Podcast Ep 70 | What's the Difference Between an Operational and Strategic CEO?

Oper­a­tional CEOs focus on the short term hori­zon (1 week to 1 year) and address tac­ti­cal items such as mar­gin, sales and peo­ple performance.

Strate­gic CEOs focus on the long term hori­zon (3 years +) and address inno­va­tion, sales rela­tion­ship health and peo­ple development.

In this episode, we talk about the dif­fer­ences between an oper­a­tional and strate­gic mind­set and how to become a more strate­gic CEO.

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Kevin Lawrence 00:13

Wel­come to the growth whis­pers pod­cast where every­thing we talk about is build­ing endur­ing great com­pa­nies with endur­ing great teams and endur­ing great strat­e­gy. And dur­ing great cash flow, just endur­ing great­ness all around. I’m Kevin Lawrence. I’m here with my co host as I am every week, Brad Giles Brad, how you doing today?

Brad Giles 00:31

I’m doing excel­lent. Thank you. Excel­lent. Just got off an inter­est­ing week, down south, and pumped and ready to go. How are you doing?

Kevin Lawrence 00:44

I’m doing great. I’m just up up up the lake, on some vaca­tion time sur­round­ed by awe­some for­est fires here in there, which has made it very inter­est­ing because we’re in the desert region, but it’s great. And just have some nice time to let the brain cool off. So it’s good.

Brad Giles 01:00

So very clear, what

Kevin Lawrence 01:02

is let’s jump into Our word of the day. And we’ll talk about our top­ic actu­al­ly talk about a top­ic first. So what are we talk­ing about today, Brad? And then we’ll just quick­ly jump into the Word of the Day in and away we go.

Brad Giles 01:10

Yeah, for sure. We are talk­ing about? Are you an oper­a­tional CEO, or a strate­gic CEO? CEO is one role. But are you an oper­a­tional CEO or a strate­gic CEO? So we’re going to talk about the dif­fer­ence and the impact? And actu­al­ly how that can make you feel as a leader? Yeah, it’s

Kevin Lawrence 01:32

awe­some. I love this top­ic. And it’s some­thing we talk about all the time as CEOs grow through dif­fer­ent lev­els. I call it a shift from a low­er­case c CEO, to a cap­i­tal C CEO, which we’ll get into that good. So word of the day or phrase and today, Bri­an, what’s yours?

Brad Giles 01:49

Um, yeah, so it’s kind of in tune with our top­ic today. But it’s about Napoleon Bona­parte. Okay, now, this is not going to take for­ev­er. Napoleon Bona­parte before every bat­tle, he had a thing that he did, he would get onto the horse and secret­ly ride into the ene­my’s camp, under­cov­er and suss out the whole of the ene­my. He be hon­est horse just going through the ene­my’s camp to get where they were at. He did that in every sin­gle bat­tle that he fought except for one, which was Water­loo, which you may or may not know that he lost. Because he had, I think it was Hem­or­rhoids at the time. And could­n’t ride a horse. So yeah, that it’s a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent to the word of the day, but it’s just some­thing that I picked up that was like, Yeah, you’ve got to know your enemy.

Kevin Lawrence 02:45

Yeah, first­hand. I love that. Um, mine is what are you real­ly afraid of. And it was inter­est­ing. We had an expe­ri­ence, they doing a com­bi­na­tion of ropes course we’re kind of up in the tree­tops, climb­ing things, bal­anc­ing on things zipline in between things. And I have a notable fear of heights. But yet, when I’m doing that, I had almost no fear. So it’s inter­est­ing peo­ple take this thing called fear, fear of heights. And it can be a fear of any­thing, any­thing that kind of psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly gets in your way in your work your life. But then when you go on to unpack it, it’s inter­est­ing, because I’m actu­al­ly not afraid of heights. I’m afraid of jump­ing. And I have this impulse to jump and this thing when I do this course, you’re con­nect­ed, so you can’t, so move them, it was a cou­ple times is a bit tense, but gen­er­al­ly not fear­ful. Because it’s it’s not about the heights, it’s basi­cal­ly afraid of myself. Yeah, yes. You know, we come across things all the time, and we learn as coach­es and is it when peo­ple think there’s an issue or a chal­lenge, if you unpack it and dis­sect it down, you often find that there’s some­thing very dif­fer­ent edits. So that was mine. I had that expe­ri­ence again today, of how I actu­al­ly quite enjoyed most of it. And, but it’s because I under­stand what real­ly is at the root of when I’m stunned stand­ing on the edge of a tall build­ing on a short rail­ing. Why that feels very different.

