“I just need you to make it simple for us,” said the senior leader of an organization I’ve recently started to help. They hired me to close a compliance gap, but as we dug into their situation, their rapidly growing organization was seeing the impact of complexity and the lack of efficient systems. My job was to leave a lasting impact by reducing complexity and mitigate risk in their business model

“I knew I had a message, but I could never find the right words,” said a recent coaching client. They’d been very successful in their coaching business, but they couldn’t see the gaps in their messaging that would potentially unleash connection with their ideal client. I could see them grappling for the right words and through well placed questions, the messaging revealed itself.

“You understand exactly what I need, when can we start,” said one of my favorite coaching clients when they were experiencing rapid change and I was able to reframe the leadership and technical solutions needed to get them back on track. My ability to see and hear what is said and see their body language enabled me to present a solution that would get them through the chaos.

The common thread amongst all these leaders is their blindspot to truly “see” the gap and provide a solution that solves their issue short & long term. 

Bringing in another set of eyes & ears enables them to see what is missing and provide a better solution by finding their “compass” to get back on track. 

The CEO’s Compass is your guide to get back on track and through assessing the 7 compass points to get you back to true North. 

By assessing your maturity across the dimensions of Purpose, Performance, Past, Pride, People, Process and Platform, you start to see the course to navigate back… but there’s another benefit I’ve not yet shared.

The CEO’s Compass is also for you. While written to address the business challenges of a CEO, each point can apply to you and your personal challenges of not feeling like you’re on track.

In my case, I recently saw via The CEO’s Compass, I did not have Peace of Mind. Doing a quick assessment across the 7 points, I was able to “see” I needed to focus on:

• People – my personal skills development to message better and create meaningful connections
• Platform – building on my accountability tools & decision logic; execute on tasks that are most impactful to my business and 
• Purpose – recommit to it and steer clear of the “shiny penny” that was starting to get me off track.

The answer is clear – every leader needs their own Compass, The CEO’s Compass is your too,  to get you back on track. 

I’d love to connect and understand where you are off track and ways we can work through it together. Let’s book a call!

When making the family spaghetti sauce recipe it’s important to stick with the ingredients that have stood the test of time and create an experience that connects the present day with your past. Having made the mistake “ONCE” of substituting jarred spaghetti sauce in the recipe nearly broke my marriage! We survived the day, but I learned my lesson to NEVER  recreate the experience without the essential ingredients. 

Now let’s think about job skills of our future leaders in the context of a recipe:

• 4 year degree
• 5-7 years of business experience
• 2-3 certifications in your field of expertise
• 1 hour of good communication 
• 20 minutes of giving feedback
• 5 seconds of navigating challenging conversations
• 1 millisecond of understanding the culture of the people they need to work with 

When you stir this up over 2-3 years, do you think the organization benefits from the investment? If it’s obvious to you this will not be  a recipe for success for the organization or the individual, then why do you continue with the wrong ingredients? What makes matters worse is the deep culture of the organization gets lost as we mix in individuals who lack the essential skills that create sustainability in your organization. People lose their trust in the organization because either brute force working long hours or having the right network is the only way to get ahead.  In “The CEO’s Compass”, the “Past” compass point along with the “People” point are where you need to navigate to, to get you to “Peace of Mind”; your true north. 

If this is you, then I want you to pause and reflect while I take a short detour…

My guest interview this week on The Drop in CEO Podcast with Tra Williams, we discussed Entrepreneurship and how critical it is to building our competitive advantage as individuals, communities and entire nations. His book, “Boss Brain” speaks on this at length. The essential skills are even more critical as the foundation for business and building relationships. Without cultivating those skills, the “American Dream” and for that matter, “Everybody’s Dream” for a better life is lost. Believing in entrepreneurship is believing in people and their talents to create a better future. Given this thought, why would you not cultivate this within business? 

When I think about you and the need to ensure you have the 3 Essential Ingredients for Leadership Recipe, I draw your attention to this picture.

