We are at the end of our second quarter, 50% through 2023. What a year it's been!
This is designed to share some critical insights and questions to help you grow as a leader and increase your impact as we move into the second half of the year.
The Importance of Personal Life Planning
It’s often easy to ignore your personal life when you begin laying out your quarterly and yearly business goals. It goes without saying that as a leader you are always thinking strategically about your business: you set up benchmarks for success, discuss your goals and plan for the future business that you’d like to grow. While business planning is second nature to many great leaders, personal life planning is often undervalued and ignored.
Personal life planning refers to taking the time to think holistically about your life and set up goals and priorities for each area of your life. Business can be one of those areas, but if you are doing personal life planning, it should not be the only area that you plan around. For example, a significant part of my life is family. When I plan for the future that I am working to build, they are an important aspect of that future. To ensure that I am properly building them into my planning, I have to take time to ask questions such as, “how much time do I want to be spending with my family on a day-to-day basis?” and “what resources do I want to be able to provide my children?”
By asking these questions, I ensure that the work I am doing will help me to build a thriving life and not just a thriving business. Too often, I’ve come across individuals who have built amazing businesses but who, in the process, ignored other aspects of their lives. Personal life planning is a way to ensure that you do not ignore those critical parts of your life.
“You can’t be considered successful in your business life if your home life is in shambles.”
One way to make personal life planning a practice is to create a personal vision for yourself. Above, you will see some images from our team member’s vision boards. If you would like to learn more about vision boarding, and the powerful role it can play in personal life planning, click here.
Another powerful exercise to envision a future that you want to create is to go through what we call the Legacy Vision tool. This tool captures all that you want to be and do on a ten-to-thirty year timeline, and it will ask you to transport yourself into that future and answer questions such as:
Who do you serve with your business? Who do you serve in other areas of your life?
What is your impact? How do you want to be remembered?
How long are you working? How much time do you spend with family and friends? What is your relationship with your family and friends like?
For a complete set of exercises and questions, feel free to download our Legacy Vision Tool. Once you answer the questions and reflect on your future, you will have the information you need to draft a vision for your future. This vision can be one that you create with prose, bullet points or even with diagrams. The point of the vision is to have open space to envision what a thriving life looks like for you.
In Your Corner: Cultivating Leadership Growth with Others
The phrase “It’s lonely at the top” rings painfully true for some of us business leaders. If you are a CEO, you have likely experienced isolation that tends to come with the job. As a CEO, you are responsible for the livelihoods of the people in your entire organization, as well as their families, and your own family. That’s a lot of pressure. Further, if you are not careful, you also might be subject to an echo chamber of your senior leadership team only corroborating your ideas (rather than coming up with novel strategies to reach your goals) – leaving you to solely do the creative work. The point: as CEOs, we can become very isolated and stressed, very quickly. What we need is to develop a network of people around us – people who are in our corner – to confide in, garner creative ideas, invest in, and ultimately give us the confidence and clarity to make decisions in our business.
A good guide for developing such a network is the “Three Cs”: Coach, Cohort, and Community.
The first kind of key relationship in the network you cultivate should be a strategic coach. While we are a biased source with this recommendation, we have seen first-hand the transformation a coach can have on your organization. With professional sports, we would never expect our favorite teams to win games without a good coach. A great coach, like John Wooden, can propel teams to extraordinary success. Such is true with business professionals as professional athletes – a great business coach can act as a trusted guide to propel you to higher levels of success. They can be your confidant, helping to address your challenges by providing an impartial perspective. Further, coaches can bring a deep knowledge of proven tools and execution rhythms as well as reduce stress by helping you to cultivate simplicity in your business.
The second kind of key relationships that we recommend you cultivate is a cohort. For reference, a cohort is a group of people who share the same experiences to mentor one another. They are the people in your corner – who know your experiences (also CEOs), who have a similar mission to you, who will support you in your challenges, and who keep you in check to your moral obligations. They are the people who will share with you openly, so you can learn from them to reach your goals more quickly. In these cohorts, everyone is mutually invested in each other’s growth, and it is a place to gain wisdom and insight from your peers. Modern Psychology and Sociology backs the benefits of these sorts of relationships – terming them “strong ties” – nurturing ourselves and our ability as leaders. Many CEOs participate in cohorts already, calling them mastermind groups.