Brad Giles 04:15

Awe­some, awe­some. Let’s so I’m look­ing for­ward to hear­ing you men­tioned these two togeth­er today

Kevin Lawrence 04:20

I know and you know, as I’m, as I’m think­ing about that, you know, it’s actu­al­ly unpack­ing what you might be afraid of, and basi­cal­ly get­ting to know the ene­my. So if the ene­my is fear, you know, and real­ly get­ting to know what it is you can unpack it and make it go away. And that’s what Nepal said. He would go to the ene­my, which would know many peo­ple would fear and real­ly dig in there and fig­ure out what they’re about. Also, then prob­a­bly help them to fig­ure out how to beat them.

Brad Giles 04:48

Awe­some. Okay, so, let’s, let’s get into it. Are you an oper­a­tional CEO, or are you a strate­gic CEO, so maybe we be no one’s gonna want to stay there,

Kevin Lawrence 04:58

then peo­ple are gonna want to stay there strate­gi­cal­ly. This sounds more impressive.

Brad Giles 05:01

I’m sur­prised AJ Don’t you know me? I’m clever. Yeah, clever,

Kevin Lawrence 05:05

say and we all, you know, again, so lis­ten, every­one, every­one real­ly think about a real­i­ty? Are you tru­ly more oper­a­tional or strate­gic sort of router jump in

Brad Giles 05:16

there? That’s okay. There’s a say­ing, which is if you’re so smart, then why are you not hap­py? Yeah. If you’re so smart, then why are you not hap­py? And that real­ly leads into the first part here that we want to talk about, do you believe that you can con­tin­ue in your role for 10 to 20 years? and retain the energy?

Kevin Lawrence 05:43

Yeah, and the effec­tive­ness and just be out­stand­ing? And that’s, it’s a great ques­tion, because a lot of CEOs we talked to get exhaust­ed by what they’re doing. Because it’s hard. It’s not the eas­i­est job in the world. Yeah, it means. And in a lot of cas­es, what hap­pens for some peo­ple is that they’re so bur­dened by their role, and many cas­es, so bur­dened by the oper­a­tional chal­lenges, short­er term oper­a­tional chal­lenges. And when you’re ear­li­er in your career, those are great ways to cut your teeth and get real­ly good and learn and grow. But as you go for­ward, that becomes more, more of a chal­lenge. And some fun ener­gy and main­tain­ing your ener­gy becomes hard for a lot of peo­ple because they feel like they’re car­ry­ing the weight of the com­pa­ny on their shoulders.

Brad Giles 06:30

Yeah, yeah. And it does­n’t need to be that way. As Mel Brooks, the famous Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­er, actor said, it’s good to be king. The good thing about being king is that you get to set the rules. And that’s kind of what we’re say­ing through here. If it is good to be king, if you do get to set the rules, then you’ve just got to under­stand what are the rules that are going to make the dif­fer­ence so that you can con­tin­ue, or at least you feel like if you want­ed to, you could con­tin­ue for the next 10 to 20 years and retain the ener­gy. As you said, so many peo­ple we talked to, they just can’t feel like they can con­tin­ue for a long peri­od of time. And it’s a prob­lem, it does­n’t need to nec­es­sar­i­ly be like that, if it’s not sus­tain­able. And then you can’t build an endur­ing busi­ness. That’s what we’re all about, and what we’re always talk­ing about here,

