CEOs don't have to be perfect
They have to get the job done.
When I speak to founder CEOs considering stepping down from their position, they almost always point to some aspect of their job that they’re struggling with and use it as an excuse to consider resigning.
Yet, when I reflect on my own experience as founder and CEO of Makers, most things I worried about doing “wrong” simply didn’t matter in hindsight.
If you’re a CEO, your job is not to be great at everything. Your job is to get the job done, that is, build a successful company. You don’t have to be great or even good at everything to succeed at your job.
A CEO has an incredible advantage over all other roles because they can design their job around themselves, and the organisation will adapt, within reason.
There are few hard and fast rules about how a CEO should operate. My go-to framework is from Fred Wilson. The CEO has three jobs:
Hold the vision
Build a team
Give the team resources to deliver the vision
It would be tough to drop any of these. But the rest is for you to define.
Working with different startup CEOs over the years, I saw how incredibly different everyone is. Some work seven days a week. Some never do more than five. Some are always in the office. Others roam from country to country, working remotely. Some are in back-to-back meetings. Others have about three meetings a week. Some are drowning in work. Others work, maybe, 25 hours a week, if not less, leading successful, growing, VC-backed organisations.
As a CEO, you have incredible freedom to make the role work for you. While it may be unfair to the rest of the team to apply special rules to the CEO, on occasion, it may be warranted because the cost and risks of changing a CEO are too high.
Startup CEOs would often benefit from focusing on their strengths instead of working harder on their weaknesses. Jonathan Lerner, a partner at Smedvig Ventures, and I discussed this in Episode 4 of the Startup CEO Succession podcast.
What are your superpowers? What are you doing better than anyone else in the organisation, including your co-founders? Where is your zone of genius? Know it and lean into it. Know yourself and trust yourself to be yourself.
If you are brilliant at something that truly matters for your business, the business will adapt to your weaknesses1. When it comes to being a startup CEO, it’s better to be brilliant at some things that genuinely matter than merely good at everything.
So, if you’re a CEO feeling like you’re not great at something you’re “supposed” to be great at, maybe it doesn’t matter2.
Your job as a CEO is not to be perfect. Your job is to get the job done.
That’s not the case for most other jobs. Most other people would get fired faster than the organisation adapts to them in a significant way.
Well, sometimes it does, as Jonathan says in the video above. It’s worth looking into it carefully before jumping to conclusions.