Here are my favorite highlights from Matt Mochary’s The Great CEO Within. Matt is a repeat successful founder and now an executive coach. He generously shares a wealth of immediately usable management and leadership advice, in a simple Google doc.
Highlights:
- If you want the most effective and efficient decision-making process, require that anyone who wants to discuss an issue write it up, along with the desired solution, ahead of time.
- Culture is the unspoken set of rules that people in a group follow when interacting with each other.
- It is important to determine the company’s five or six most significant KPIs, then track them religiously and make them available for the entire company to easily see on a daily basis.
- Create a document listing every possible function in the company. Next to each function, list the directly responsible individual (DRI). This is the AOR list. It serves as a routing layer for any questions and ensures that no functions fall through the cracks. Make sure everybody in the company knows how to access the list, and update it as new functions arise or as responsibilities shift.
- The only way to prevent politics is to never allow lobbying to be successful, and the only way to do this is to have a written policy about as many situations as possible, particularly around compensation, raises, and promotions. Apply this policy to all team members, all the time.
- For an organization to work well, three things must occur at every level of the organization.
- Accountability
- Coaching
- Transparency
- (I use these particular words only because they form an easy-to-remember acronym: ACT.)
- DO NOT use a 1-way communication method (email, text, voicemail) to give feedback, unless it is 100% positive.
- As the hiring manager, write out a ninety-day roadmap for the position you need to fill. This roadmap includes all the goals that the new team member will be expected to hit within the first ninety days of joining. This is critical for successful onboarding. During the interview process, share this roadmap with the candidate to make sure that she is excited about these goals.
- The granting and accepting of a job offer is a very emotional moment for a person. Making a big deal out of it is a good thing. We recommend that you make a ceremony out of it. Invite the candidate to receive the offer in person. Create a ritual out of this process.
- To make a sale effectively, you need to do the following three things:
- Build trust
- Identify the customer’s specific pain
- Sell results, not features
- Through a series of questions, your aim is to understand 3 things:
- What are their goals?
- What are the challenges preventing them from reaching those goals?
- What are their ideal solutions to overcoming those obstacles?