Kevin Lawrence 07:28

you need that you need to have endurance in order to build an endur­ing busi­ness, because it’s a lot of work. And it’s a chal­lenge. So in that first ques­tion, you know, do you have that, and if you believe you can con­tin­ue to grow, and thrive, and add great val­ue to your orga­ni­za­tion for the next 10 or 20 years, then great, then you are poten­tial­ly more like­ly to be a strate­gic CEO, or you just love it, and you’re set up to be, you know, in your sweet spot all day. And if you’re not, which isn’t the case, for a lot of peo­ple, they’re more oper­a­tional than they want to be. Yeah, and strate­gic car­ries a great men­tal what weight but so does the oper­a­tional side of it. So let’s, you know, and the dis­tinc­tion between an oper­a­tional CEO and a strate­gic CEO. And this is impor­tant that we break it down. And they’re very dif­fer­ent types of CEOs. That’s the dif­fer­ence between when I say as a low­er­case c CEO, it’s almost like a junior CEO, ver­sus and or if you have a small­er busi­ness, if you have a small­er busi­ness, you’re more like­ly to be a low­er­case c CEO. Although he has a small­er busi­ness that you want to get big, you need some of that cap­i­tal, see strate­gic stuff to get there. That’s how you get there. So let’s talk here. So what if we were to draw some dis­tinc­tions between an oper­a­tional and a strate­gic CEO, let’s, let’s look at some of them. And one of them we got here and I’ll start the first one, you can go on to oth­ers or bribe, but it’s the time­frame of the projects they work on. You know, oper­a­tional CEOs are gen­er­al­ly focused, some­times it’s a day or a week or maybe a year. But they’re clos­er to the day, week, month, maybe quar­ter focus on the projects that they work on, the deci­sions that they make, the emails, they respond to, the meet­ings that they’re in. So for exam­ple, we would take, you know, if it was a sales real rev­enue side of the busi­ness, if they were involved in a week­ly meet­ing about key cus­tomers and oppor­tu­ni­ties. That’s more of an oper­a­tional CEO, that’s a week­ly, you know, week­ly meet­ing with a focus prob­a­bly have a few months of when that busi­ness plans, if they’re strate­gic, you know, they’re gonna be focused gen­er­al­ly on stuff that’s about three years plus a lot of the time and there’s no right amount of time. Like it’s, it’s dif­fer­ent for every­one. But they’re going to be look­ing at part­ner­ships. Maybe it’s acqui­si­tions, maybe it’s new prod­ucts that they that are gonna, you know, take the busi­ness in a new direc­tion or new mar­kets, it’s things that will impact the income state­ment or bal­ance sheet in three years ver­sus, you know, day, week or month. That’s the first is time­frame. And we want to be real­ly clear the amount of time that you should be strate­gic ver­sus oper­a­tional. There’s a lot of debate that we can have, there’s no right answer, it depends on you. And it depends on the stage of your busi­ness and your goals. But it should be if you’re want­i­ng it north of 25%, at least for almost for most CEOs. On the strate­gic side, but it could be as high as 70 to 80%. If you’ve real­ly got a mas­sive growth, ambi­tion, and have the right oth­er pieces in place,

Brad Giles 10:46

I love that’s one of in my hum­ble opin­ion, one of the two nuggets of today’s episode, and that is look at your email, look at your meet­ings that you’re hav­ing as a lat­er. Where are your what is the time­frame? Is it a week, a day, a quar­ter? Or is it three years? And now that’s a there’s a bit of speci­fici­ty in there. But I think that Yeah, it’s a real­ly great mea­sure to say, Are you oper­a­tional? Or are you strate­gic now? it you can’t switch it all off and go from tac­ti­cal or oper­a­tional to strate­gic. It takes time. But the more that you work on the strate­gic, the less that you will need to work on the operational.

Kevin Lawrence 11:33

Yeah. So what are some oth­er things? Brad, in your mind? That would be things that would be very dif­fer­ent between an oper­a­tional CEO and a strate­gic CEO?

Brad Giles 11:41

Yeah. So I love this one as well, this is are they focus­ing on grow­ing the mar­gin? Or are they focus­ing on inno­va­tion? So an oper­a­tional CEO, now we’ve spo­ken about gross mar­gin, gross mar­gin is one of our very best friends. Yes. And it, we’ve got a fan­tas­tic episode about that. Gross Mar­gin mat­ters, but, but equal­ly, it is one of the sig­na­tures of an oper­a­tional CEO, the sales man­ag­er should be obsessed with gross mar­gin. But the strate­gic CEO is focused on inno­va­tion. And of course, high­er gross mar­gin will be born of inno­va­tion, ulti­mate­ly, but are you spend­ing your ener­gy, your time more on for on the gross mar­gin or more on the inno­va­tion, so that’s anoth­er, that’s another

Kevin Lawrence 12:46

inno­va­tion is real­ly going to ben­e­fit you. And again, we’ll go back to the three years as a con­cept, it’s going to ben­e­fit you a lot three years down the road or longer. Where that gross mar­gin squeeze or dial­ing in would be a lit­tle more short term. It could be this month, this quar­ter this year. Yep, that’s a great one. Oh, anoth­er one is how they look at peo­ple. And one of the things with peo­ple is that they would be look­ing at out­put or per­for­mance, which is good. And an oper­a­tional CEO would do that and do that. Well. A strate­gic CEO would be look­ing at devel­op­ment, ie enhanc­ing peo­ple where there’s a an invest­ment today that pays off down the road. They also might be look­ing at high lev­el recruit­ment, or attrac­tion strate­gies to get some of the best tal­ent to start to come to the door over the next three to five years,

Brad Giles 13:39

like build­ing a vir­tu­al bench.

