Printer Friendly VersionIntelliVen.com is a site for chief executive officers, managing directors, executive directors, and chief administrators; that is, it’s for the person in charge of any organization — no matter how large or small — and those who aspire to hold leadership roles. The work of the one in charge is never finished; the job is 24/7 and comes with a ubiquitous, omnipresent, and incessant sense of accountability to owners, investors, lenders, donors, customers, tax-payers, partners, employees and their families, and the local community. The mantel of responsibility is never unyoked, which may cause physical distress to those not cut out for the role, or the equivalent of a runner’s high to those who are!
The role and specific tasks vary considerably with maturity and scale, but the responsibilities listed below are core to the top job from day-one. 
Despite the clarity afforded by the list, deciding how to spend time hour-by-hour, day-to-day is far from clear for many if not most.
Specifically, many wrestle with whether to get work done themselves or to assign and develop others to perform the functions of their organization in an ever-more systematic, teachable, scalable, predictable, and reliable way. As Michael Gerber puts it in The e-Myth Revisited, it comes down to whether the one in charge wants to “make pizza” or “build a pizza-making business.”
When the person in charge decides to do personally what s/he believes is needed to get work done, no matter how right it seems at the time, s/he should consider the following, all of which can lead to less than optimal results:
- Time spent on a specific thing is time that can’t be spent on something that is more important.
- Everyone else in the organization will refrain from doing what the person in charge does for fear of upstaging or competing; the preferred assumption is that if the top-dog is doing it, they must not need to.
- Others in an organization tend to assume that what the person in charge does is right and correct, so they fail to think critically about it and fail to push back when they should.
The net effect is that the most important thing for the top-person to do does not get done, s/he ends up doing what others can and should do, but now avoid doing, and there is a lack of critical thinking which can lead to poor performance. The organization becomes constrained by its top person in its ability to grow and perform; and that top person might then wonder if s/he should work on being a better manager, or work on being a better leader.
The best figure out that it is not all about them. It is about their organizations and the decision to either manage or lead is a false dichotomy. The simple truth is that the one in charge needs to manage in order to lead and, indeed, can and should manage to lead his/her organization to achieve the stated vision. The top person’s job starts with managing his or her self to lead.
IntelliVen blog posts provide insights for current and aspiring leaders who want to build “pizza-making businesses.” The topics covered here are not from your parents’ textbook or an MBA lecture. What distinguishes this material is that it offers a chance to learn from those who have grown wiser from being in the trenches and who see every mistake and success as yet another opportunity to learn and to grow.
IntelliVen principals have managed to lead in many different businesses and situations. They have paid attention to what worked and what did not work, and why. They have consolidated lessons-learned and tested and tuned key insights that have led to the discovery of some relatively simple, but also hidden, truths about organizations and leaders that, once understood, can help those interested manage to be effective leaders.
The truths are shared in the posts and can change the odds for success in simple yet powerful ways. Current and aspiring leaders are invited to subscribe, read, contemplate, dialogue, develop their own points of view, and ultimately manage to incorporate what makes sense into their own approaches to leadership, both now and as their careers unfold.
Very helpful article. Wish I read it 11 years ago before my first CEO gig!! All Exec Team members of early stage companies on the path to success should read this. Thanks.
I agree with your point that leading can take quite a toll on a person, but done right, can be a source of a natural high. I’m not sure if there’s a right or wrong way to lead, but rather that each leader probably has a way to lead that works best for him/her in a given organization. I think that the first step might be, as you advise in another post, to define how you want to lead and measure your own life, and then align your leadership role and style to your own ‘life space’ so you can gain energy from your leadership role, instead of having it be a “job” that runs your life. I look forward to reading and learning more from your site!
Easy and fun read. Very insightful article – all leaders, managers at big and small companies, should read this blog for continuous reflection.
The comparison of entrepreneurship seizure and entrepreneurship exhilaration is apt. However, there maybe a continuum of different kinds of businesses as it relates to e-seizure, some are more prone to cause e-seizure, namely high start up and fixed costs where the product is expensive and not dynamic. Businesses less likely to cause e-seizure, like consulting, where the fixed cost and start up costs are low and the deliverable is very malleable and does not cost a lot to alter.