Do You Need To Be Great At Everything As CEO?
You have to be good at a lot of different things when you're the CEO. But do you need to be great at everything to be successful?
Hardly! I'll debunk this myth and explain a much better way to run your company in this short video.
Read The Video Transcript Below:
Here's a great question. As the CEO of a company, do you have to be great at everything? Do you have to be great at sales and marketing and engineering and finance?
And the answer is no, you don't, But here's what you do have to be great at.
You have to be great at hiring great people in each of these disciplines.
That's what you have to be great at. If you're not able to hire. if you're not able to recruit. If you're not able to build an organization of really good people, then your chances of success go way down.
I'm going to tell you a story about a company that I was involved in, kind of peripherally, where a board member of my company, his company, essentially the team that he had built wasn't really strong, and it slowed him down every step of the way.
And if I've seen one thing consistently in working with entrepreneurs, it's that eventually you can only scale so much if you don't have a great team around you.
So yes, you can be great at a lot of different things, but you need a great team around you because eventually you're going to run out of bandwidth.
So you need to be able to hire great engineers, great sales people, great marketing people, great finance people, all the way through the life of your company to scale. It's that simple.
So what should you be good at? Figuring out how to hire really good people.
Now, how do you hire really good people? Well, you start with your network. And if you can find people that are in your network that you know, that's great because you've reduced your risk when you found people inside of your network, and if you can't find people inside of your network use LinkedIn.
It's a great recruiting tool. I use it all the time and it works really, really well. So I would use LinkedIn as a second bet, Third recruiters. But I would prefer not to use recruiters because every step away you get from your network increases risk.
So your mission is to reduce risk. Hire really strong people. Now, when you're looking for your people, look for people that are smart, expert in what they do, ideally fanatical about what you're doing. That would be great if you can find that. And maybe most important of all, are cultural fits for your company.
Don't hire people that are what I call brilliant jerks. In other words, really smart people that are great, but have so much baggage attached with them that the last thing you want to do is have them as your part of your team. And worse yet, nobody on your team wants to work with them either. Remember that. I'm Brett at www.brettjfox.com. Have a great, great day. Thank you.