Kevin Lawrence 13:41

Exact­ly like build­ing a vir­tu­al bench, which we’ve also done a show on as well. So but real­ly, it’s the lens of peo­ple get them to pro­duce ver­sus build­ing an amaz­ing team that will be able to han­dle four times the oppor­tu­ni­ties in a decade.

Brad Giles 13:57

Yeah, yeah. It’s, it’s inter­est­ing. are you focus­ing on the per­for­mance? I mean, let’s be fair, that is still in tune with the time­frame that we set before, are you focus­ing on peo­ple’s per­for­mance this week, this day, this month, or this quar­ter? Or you focus­ing on the per­for­mance that they will be mak­ing in a year or two or three, again, around devel­op­ment? build­ing out the dif­fer­ence between those. And so what do we got? What do we got for our next item, the dif­fer­ence between an oper­a­tional and a strate­gic CEO?

Kevin Lawrence 14:33

Well, you know, there’s also, it’s basi­cal­ly around sales, like if they’re look­ing at sales, an oper­a­tional CEO is going to look at, you know, the deals that are clos­ing and the pipeline, the pipeline of trans­ac­tions. Now, there are some strate­gic CEOs are going to make a call. I’ve got one strate­gic CEO I’ve worked with for years, on some mas­sive oppor­tu­ni­ties that might drop $10 mil­lion to the bot­tom line. They might be invest­ed in those oppor­tu­ni­ties, that’s a long term deal, they might end up because there’s excep­tions to every­thing. But gen­er­al­ly, the strate­gic CEOs are look­ing at enhanc­ing rela­tion­ships that will pay off in the long term or con­tin­u­ing them. So we’re out on the boat yes­ter­day, actu­al­ly, with a good friend rather chat­ting. And he’s, you would dif­fer­ent title equiv­a­lent to the CEO of a large com­pa­ny, a very large com­pa­ny. And we’re chat­ting about how he spends his time ver­sus how his team spends their time. And he basi­cal­ly talked about how he is build­ing rela­tion­ships with the CEO, and con­tin­ues to talk to the CEO about long term strate­gic things, and that at the right time, oppor­tu­ni­ties end up com­ing from that. And his team focused on a rela­tion­ship with the CFO. Right, it’s more of the tac­ti­cal rela­tion­ship, not com­plete­ly, but you know, it’s it’s still strate­gic, but more on the oper­a­tional end of get­ting the deals done. And he’s focus­ing on the rela­tion­ships with the CEO is because it’s a you know, it’s that CEO to CEO con­ver­sa­tion that brings oppor­tu­ni­ties, and then the rest of the team exe­cutes it. Yeah. But it’s instead of the pipeline, it’s about enhanc­ing rela­tion­ships, that will fill the pipeline for decades, if done right.

Brad Giles 16:19

Yeah. So an inter­est­ing thought around that is, can you have a gen­er­al man­ag­er or a CEO and still be oper­a­tional CEO?

Kevin Lawrence 16:35

No, absolute­ly. Because what hap­pens, and here’s the chal­lenge, what hap­pens is the CEO does­n’t get the cap­i­tal see­ing their title, and they stay oper­a­tional. Yeah. So you can have some­one with the title of CEO, but you may not let them run the busi­ness like they gen­er­al­ly do in there’s dif­fer­ent ver­sions of that title. So there’s one, hav­ing the peo­ple will come to the sum­mit, and we get into the stucks. And the oppor­tu­ni­ties, it’s hav­ing two peo­ple in roles. And then sec­ond­ly, it’s oper­at­ing like that strate­gic CEO and pulling your­self out of the weeds and out of the details. As hard as that not because it’s your com­fort zone, and you’ve been doing it for years.

