Our Three Small Business CEO Leadership Principles (2020 Edition)

Countless research papers, books, posts have been written on what makes a great CEO. If you were to try to read all the content published in just one year, you’d probably never get through it in a lifetime. Considering that, it can seem narcissistic or at least obtuse for us to throw our hat into the ring and try to say something differentiated about leadership and sitting in the CEO chair. But we have a core set of beliefs at Endurance Eagle and we believe that sharing those beliefs says much about how we like to run small businesses. As a small business owner, examining our beliefs helps you to understand how your small business will be run by Endurance Eagle and to know if we are a good fit to carry your legacy on after your transition. Each year we reflect on what we value and examine if that’s changed (hasn’t so far). This is our set of leadership principles for 2020.

Lead from Behind

We don’t mean to say that a CEO’s job is not to be the head of the company and set the goals and strategic vision for the organization, but it does mean that part of a great small business CEO’s job is to work hard at pushing his/her people to the front by understanding, empathizing, training, and empowering them to make decisions. This is where a small business can find true power and leverage from managers, including the CEO.

In practice, this means removing yourself as a decision-making bottleneck. For example, if an employee comes to you with a problem, ask: “What do you think? How do you want to solve this?” Instead of just giving them the answer. Empowering an employee to solve the problem and giving them the psychological and career safety to execute (i.e., you can’t fire them for the failure of the execution if it was done in earnest) creates a stronger commitment from the employee on the project and a greater desire for success for the project and company

Measure for Alignment & Growth

Peter Drucker’s is often credited with the quote, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” We believe that he was right, but there is so much more value in measurement than that quote states. Measuring the inputs to a process from sales to manufacturing will improve the outputs, that much is true and there’s countless examples that we don’t need to cover. Additionally, measurement also improves the interpersonal interactions of a team, leading to stronger alignment (and execution) across the company.

When people work together, subjective measures of success (e.g., who likes whose idea, what does the boss thing, etc.) start to become prevailing norms as an organization grows (these are shortcuts to success that employees adopt in the absence of data/fact-based measurement). These norms can be destructive to performance of the organization and morale since employees will be chasing goals that are misaligned with their peers and you, the CEO. We believe that establishing a universal set of metrics (a benchmark for teams and the company as a whole), that are broadly and repeatedly communicated, reduces bureaucracies within/across teams, and moves an organization towards growth and alignment. It also has the bonus of reducing employee stress, which can improve employee retention.

Create a Culture of Done

The mantra of many startup companies is, “done is better than perfect.” While we like the underlying message of this mantra, we believe that it leaves a lot on the table. Startups are actually trying to say something along of the lines of, “Don’t endlessly optimize a project. Just launch it because 80% of the value is already created and the last 20% won’t generate a return relative to time.” We agree with that philosophy, but we believe it is more nuanced. The CEO needs to create a culture of done. A culture of done encapsulates the above mantra, but also adds agency. Specifically, it tells the CEO that he or she must create a culture of done – he or she must lead by example and get things done. We believe that this has a number of benefits: 1) employees see what an example of “getting things done” looks like, 2) employees see the CEO making mistakes and the psychological safety of making mistakes (that are corrected), and 3) the CEO stays closer to the team through getting projects done. A culture of done is extremely hard to implement, especially for CEOs, but is critical for the growth of any organization.

There is so much great reading to be done on leadership and what it means to be a small business CEO. We can say that some of our favorites have been: HBR’s Must Reads on Leadership, The CEO Next Door, and Good to Great. if you’re looking to sell your business and feel that your leadership principles align with the Endurance Eagle principles, contact us today