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.
We are excited to share our updated BHAG - We made our BHAG measurable, and it is a result of a significant takeaway from our global Scaling Up coaching work - people flourish when they have a good job. Everything begins with a good job, and the CEOs we partner with share our passion for creating jobs that allow their team to flourish.
Grit is one of the pinnacles of PFD Group’s “Want-To Factor,” a trademarked designation that identifies the ultimate doers of any group. People with high Want-To Factors are the most likely to get things done. Learn more on how to find high Want-To candidates for your business.
The question of what makes a great leader has long been a focus of PFD Group’s coaching and strategic planning services, as great leaders build and leverage great communities. Among other things, a great community can help leaders learn more about themselves, which can help them build and grow better businesses.
When holding your annual planning meeting, you want attendees to focus on the important details of planning your business, with full attention and in a strategic environment conducive to the future-planning process. Last-minute planning of the meeting can result in an unfocused event. We’ve prepared a checklist for your annual planning meeting with tips and strategies to consider in organizing the finer details.
The question of what makes a great leader has long been a focus of PFD Group’s coaching and strategic planning services, as great leaders build and leverage great communities. Among other things, a great community can help leaders learn more about themselves, which can help them build and grow better businesses.
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.
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.
We live in a time that is undoubtedly marked by fear.
There have been several events in recent memory that have instilled a culture of fear in our society – the most recent of which is, as we all know, the emergence of Covid-19 as a global pandemic. Further, in America, we have seen the second economic recession in twelve years, contributing to thirty million unemployment claims filed since mid-March. The fear we feel might well be justified, but it is also disempowering to everyone.
We also all know by now that Covid-19 will be in the history textbooks. While we might want to dwell on the magnitude of the situation, we should also remember that history not only remembers the large, defining events but also the leaders that stepped up to face those challenges and empower others to do the same. We remember the terrible Civil War, but we also remember Abraham Lincoln and Harriet Tubman. We remember segregation, but we also remember Martin Luther King Jr. Despite the hardships and difficulties of their times, we remember incredible leaders like Mohandas Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Nelson Mandela for their bravery and service to others.
Source: The International Churchill Society
One particular leader that inspired us during this time is Winston Churchill. When we talk about an era that is marked by fear and anxiety, a quintessential example is Great Britain during WWII. To the left, you will see the ending of one of Churchill’s most famous speeches – “This Was Their Finest Hour”. Preceding this speech, France was overtaken, and the United States had not joined the War effort yet, essentially leaving Great Britain to fight the Nazi empire alone. As the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Churchill had to stiffen his resolve, to fight, and to inspire his nation to do the same. Eighty years later, this is still widely regarded to be one of the best and most important speeches ever given. Even though we face different circumstances, we decided there was great wisdom to be gleaned from Winston Churchill.
In this era of Covid-19, we asked ourselves, “What can we do, so that someone, one thousand years from now, could say that this was our finest hour?” In our community, we have seen many examples of how people have made this ‘their finest hour’. We see how our healthcare heroes and our frontline essential workers show us every day how to make a difference. We greatly enjoy seeing John Krasinski’s weekly installment of Some Good News, and the positivity that is spread through that. We are inspired by the parades of cars throughout the neighborhoods celebrating our local high school graduates. We know that there is incredible power within communities where people support one other. We wanted to be a part of that movement.
At PFD, we decided to gamify our positive impact. We know the power of Quarterly Themes and how they can strengthen morale, so we decided that our theme this quarter is “Our Finest Hour”. We set a goal for ourselves, even in this time of self-isolation, to positively impact 1,000 lives. We made the visual you see to the right, modeled after WWII propaganda posters to pay homage to our inspiration and to track our progress.
We can coach our clients so they can navigate the uncertainty and make the best possible impact on their employees. We are so blessed to work with a wide range of CEOs that truly care about their teams and their community.
We can rally entrepreneurs in our area to buy meals for our healthcare heroes – both supporting a local business and our healthcare workers
We can support our own team by investing in tools that allow them to work safely from home and encouraging them to practice self-care. The person who is writing this blog post, Emmalee, has asthma, so she is especially grateful for this one.
We can keep our commitments to our summer interns, so that they don’t have their work cancelled like so many other college students.
We can launch a CEO Growth Forum using proven strategy and execution frameworks to create confidence and clarity for entrepreneurs that are navigating an especially challenging portion of history.
We can work intently and creatively to figure out how to hit our revenue targets for this year, so we have the resources to also hit our corporate giving targets to support non-profits that were hit especially hard by the recession.
We can be a voice of positivity and empowerment. This is not to diminish the hardships of our time, but to offer a way forward through this crisis and to support and recognize the ingenuity and spirit of humanity.
Our Quarterly theme printed, so our progress can be tracked & shared
We might facing difficult circumstances that will alter the course of history, but history will also remember the great leaders of our time that rose to the challenges. We want to be among the leaders that step up to face the challenges of Covid-19 and empower others to continue to do well by their community. We know that business can be an incredible platform with which we can transform lives, and we want to be just one company that intentionally creates that impact. We are so incredibly humbled and inspired by the tenacity and altruism of our clients and community, and we are very excited to continue to serve them, no matter what lies ahead.