Brad Giles 17:17

Yeah, yeah. And, and that, and you know, it and you know, once what works, but to our very first point today, maybe it’s not sus­tain­able, maybe the way in which you run the busi­ness, across every­thing on a very short term man­ner, isn’t sus­tain­able. Now, that does­n’t mean it. That does­n’t mean, if you had a CEO who was doing that, well, it would be sus­tain­able for them, it should be okay, it should be sus­tain­able, because they’re not also car­ry­ing the oth­er bur­den that the CEO is. But being able to pull that apart and say, the CEOs role has to be sus­tain­able. There­fore, we want to work in the long term to be more of a strate­gic role, rather than an oper­a­tional role is cer­tain­ly what we’re advo­cat­ing here.

Kevin Lawrence 18:11

So why don’t we Why don’t we dig into what are some of the things that drag a CEO more oper­a­tional, or lift them more strate­gic, like spe­cif­ic things that we have seen. And, and, and I’ll start with one of them, but to also to, and they’re tied, one is the strength of their team. And to give an exam­ple, if they have a team, and if we take a look at lev­els and com­pa­nies and think about a vice pres­i­dent ver­sus a direc­tor, in turn, basi­cal­ly an autonomous leader that can man­age almost any­thing with some­one that still needs help with some deci­sion mak­ing. Gen­er­al­ly, and they’re still ear­li­er in their career, often, not always, what often is, is that they have very strong bite VPS, or what­ev­er title, you want to call it under the CEO, that are strong and actu­al­ly don’t need a lot of care and atten­tion. They need to be sup­port­ive, but they’re account­able. They know their stuff, they deliv­er, and they get stuff done. So what­ev­er it is, hav­ing a team that’s incred­i­bly strong, allows them to not have to get into the weeds. Now, they still may have a prob­lem with that some per­son­al­i­ties do, but they don’t have to be in the weeds as much or as on the oth­er side. So that’s one is a strong enough team. So you have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to and the oth­er side is tak­ing that oppor­tu­ni­ty and pick­ing projects that are about three to five years in the future and work­ing on them like the new facil­i­ty, like the acqui­si­tion strat­e­gy, like the expan­sion into anoth­er mar­ket or inno­va­tion like we’ve talked about, but hav­ing notable amounts of their time on those projects, and then going and meet­ing the part­ners and the ven­dors and every­one around That future state idea that they’re work­ing on. So that, you know, they’re less like­ly to get too much into day to day. But they got so the right team, and then the right prod­ucts, a lit­tle bit of both one sets you up, the oth­er one pulls you.

Brad Giles 20:14

So what was and you know, what I would add to that is, is trust, maybe a lit­tle bit of a dif­fer­ent angle from what you’ve got there. But I would say that trust­ing the peo­ple to do the short­er term stuff, trust­ing your team, I’ve seen it in lead­er­ship teams where, you know, CEOs have been burned, they’ve been burned by, you know, poor per­for­mance or bad sit­u­a­tions, and, and they just, they can’t build up enough trust in their del­e­gates to their team, to be able to com­plete­ly hand over to them to be able to com­plete­ly let them run with and take full respon­si­bil­i­ty. So they can step out of the week or the month or the quar­ter, and spend a lot of their time work­ing on the longer term stuff. And, and so that kind of they get into this, this, this ter­ri­ble loop of that they can’t escape from a ran­dom trust.

Kevin Lawrence 21:21

Yeah, and I would always add, when peo­ple have say the word I need to trust, and I would add the word ver­i­fy, oh, yes, and ver­i­fy it, and which is usu­al­ly you need data and report­ing to be able to do it. And we’ve done oth­er episodes where, you know, doing this is is like being a, this is the shift from a visu­al of a pilot, a visu­al licensed pilots called VFR visu­al flight, where you can fly when you can see where you’re going, ie good weath­er and sun­shine. Yeah, ver­sus instru­ment rat­ed pilot, where you can fly in the dark in the storms. And in a snow­storm when you can’t see a thing or a sand­storm, we can Sand­storm, I’d be more dan­ger­ous. I don’t know if that’s true. But where you can fly with it when you can’t, when your eyes can’t guide you? Yes, it’s not pos­si­ble. And then hav­ing the right report­ing in that it makes a mas­sive dif­fer­ence. And whether it’s on the peo­ple on the process, the finan­cial KPIs, the oper­a­tional KPIs, how peo­ple are doing and bring­ing the strat­e­gy to life in terms of the exe­cu­tion plans, all that stuff real­ly, real­ly makes a dif­fer­ence to Yeah, so and a lot of peo­ple don’t have the right data. And that’s why they have to have their hands in it. And it’s, you know, it goes back to the fate, one of my favorite phras­es, which is man­ag­ing by objec­tive, you know, and the process­es that we set up in com­pa­nies. Every­one has clear oper­a­tional met­rics, finan­cial met­rics, they have cleared quar­ter­ly goals by group and by per­son. It does­n’t take a rock­et sci­en­tist to tell where per­for­mance is and isn’t peo­ple doing the work or the peo­ple that over­see that. But a lot of peo­ple don’t have tight enough sys­tems to make it that way. And then they can be feel, or maybe truth­ful­ly do need to be over involved to make that happen.

