CEO Training / The Transition

The Skill That Got You Here Now Gets In The Way

Your deepest competence becomes, in the top role, the most reliable source of your worst habits.

Consider what happens when a former head of operations becomes chief executive. Operations remains the area where they are fastest, most confident and most obviously useful. So when the week gets difficult, that is where they go. They join the scheduling conversation. They notice the inefficiency nobody else has noticed. They are, genuinely, right about it. And in being right, they teach their operations manager that operational decisions are not really theirs, teach the rest of the leadership team that the chief executive has a favourite function, and spend a morning on something worth a fraction of what the same morning spent on the funding model would have been worth.

The tell is comfort. If a piece of work feels satisfying in a way that most of your week does not, examine it. Satisfaction usually means you are in familiar territory, and familiar territory is by definition territory somebody else should now own. This is not a rule against ever touching detail. There are moments when the chief executive must go deep, particularly where safety, money or reputation are exposed. But those moments should be chosen deliberately and announced as temporary, so that the person whose ground you are standing on knows you intend to give it back.

The harder discipline is accepting that the work will now be done worse, at least at first, and letting that stand. A capable specialist watching their old function being run to eighty per cent of their own standard finds this close to physically painful. Yet an organisation in which one person is the ceiling on quality in one function, and unavailable everywhere else, is a smaller organisation than one in which four people run four functions at eighty per cent. The arithmetic favours the second. Believing the arithmetic while watching the eighty per cent happen is most of the transition.