The central question of this post is this: are realism and vision mutually exclusive worldviews for ‘CEOs’?
For the purposes of this post, when I say “CEO” I mean “person in charge/owner”.
This is something I said to a friend of mine after listening to her talk about her work environment:
You should write a book targeted at CEOs but written from the middle.
Fairly tortured, woefully incomplete articulation, so let me try again:
- CEOs are ultimately responsible for a lot – the life of the organization, including its people, its customers, its creditors, its products, its distributors, its retailers, its advertising agency, its … everything.
- CEOs can not possibly know what is happening at every stop along the chain. They can’t know all their employees (in organizations past a certain size), and they can’t meet every customer. They just can’t.
- CEOs sometimes have a disconnect between their vision for a company and what it actually is, the day-to-day running of the organization.
- Often, middle-management is charged with enacting this vision, and frankly, with bringing the vision back down to proportion – to what’s ‘doable’.
- Middle-management sometimes suffers from lack of vision, inability to share the vision, lack of commitment to the vision, or a genuine belief that the vision is not realistic.
- Some CEOs, and not always just CEOs, but presidents of divisions, heads of departments – in other words leaders – find solace and respite from the highwire in mucking about in day-to-day details.
- And some CEOs simply fail to imagine what the world looks like through the eyes of the people who work for them.
So then. There are people in your organization who are senior but not in charge. They are working both angles as hard as they can – trying to foster the CEO’s vision and trying to enact it. They are trying to keep the vision alive while dealing with the realities on the ground. They know people’s names and meet the clients and deal with venders.
They have something to teach CEOs who have become very busy doing very important work, but work that has elevated them out of the day-to-day.
I would like to see a book written by someone in middle management about what vision looks like from the middle. Maybe this is the purpose of that TV show Undercover Boss.
I’m still thinking about this – and what that book would be like, and why I even think it’s a good idea. But I did see this on Seth’s blog:
Product launches, innovations and initiatives by any organization work better when the key people agree on the goal, believe that they can achieve it and that the plan will work.
Do we have a cynicism shortage? Unlikely.
Successful people rarely confuse a can-do attitude with a smart plan. But they realize that one without the other is unlikely to get you very far.
I added the emphasis on “the key people.” I think this is sometimes where things fall down. Who are the key people? Sometimes CEOs think it’s themselves and other people in, for want of a better turn of phrase, their ‘class of service.’ Sometimes they leave out the people who have to make it happen, and the people who have to live with the consequences of the decision. Sometimes this is even the right thing to do – I am not particularly in favor of democratically run commercial enterprises. But when you have internal expertise and you do not assemble these experts, it’s hard to expect people to be enthusiastic and supportive when you forge ahead.
So what would be interesting to me is a little handbook from a smart, committed, insightful middle manager (my friend from the start of this post) for the conscientious CEO who really does want to move forward, together, with his or her people. Of course this middle manager would need to not be an Iago. Maybe it’s a tall order, and maybe it’s not very inspiring sounding, but it feels like a way to keep a CEO grounded in what needs doing, and not what seemed like a good idea at the time.