Brad Giles 23:05

Yeah. So what can we do about it? What what is it that that lead­ers can do? If they’ve lis­tened to this episode, and iden­ti­fied them­selves as an oper­a­tional CEO, and think, you know, what I actu­al­ly want to induce, I feel as though my role is not one that I can main­tain for a long time, then. And I’m try­ing to find a way to get out maybe rather than sell­ing the busi­ness and idea could be to turn to become a strate­gic CEO. So what can peo­ple do about it? Well, I’ve

Kevin Lawrence 23:43

got a cou­ple. I mean, I’m like you, I’m always work­ing with CEOs on this. And actu­al­ly, most of AI CEOs, we’re work­ing on this to some degree, they’re all at dif­fer­ent lev­els of climb­ing this lad­der towards strate­gic CEO. Because most of want to keep going for the long term. But where we nor­mal­ly start? Is them get­ting clear on real­ly decid­ing that they’re going to do this. And usu­al­ly they’re in enough stress and pain that that’s an easy deci­sion. I go to the team, like I got one that we’re doing this with right now. And he drew me his org chart. And he thought he need­ed to make a change and restruc­ture it. I just as we start­ed going through it, I’m like, well, there’s this per­son in this box here, who isn’t an A play­er who you have all kinds of sto­ries about, who is your you’re drop­ping down and doing part of their job, and we’re gonna go and ver­i­fy the struc­ture. I think his struc­ture is fine. He needs to get an A play­er and a cou­ple of crit­i­cal roles. So he does­n’t have to be as involved as he is. And he’s involved. He’s cre­at­ing work arounds and bridges and hold­ing peo­ple’s hands on stuff that he should­n’t have to be. But he’s kind of you know, the per­son He’s been with a long time he likes them. And he does­n’t real­ize he’s kind of the amount of pain he’s cre­at­ing for him­self in the orga­ni­za­tion. So it’s, you know, make sure you have the right struc­ture and basi­cal­ly sur­round­ed by a play­ers in those key roles. We talk about some of those oth­er projects for him, but until he gets that sta­bi­lized, and get the strength he needs around him, it’ll be very hard for him to the next part, which is my favorite is work­ing on more of those strate­gic projects.

Brad Giles 25:26

Yeah, it’s it’s Jim Collins reverse reac­tion or response to many things, which it’s first peo­ple, you know, first, you got to get the right peo­ple on the bus. And then we can think about the oth­er thing. So yeah, first of all, we’ve got to, we’ve got to have a team of com­pe­tent a play­ers or peo­ple who are good enough to be able to do this, that’s, that’s kind of sets the foun­da­tion, but then start work­ing on the things that are going to carve out more time for your­self. So start think­ing about the longer term things, what is it that you can obvi­ous­ly del­e­gate this, it’s there’s some obvi­ous stuff around there, but begin to work on the things that are long term, the things that are impor­tant and not urgent, and maybe you start off spend­ing three hours a week on that. And then, and then that will begin to free up a bit more time so that in two months or three months, you can go to four hours a week,

Kevin Lawrence 26:33

for sure. Oth­er things, is to stop tak­ing meet­ings that are about short term things, or stop attend­ing meet­ings, that your direct reports should be able to han­dle it one of our CEOs is deeply involved in the strate­gic plan­ning meet­ings. And one of their, their, their deci­sions, is that they’re no longer going to be involved in the group dis­cus­sions. So when peo­ple go off into break­out groups, or indi­vid­ual rooms, when we’re in per­son, they’re just gonna sit and hang out whether they’re in the room with me or go do some­thing else. Because those are oper­a­tional dis­cus­sions. They don’t need to be there. But they’ve been there for all the years, they’ve been run­ning the com­pa­ny. And so there’s there it’s about the meet­ings that you stop attend­ing, or you attend once in a while, and you just sit and lis­ten. Oth­er anoth­er piece, and it’s inter­est­ing. One of these, the hall­marks of the oper­a­tional CEOs is they take a lot of notes in meet­ings. Some­times though, the damn scribe. Some­times I’ve seen the peo­ple run­ning 250 $300 mil­lion busi­ness­es, where the CEO is not­ing down the action items. I mean, they’re real­ly help­ful. But the real oper­a­tional ones have a hard time let­ting go of that. And that’s just, you’re in the way of oth­er peo­ple and let­ting peo­ple han­dle those things them­selves. And again, it’s not it’s, it’s more com­mon than I would think that it would be, espe­cial­ly you know, when and

