The Role of the Founder/CEO: You Have One Job

Most people have a certain image in their minds when they think of a founder/CEO.

They picture the boss in the corner office, standing behind her desk, gazing out over the city. They imagine someone calling all the shots, and everyone relying on their insight and wisdom — a visionary who is never wrong. They fear being grilled, berated, and guilted into working long hours — inevitable top-down command-and-control.

When startup founders take this approach today, they fail.

The more involved you are with the day-to-day work, the more difficult it will be for you to scale, and the less likely it is that your company will succeed.

As the founder/CEO, you have one job: Look at where you’re spending your time, then fire yourself from that position.

Here’s what I’ve learned that makes this possible:

1. Perform The Role, Then Hire Someone Better

The best founder/CEOs are jacks-of-all-trades.

Their value doesn’t come from doing one single thing exceedingly well. It comes from being able to perform an array of things fairly well, and then having the awareness to find someone better than them to take over those responsibilities — allowing them to move on to the next most-important role and the next most-consequential hire.

2. Hire People to Help you Hire.

If you’re doing this well, you’ll quickly reach the point where the company will outgrow your own ability to “chair hop.”

Instead of filling one role at a time, you’ll be filling three.

3. Bring Top-Down Context, Not Top-Down Decisions

As the founder/CEO, you are in the single position that can see across roles, across skill-sets, across your market, and across your customer base. That is your unfair advantage. You aren’t better than your team, but you certainly have more context than your team. How can you use this to empower them?

I like to picture my org chart upside-down. They don’t report to me. I report to them. What do they need to succeed at their roles? Context to prioritize. Context to make decisions. Context to know when to push for more resources, or when to make-do.

The moment you stay married to any one role, you’ve stopped searching for your next replacement, and the company has begun to stand still.

You never want to be standing still.

All in all, so many founders forget that the ultimate goal is to make themselves completely unnecessary to the day-to-day operations of the company.

The irony of course is, as a founder, you’ll never be completely unnecessary to the business. In constantly trying to “fire yourself” from different roles, the company will continue to grow. As it grows, new responsibilities and challenges will arise, and you’ll have to repeat the process of getting people up to speed all over again.

But that’s the point.

​Source: Jeff Seibert. Read more by clicking at the image below.