You see my daughter and son making the recipe, but hidden in this image is your answer: 

1. Preserve the past of this recipe – where did it come from, why was it important to write it down, who created the recipe and what is the importance of each ingredient. When people understand the past culture,  they are more likely to understand how it connects to today. They will remember the story and build on it. 
2. Mentor the essential skills – now in the context of spaghetti, cooking the meat in the sauce, adding spices to taste and dipping the bread in it to make sure it has the right flavor are what we teach my children in making the recipe. The same goes for business when we give them the job description – we need to spend hours / weeks / years nurturing their ability to fulfill a role that provides value. When we skip this step, they may take short cuts like I did in buying jarred sauce, burning it if the stovetop temperature is too high, or one time I used sugar instead of salt. We save our employees some of this heartache if we invest some time in showing them the way. 
3. Show people you care about them; it goes a long way in building a trusting (and loving) relationship that ensures a sustainable business. While these are two of my three children making the sauce and we indeed enjoyed the results, it was more about learning the process and the experience of eating together. When we translate that same sense of family and caring to business, we not only create a sustainable business, but one that is creating a culture for tomorrow. 

With these key ingredients, for building your leaders of tomorrow and the culture you wish to see in a sustainable business, do you have everything you need to get started? Do you have the time to build your leadership team leveraging the culture, their technical skills while building their essential skills? If there are barriers in the way of starting, let’s book a call.  We can talk about the spaghetti sauce recipe, or we can talk about getting you back on track!

My heart sank when I had to call an emergency meeting with my team and had to basically say “stop everything,” because we had multiple crises to manage. I had fallen victim to what so many organizations do; ditch the strategic work in favor of firefighting. And here I was in that position, having to lead others and feeling so off track. 

I pulled out my CEO’s Compass to figure out how to stay grounded amidst the chaos and still move the organization with the strategic work in addition to the task at hand. But before I go into what I did, let me give you some context…

Crisis 1: We were having a quality problem in one plant for which we’d not found the root cause and putting us in a position of constant mitigation. On top of that, there was external pressure to resolve the issue, because there was also a major infrastructure enhancement due to start in the same area. To make matters worse, I was challenged to gain the support from some local leadership in order to bring in external resources to fill our capability gap given the multiple issues to manage. 

Crisis 2: We had found a quality issue with a supplier for which they were pushing back on us that it was not them. Despite collaboration to try to find the root cause of the quality issue, it soon escalated into our inability to ship products to a customer. When we brought all the interested parties together on a call we reached a conclusion that allowed us to continue shipping, but I felt defeated that I could not get to the root cause. What I did realize was that I got people’s attention and we collaborated on a solution; though not optimal. 

Crisis 3: We had a quality leader that was not performing and impacting the moral of the employees. We worked extensively to give them guidance and an opportunity to improve performance, but in the end we had to let them go. The energy we took to try to improve the situation for the manager and the employees ultimately was exhausting, we let them go and moved forward with interim leadership to help rebuild the organization. 

I had to quickly manage resources, set expectations and provide a calm environment for my team to perform at their highest potential as we gathered in our “War Room” to manage the crisis. While the CEO’s Compass was not even an idea at that point, it was a story in the making and here’s why:

To get back to True North or “Peace of Mind”, I needed to focus on 3 things:

• Purpose: We needed to get back on track as being a trusted brand and deliver safe & quality products our customers expected. Diverting resources for this greater purpose gives us the freedom to focus and know we would get back to the strategic work once capacity allowed us. The team poured their collective wisdom into the situation and they naturally started to collaborate on the best approach.
• Performance: I needed the framework to assess the needs of the organization, individual teams and the individuals themselves and provide the leadership, coaching and feedback needed during this time. I was no longer the subject matter expert and had to rely on really smart people on the best approach. My job was to remove barriers and provide tactical and emotional support so they could do their job.
• Pride: The intersection of the humanity on my team with their intellectual property was my single most important tool to get through this challenge. The team had expertise in areas I’d not needed to leverage and since I knew their past and what they’ve done before, I was able to deploy resources based on acknowledging their gifts and put them in the right places for the multiple crises. 

As I cleared the table for my team to address these multiple crises and had to say “stop everything.” But with these compass points in my pocket, they rose to the occasion and we addressed the crisis. Lessons unfolded into the strategic work we were meant to do. We had a few scars from these events, but we came out stronger than before. 

As I assessed the Compass points of “Purpose, Performance and Pride” to set the strategy to navigate these crises, I found myself back on track and could continue forward with the strategic work and lessons learned from these events. 

How do you manage through transformation or a crisis? What hard conversations do you have with your team? Do you have a Compass that with a few course corrections can get you back on track? 

