Promote Yourself to CEO

Polish the skills and capabilities you need to boost your growth, profitability, and ease of operation

Michael Van Horn 
#5 in the series

The more your company grows, the harder it can be to grow yet further. Why? Because the management practices and habits that worked when your company was smaller are no longer adequate.

You might be the main bottleneck. You may not be “presidential” enough in your management style. You must “promote yourself to CEO”—that is, focus on executive responsibilities and be less of a floor manager and worker.

Easier said than done! While you are trying to keep your focus on the entire forest, many things conspire to keep you stuck in the trees and underbrush.

The exercises in this book will help you upgrade your management style, management practices and management structure—for yourself and for your key people—so that you can take your company where you want it to go.

Topics covered

  • How not to manage a growing business

  • Turn ‘em loose vs. hold ‘em tight. Laissez faire vs. micro-manager

  • The ladder of executive capabilities

  • There can be no empty rungs on the ladder

  • How do you interact with your managers?

  • Job description of a successful CEO

  • Building your growth team

  • Play to your strengths, compensate for your weaknesses

  • Rate your skills and your company’s capabilities

  • The management grid: how to get things off your job description

  • Organization charts for dysfunctional companies—and for successful ones

  • The “Everyone reports to me” syndrome

  • Breaking through plateaus, bottlenecks, and barriers

  • How to upgrade your own skills (Skills are closely linked to attitudes.)

  • How to manage the expert

  • Create development programs for your key people. “Don’t build your company’s growth around the limitations of your employees.”

Warm up exercise

From the workbook

How Not to Manage a Growing Business

Do any of these apply to you?

You are a worker/manager You are so close to the other workers that you find it difficult to manage them properly, and to give correction when needed. You are so busy doing the work, you don't have time to focus on management and strategic issues.

  • Fire starter.

    You are always coming up with new projects, often with overlapping and conflicting demands on your people. Employees have difficulty setting priorities and following things through to completion, because there is always a new thing which must be done right now.

  • Open door.

    Your door is always open; accessibility is a virtue. Your tacit message is, “I let everyone else set my agenda.” So it's hard for you to focus on things that require concentrated attention—financial analysis, planning, creating new materials, writing. 

  • The business is moi.

    Your actions say that you are the only one who really matters in the business. All the others are appendages. You are afraid that if you rely on your people, they will let you down. The burden this places on you is inexorably wearing you down.

  • One big family.

    You don’t think you need job descriptions or tracking systems. You want to avoid the image of a numbers-driven, impersonal business.

    Turn ‘em loose vs. Hold ‘em tight

  • Laissez-faire manager.

    You hire a good person, then turn them loose and expect them to learn their own job. You give them inadequate guidance, training, and feedback. They feel frustrated, thwarted, and impatient. You feel that they’re not doing the job. They begin circulating their résumé.

  • Micromanager.

    You hire good people, but then never let them do their jobs. Instead of giving enough responsibility and authority, you look over their shoulders and second-guess them. You allow other people—both employees and customers—to go around them and come to you.

    Strong workers and managers thus give up taking initiative, and ask you every little thing. You make decisions and solve problems that they should handle. Then you wonder why they don’t take any initiative, and why you are still overworked.

  • From one to the other.

    You may employ both these styles by vacillating between giving people too much freedom and too much guidance. After ignoring them for a while, you come down hard on them when they make mistakes, and micro-manage for a while.

    You allow things to build up—perhaps for a whole year—then dump all your gripes on them at once. No wonder you hate doing performance reviews! From the employee’s perspective, this is the worst manager.