Brad Giles 28:01

so, but all of those things that you’ve said is about fig­ur­ing out what you need to stop doing. And what I love that one of the scribe because there’s a leader that I work with, you know, let’s say, a greater than $200 mil­lion com­pa­ny, and he’s tak­ing notes at every sin­gle meet­ing. And I just, I just think that that is, you know, your, your time is much bet­ter served. Yeah, but over­all, what we’re say­ing is what he stopped

Kevin Lawrence 28:34

you at that lev­el, you just should­n’t do it? Yeah, that is some­body else’s job. And that’s just an indi­ca­tor of oth­er things you’re hold­ing on to and we do, it’s inter­est­ing. I have one client that I’ve worked with many amaz­ing strate­gic CEOs, but one in par­tic­u­lar. And I remem­ber this amaz­ing CEO would take almost no notes. He might write down, you know, sev­en words in a meet­ing. Yeah. But because every­thing else was up to every­one else. And he would get peo­ple to present. He would ask a whole bunch of ques­tions, a num­ber of ques­tions. And then he would get them to make a rec­om­men­da­tion he need­ed to decide, or ask them to update it, and then come back and see him in a cou­ple weeks. Yeah, but he did­n’t take a strate­gic CEO almost nev­er comes away with any home­work. You not leave, they leave the meet­ing with every­one else hav­ing things to do, but rarely do they have things to do.

Brad Giles 29:31

Also, awe­some. Awe­some. So are you work­ing on things that are three years plus? Or are you work­ing on things that are one week or one month? So let’s move to a quick review of what we’ve spo­ken about here. Real­ly, you an oper­a­tional or a strate­gic CEO? We begin by ask­ing the ques­tion, do you believe that you can con­tin­ue in your role for 10 to 20 years and retain the ener­gy. That’s the big prob­lem that we come across all the time with lead­ers. So, oper­a­tional CEOs focus on short term one week to a quar­ter, maybe even six months or a year, they focus on oper­a­tional CEOs focus on the tac­ti­cal items. And they focus on the mar­gin, they focus on sales on the peo­ple’s per­for­mance, you know, tell us about the strate­gic CEOs, Kevin,

Kevin Lawrence 30:33

strate­gic CEOs are not caught up in the day to day fire­fight­ing in the busi­ness gen­er­al­ly. And they’re look­ing at three years out and inno­va­tion and build­ing long term rela­tion­ships, devel­op­ing peo­ple devel­op­ing new prod­ucts, or mar­kets or alliances or things that just add long term val­ue to the busi­ness. So they’re work­ing three years out, ver­sus work­ing in the fire that there is today. And like he talked about upfront, like Napoleon, you know, rid­ing out to go and assess out the next bat­tle, they still get their first hand infor­ma­tion, they don’t lose con­tact. But they’re think­ing about how do we win long term, not wor­ry­ing about the details of what’s going on. And we did­n’t talk about we’ve kind of talked about, you know, for a lot of peo­ple the shift is when decid­ing you’re going to do this. It’s say­ing no to a whole bunch of short term tac­ti­cal stuff like don’t be the scribe, don’t come away with home­work, oth­er peo­ple are sup­posed to have home­work and not you. And, and, and find­ing ways to build the team that’s so darn strong that you can trust and rely on them, although you ver­i­fy them and that’s usu­al­ly a big gap. Aside from them being con­trol freaks not let­ting go. It’s not hav­ing a strong enough team that can han­dle what tru­ly needs to hap­pen at the scale that they’re at.

Brad Giles 31:44

Awe­some. Well, thank you for lis­ten­ing. This has been the growth whis­pers on Brad Giles. You can find me at evo­lu­tion part​ners​.com​.au and you can find Kevin at Lawrence and co​.com. Again, thanks for lis­ten­ing. We hope you have a great week and can catch up again next week.