Scaling Yourself as a CEO / CxO

They worked for us, and clients like you.  Each is as simple as possible, but no simpler.

The topics are organized into what we consider the three core domains of leadership: Self, Other, Team.  We're glad to share any of these, just as our mentors shared with us.

• Priority & Time Management: Managing energy to achieve the right outcomes
  • Defining the role of the CEO/CxO.  The „You by Four“ for managing self and delegating.  Gaining leverage through delegation and expectation setting.  Finding the appropriate balance between driving and contributing.
• Authentic Leadership: Understanding myself at my best and at my worst
  • Making decisions when there is no right answer.  My values: Lived, Aspirational, and Shadow.  Getting crisp about who I intend to be: my wiser future self.
  • Understanding my superpowers and preferences.  Perspective taking and inflection points in scaling.  Effective listening skills.  
• Building Alliances so others know how to work with and predict you
  • Creating a “User‘s Guide” / Owner‘s Manual.  How to be genuine.  Understanding my personality and style preferences.  Predicting how I impact others.  Leveraging my preferences for communication, decision, alignment.
• Understanding how I am perceived, my blind spots, and my impact on others
  • Getting and acting on 360 feedback from my staff, org, and board.  Taking action to address the areas that are most important.  Modeling self development and transparency.
• Managing Stress in myself and others
  • Tools for awareness before (and in) the moment.  Making better choices in challenging moments - appropriate response.  Mindfulness: micro- and macro-scale practices.  Channeling allies to defeat negativity and doubt.  Creating calm and getting perspective when under stress.

• Leverage and Freedom: the art of commitments and delegation
  • Making clean commitments and creating positive accountability.  Personal scaling via Leverage.  Delegating as a sequence, not an event.  Using the Freedom Scale to Delegate with Insurance.  Using the 5 W‘s to avoid micromanaging and stay at high leverage.
• Situational Leadership: using the right style for every situation to maximize your effectiveness.
  • The primary styles of leadership.  Understanding your go-to/natural styles.  Diagnosing where the other person is.  Flexing to the right style for the situation.  Developing the most effective leadership styles in yourself.  Coaching vs. Leading mindset and skills - how to get others to solve their own problems.  Listening skills for fast thinkers.
• Managing Execution
  • Goal setting that creates „line of sight“ alignment from self to team and company.  What is a balanced scorecard?  The art of creating inspiring goals.  Stretch and commit goals.
• Performance Assessment and Enhancement
  • How to identify and address performance issues early.  Difficult conversations: how to discuss anything without arguing.  Giving direct, effective, and actionable guidance.  Evaluating performance and stretching people: rock stars vs shooting stars.  Career conversations.
• Leading & Mentoring Diverse Leaders
  • Getting the most out of a diverse team.  Understanding and leading those who identify as diverse in your team and your cultures.  Creating psychological safety.  Helping teammates explain themselves and understand each other.
• Designing and Leading your Board
  • What to know about boards.  How to think about board members, meetings, and funding.

• Hiring Excellence
  • What predicts success in a new hire, and what that means for your hiring practices.  How to build a world-class hiring practice.  Metrics and methods for continuous improvement.
• Making Timely, High-Quality Decisions in groups
  • Clear roles and responsibilities in decisions.  Getting commitment to execution without taking forever.  Instances and Patterns in decision-making roles.  Decision Styles and their impact on alignment vs timeliness.  Separating Decisions from Execution.  When to „disagree and commit.“  
• Creating strategic alignment in a team
  • What is alignment?  How do you know whether you have it?  Using the Structural Tension approach to drive commitment and align actions.  
• Leading through Disagreements
  • Avoiding “solo escalations.” Identifying and debugging Triangulation and the Karpman Drama Triangle.  Difficult conversations - modeling and teaching NVC techniques.  
• Designing a high-performance leadership team 
  • What is a team vs a group?  Three measures of a high-performing team.  Setting the 6 essential pre-conditions that predict the majority of a team‘s performance.  The four activities of a team, and structuring agendas to best suit each.  Key differences between teams and executive/CxO teams.
• Getting the Leadership Team to Self-Improve
  • Once you have a team in place, do a “Team 360” where the team evaluates itself and chooses areas to work on together to improve their performance. Help the team build the muscle of continuously improving themselves, as one aspect of a high performing team.
• Creating Culture Intentionally 
  • Setting and reinforcing cultural Norms.  Creating a culture of candor, clean commitments, and Positive Accountability.  Managing culture when people aren‘t in an office.
• Designing your Organization, Talent Reviews, and Implementation
  • What is “organization design?“  Why and when do it?  How to spend your next round of funding on people & practices.  The three stages of needs-based design, talent matching, and implementation.  Cheap and cheerful design by understanding org design patterns.  Why “org designs don‘t fail, org design implementations fail:” what are common mistakes?