Our Small Business CEO Leadership Principles Updated for 2022 (and Notes from Kim Scott’s Radical Candor)
If you’ve read our small business CEO Leadership Principles 2020 Edition (we didn’t author a 2021 edition, it was a busy year), you know the core values that guide how we work and lead small business teams. While these values are important to us, we subscribe to strong opinions weakly held from Paul Saffo and thus like to revisit our leadership principles for possible revisions. Recently, reading two books has pushed us to add a new principle: Caring deeply and challenging directly.
How did we get from three principles to four? Two books read back-to-back that were more connected than they might seem on the surface. Connect by David Bradford and Carole Robin (we wrote about building connections in small businesses) and Radical Candor by Kim Scott (more on her book below) showed us that leadership requires personal connections to build trust and direct feedback to drive results. Leadership is done through the relationships that the leader builds with each direct report. Those direct reports in turn model the leader’s style and build relationships with their direct reports. This pyramid of connection creates the pathways to getting things done in an organization at scale (beyond 5-6 direct reports it becomes too hard for a leader to interact with everyone in an organization, especially as they grow). Our new leadership value, “Caring Deeply and Challenging Directly” is a blend of the concepts from Kim Scott and David Bradford/Carole Robin that both speak to building strong relationships one-to-one (caring deeply) to promote trust (and psychological safety) and using that trust to drive improvement in outcomes through changes in processes/systems (challenging directly). While it is tempting to try and build relationships one-to-many, the reading of these books shows us that 1) relationships matter, 2) relationships/trust drives connection and results, and 3) a one-to-one culture is extremely difficult to duplicate, thus protecting the long-term success of an organization that takes the time to get it right. For us, that is worthy of being our fourth leadership principle.
Small Business CEO Principle One: Lead from Behind
The CEO’s job is building a sustainable and defensible business. To build a sustainable and defensible business, scaling is often necessary. To scale, a CEO’s must push his/her team to the front and empower them to be successful (this gives everyone leverage on his/her time and thus enables scale). Support can be listening, empathizing, training, compensation/incentives, more team members, or just empowering the team member as the decision-maker. The true power of the CEO is raising up others around the team to carry the mission forward.
Small Business CEO Principle Two: Measure for Alignment and Growth
What gets measured gets done. Measuring doesn’t just “track” what’s going on with a project, it forces us to think at a more granular level and understand the inputs that drive results. This is why measurement is so important. It’s not for understanding what happened last week or last month relative to the current time period, that’s important too, instead it is understanding how to execute and optimize that execution to materially change outcomes. We humans come to work in small businesses packed with biases (both good and bad). Measuring the inputs/outputs helps to mitigate some of those biases by making it about the results and improving those results (alignment of the team and growth of the outcome).
Small Business CEO Principle Three: Create a Culture of Done
Getting things done matters. Without execution, even the best business strategy in the world is worthless. Said differently, execution eats strategy for breakfast. We believe that a CEO of a small business has to get things done to be the example of what done looks like in his/her small business. This helps the team understand the speed and quality of done and also gives them an example of the CEO making mistakes (mistakes always happen) and the psychological safety of making mistakes (that are corrected).
Small Business CEO Principle Four: Care Deeply, Challenge Directly
Our three above principles lightly touch of the concepts of our new CEO Principle Number Four (e.g., you can’t lead from behind without listening and empathizing with your employee’s current position/needs), but caring deeply and challenging directly are so important in building successful small business work relationships, that we felt it must be explicitly stated. At the end of the day, we are all put on this planet to be part of relationships. We believe a true leader and CEO is actively building and growing those relationships. There is no better way to do that than to care deeply and challenge directly.
Post-Script: Additional Insights from Radical Candor
Kim Scott’s Radical Candor is full of insights and advice from her years leading the biggest companies in technology. It is impossible to build a list of all of her insights, but we captured a few that we are going to strive to implement into our leadership practice this year. We suggest you read the book if any of these insights spark your curiosity for more.
- Leaders need feedback to survive. Don’t let your direct reports off the “feedback hook.” Kim makes the point that leaders need feedback just as much as their direct reports may need feedback. The challenge is that as a leader moves up the ranks it is harder to get honest feedback. In those moments, a leader must continue to press his/her direct reports to get that feedback that is critical to the growth of the leader and improvement of the organization. Kim’s favorite feedback question to direct reports: “Is there anything I could do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me?”
- Guidance and feedback must be as close to the moment as possible to improve performance. The closer your feedback is to the moment, the more meaningful the insight will be to your direct report (added bonus of you will not forgot to give the feedback if you do it immediately). When giving feedback, describe three things: 1) The situation you saw, 2) the behavior (always describe the behavior, not the person!), and 3) the impact you observed.
- Find help to coach and support your team. Coaching and supporting your team shouldn’t be you coaching the team directly. You will become the bottleneck! Instead, find external resources and support systems to offer the same insight/support, without waiting for you to deliver it.
- Align the role of your direct reports with their values. Employees that feel a connection to their career goals and values will be more insightful and impactful than those that are not connected to the work on a deeper level. Start having career conversations and value alignment with the three step career goals conversation: 1) Life story conversation, 2) Dreams conversation, and 3) 18-month plan conversation.
As always, if you’re looking for a team that has core values aligned with your own, contact us at Endurance Eagle about selling your small business now.