once he becomes a manager, he magically transforms into a dick.
He feels like he has to establish his authority, so he stops treating you like a person and starts treating you like someone he has to impress with his power.
Her CFO will be
Her CFO will be super confused because he has no idea what he’s done wrong.
The right thing to do is say to the board member: “Great. Please let me know what about those CFOs you think is better and introduce me to them.”
Then the CEO should spend time with those CFOs, see if she comes to the same assessment, and decide how important those skills are for her company. If the skills are critical and the delta is real, she can go back to her CFO and be herself.
If she disagrees with the board member, she can be herself with him too.
At the CEO level,
At the CEO level, it’s more subtle.
It often comes from modeling a successful leader who isn’t you and whose methods you haven’t internalized or whose best practices don’t apply to your company.
For example, a CEO might read about Jack Welch’s “rank and yank” process where he eliminated the lowest performers.
So, he brings it to his managers, and one of them says that they’ve gone through this super intense hiring process so the bottom 10% is pretty darned good.
At that point, the
At that point, the CEO is stuck.
Does he stick to his guns even though he doesn’t really believe them? Or does he risk appearing wishy-washy by reversing himself on the spot?
He’s painted himself into a corner by trying to be Jack Welch rather than be himself.
If you aren’t yourself, you won’t even follow you.
