If you are anything like me you believe the learning process in business never ends. That's why I always like reading about news ways to engage customers, improve my win/close rate, manage better, and lead more effectively. Along that line of thinking I enjoyed the BNET article by Steve Tobak yesterday on 5 new ways to manage like a CEO, especially because a few of the 5 are contrarian and will cause debate. Here's the list:
1. Focus on critical, trouble areas and leave everything else alone - others might argue that you should focus on areas that are succeeding and help make those even better or identifying new opportunities to grow the business but it may makes sense to leave the good alone and tackle the trouble spots
2. Hire functional experts who are also solid, upcoming managers - the point being that you can coach people to be good managers but it's much harder to find the right people to fit the roles in the first place
3. Business comes first - this one will likely cause the most debate (and did if you look at the comments posted by readers of Tobak's article), yes the focus of business is business which means taking care of customers and driving sales but in the business world today I believe it's essential to take care of your employees, too
4. Manage up - this becomes more and more important as you move up the ladder and critical at the CEO level (heck he/she has to manage the BOD), I've learned the hard way that when you only focus on your team and don't properly manage the expectations of your boss you soon find yourself looking for a new job, another way of saying it is "make your boss look good and you look good"
5. Help to "manage the company" - most of us put the blinders on, head down, get the job done, and go home, but you need to look beyond your own little world, when you look at things wearing the big company/corporate hat you've got a great opportunity to be be recognized and move up
I've never been a CEO but there's some good nuggets here on how to manage like one.