If you don’t have a Compass, let’s book a call.

I’m a Lean Practitioner, so let’s just get to the point… a CEO must strive for “Impact” and not achieving goals. I boil it down to this simple approach, but be ready for your world to be turned upside down. The CEO’s Compass and the North-West point “Performance” will guide you towards Impact. 

• Trust
• Innovate
• Performance

Now, I know you’ve read every leadership book that hits the Amazon Best Seller List and you could probably teach each of these concepts, but let me propose something new to get you to “Think Differently” than most experts.

Trust: 

We talk about building trust, earning trust, trusting others as a way to create high performance teams and my conversation with David Hancock of Morgan James Publishing also talks about trusting yourself and the process.  When Dave and I spoke on Episode 117 of The Drop in CEO podcast where we talked about Trusting “himself” to be a best selling author and Trusting the “timing” of when he was to finally achieve success. Sometimes we muscle past these important elements when these are really the leading indicators of ultimate success. 

Trust yourself – starting from a place of “Self-Trust” is necessary before you can create Trust for your team. Do you believe you have the skills and resources that you can lead your team, with a heavy emphasis on “belief”. If not, don’t move onto the next TIP

Trust timing –  often something we think we can control, but until opportunity meets up with careful preparation, you really can’t control the timing. Trust that the right “time” will show up when it’s ready. 

Balancing the reality that “Trusting yourself” is in your control while “Trusting timing” is not in your control and you can accept this, will you see your ability to impact others to achieve high Performance

Innovate: 

My upcoming conversation with Rochelle Smith of the Daily Social Club on Episode 118 of The Drop in CEO Podcast, we discuss how to pivot her business in Covid and still serve her clients. Rochelle took the high road, gathered her team and found innovative ways via technology to not only provide the social services for her clients, but also engage care-givers in the process.  

Through unplanned innovation, the impact of her business actually grew in the face of crisis. Given this is an example where her business benefited, wouldn’t it be a better model for CEO’s to be constantly innovating to be prepared for when crisis may strike?

Do you include innovation as part of your planned conversations with individuals, teams and your business?

A quick story about myself, I would often get low marks for innovation in my career, but lacked the guidance to know what did innovation look like? Later in my career, when I innovated and tried new things, it was not met with support; simply “that’s nice” and cautioned to make sure I achieved the goals. 

Which leader are you? Heads down to the troops or is it part of daily conversations? You may be missing out to create a culture of innovation and when faced with a crisis, your team does not have the capability to respond. 

Performance: 

In my book to be released later this year, The CEO’s Compass – Getting You Back on Track, I speak about performance, but not in the typical context you would expect. Often we discuss “High Performance Teams” and the dynamic of support & accountability to each other. I get that, but I think there is something missing from creating an “event” vs. a systemic process to align all people up and down the organization towards an outcome. 

As a leader, we have to assure that Purpose and the Strategy to achieve the purpose is understood at the Business, Team and Individual Level. Then at each level, we have to align the Purpose to each individual’s work and how it is connected. During that process, we need to be able to assess the Capability of the people to support the Strategy and where there are gaps, develop those skills.

Case in point – if we say our purpose is to be the supplier of choice through building trusting relationships, that sounds nice, but do your people have those skills at each level? If at the business level, only Customer Service and Sales have the customer relationship skills, but your internal functions have poor customer skills, we’ve not addressed the capability to support your strategy. So Performance needs to be thought about as a system to assure Capabilty exists and where there are gaps, close the gaps. Where purpose is not defined in connection with a job function, close that gap as well. 

I find when we address systemic gaps in Connection & Capability, the Performance comes and we can toss the playbook on building “High Performance Teams”, because it comes with the Performance System you created. 

Now that I have your attention, I want you to pause and reflect and ask yourself these questions:

• Do I Trust myself and the timing to have an “IMPACT” on this organization?
• Do I give myself and the team to Innovate as a daily process and support the development of that capability?
• Do I really focus on the systemic elements of Performance as a daily practice focused on aligning each individual’s contribution to the purpose and closing gaps as part of internal business development?

If you answered “Yes” to all of these questions, you’re on your way to creating an organization that will have “Impact.”

If you answered “No,” let’s have a conversation to see how The CEO’s Compass can get you back on track.