The third kind of key relationships that we recommend you cultivate is a community. In the context in which we are speaking, a community encapsulates the broader reach into the world that you have – the acquaintances in your network from all over. These connections, per a Sociological and Psychological framework, are termed “weak ties”, and they are valuable because they give you broad access to people and resources that can help you further your mission (and you can do the same for them as well). Essentially, these are the people in your rolodex. These are the people that will welcome you into their neighborhoods, partner with you with their organizations and associations, and create mutually beneficial relationships that allows your impact to have a far reach. These are the people to call upon to source talent, strike deals, and organize philanthropic efforts. With a strong community, you will never have a shortage of people to call upon to solve problems and strategize a better shared future.
With a coach, a cohort, and a community, you will have both the strong personal connections that foster growth, and the access to broader networks (with people and resources) that make your impact possible.
What is my Role as CEO?
As CEO, our roles aren’t necessarily as clearly defined as other senior roles. When we think of other roles, like Chief Financial Officer or Chief Marketing Officer, we have a better idea of what that means. Chief Financial Officers are clearly responsible for the financial health of the organization, making sure that we have plenty of cash, that we aren’t over-leveraging debt, etc, and Chief Marketing Officers control the marketing strategy and execution, using their expertise to understand the tactics that will further awareness and best support the overall brand identity. But what is the Chief “Executive” function? For this role, what we are responsible for, are not as clear-cut. With this lack of clarity, we can find ourselves taking on far too much - not effectively delegating key functions to our team so we can optimize our time with the highest-priority activities.
As CEO, we should rethink our roles to be three things: Chief Vision Officer (CVO), Chief Relationship Officer (CRO), and Chief Mentorship Officer (CMO). What this means is we are in charge of our company’s strategic vision, as well as building a community, relationships, and culture that will allow is to realize that vision.
As the Chief Vision Officer, we are in charge of creating the strategic and creative vision for our companies, and for communicating it throughout the organization and beyond. The best talent out there will want to be a part of something special and something inspiring, and they won’t want to come into an organization that doesn’t have a vision for a better future. Why? They want to be a part of creating that better future. As the CVO, we must consistently be looking at our vision, and allowing our leaders to see themselves in and shape that vision. If you need help clarifying your vision for your company, download your Legacy Vision Tool below.
As the Chief Relationship Officer, we are in charge of creating key relationships in our communities that will propel the company to success. This means not only finding great industry partners and mastermind groups that will help you realize the vision of our company, but to intentionally use your time to give back to the community. The best talent will want to be a part of a company that cares about how they make a difference in the community that immediately surrounds them. Further, this sort of outreach will connect you with amazing people that will help you source your future talent.
As the Chief Mentorship Officer, we are in charge of stewarding a mentoring and learning culture in our organization. This is so critical to talent development, because we want our employees to always be growing and learning, and we must create the culture in which that is valued. We also must take charge to mentor great leaders into their roles and to create opportunities for them to continue growing in their leadership. After all, why should our employees stay if they don’t see themselves professionally growing in their job? The best employees will want to create new challenges for themselves to be able to professionally grow and reap those benefits. Our job is to make sure we challenge our employees with new things to learn, but also give them the support to be able to thrive in that environment.
With these three key roles in mind, we are able to drive forward into the future of our organization while creating a team and culture that supports growth.
Communication: Foundation for Trust
Great communication is a key factor in the success of our clients. In our experience, not only is communication a core value for the PFD team, but we also found it to be a key factor in the success of our clients. We find many CEOs theoretically understand the importance of great communication both internally and externally, however, the execution can be difficult.
Equally, CEOs must communicate with their teams; over-communicating their vision, the core values, where they are focusing, where they are going. It is so important that this type of communication happens regularly. At PFD, we found two tools to be very effective in communicating and aligning our team.
Internal communication is a key factor for team alignment. The first tool that we recommend is a weekly CEO email. This is compiled by the senior leadership team, but edited and sent by the CEO to the entire company on a set schedule every week. Celebrating wins, reinforcing core values, and sharing KPIs can all be populated by the data in Metronome Growth Systems.
The second tool that we found to be very helpful is using growth system software to drive alignment and visibility. In our case, we have had success with Metronome Growth Systems that not only captures the company’s one-page growth plan but it also makes it easy for leaders to update their key initiatives and have awareness of what the rest of the team is working on.
We have found excellent communication to be a key success driver for high growth companies and nurturing the culture as the company grows. This is a core value for the PFD team.