Nobody wants to be a lousy CEO; the idea of failing your company and yourself can drive people crazy. We want to inspire growth, good work, and excellent results, but many end up pushing their employees away or accidentally causing a cruddy turnover rate. Don’t give your employees an excuse to leave and cost you thousands to hire and train a new person.
Instead, here are the main things to focus on so that you can become the best CEO possible. We interviewed Andrew Miller, the former CEO of Polycom, about what it takes to be a great CEO.
Listen To Your Employees
Your employees are an essential part of your company. Whether they’re creating the products that you expect to change your customers’ lives, or they’re offering services unlike any other business- you owe them your success. Help them be successful by listening to them and investing your time and resources into ensuring they can do good work.
If your employees fall behind or your business stumbles, pay attention to how and what you can do to fix this. Ignoring them and bulldozing over their concerns with micromanaging will doom your business and cost you endless money.
Be Clear and Set Goals
Have a mission statement for your company, and set goals for everyone involved. Don’t make your goals too easy to avoid failure- shoot for the stars and be understanding if you don’t reach them.
Being humble about your goals will lead to complacency and may make you more likely to fail. Andrew Miller succeeds by following through with plans and ensuring everyone else he works with can, as well.
Be Ready For Problems
Don’t be caught by surprise by anything. Please plan for any company missteps or failures so that you’re ready when they happen, or you’re capable of stopping them. You can’t see the future, but you can create guidelines and safety nets so that your company isn’t pulled under by a huge mistake. It would help if you made it clear that you’re working forward in your company, not focusing on what has already happened.
Keep Yourself Informed
Study up on what’s going on in the market and what your customers are saying about your product or service. If you ignore everything and focus on production, you could be doing yourself a significant disservice.
You have to let your opinions and operations be affected by the world they’re in: you don’t run your company in a vacuum. Listening to others could lead to changes that help your company skyrocket, so keep your ears and eyes open.
Look To Your Competition
Although corporate espionage is illegal and we can never know one hundred percent of what our corporate competitors are up to, we can get a good idea based on how they do business. Instead of letting yourself get drawn into the drama caused by ad companies that can generate bad publicity, work to be civil but studious.
If your competitor changes something about their business, you must know why and how. Look to see if this will help their company or how you could exploit it to help your own. Changes are risky; you can benefit if they make a poor decision.
Interesting Related Article: “The direct effect of the CEO’s reputation on a company“