Hey look, it’s a CEO! He has a suit coat on, he must know what he’s doing!
Hey look, also a CEO? Weird, this guy runs a company? Who the hell put this guy in charge?
When you get into running a startup, you realize VERY quickly that a whole bunch of people are going to expect you to have answers. How are we going to make money? Where should we spend the money we have? Can I get a promotion? What should we pay this new hire? Do we want to spend a big chunk of money on this risky endeavor?
So all of a sudden you find yourself providing answers to all of these types of questions, whether you feel qualified to answer or not. No one ever says to you “Hey CEO, do you feel like you have any idea what you’re doing?”
Crazy right? People sign contracts with you to pay you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in business deals. Investors hand over checks for millions of dollars. Employees sign on to work at the company. Yet, no one ever asks if this newly minted CEO has a clue what to do with the new found investment, business opportunities and employees. I get a feeling it’s because most people know that the answer wouldn’t be very hopeful.
I’ve worked a ton of jobs in my career. Delivered newspapers, waited tables, cook, theatre production, actor, writer, safety professional, environmental guru and then CEO. Somewhere in my brain I always knew that you do a lot of the learning on the job. No matter what career you choose you don’t get to be fully prepared before you start. Yet with the job of CEO, that’s true to an incredible degree. Each decision you make ripples to so many people. It affects people’s abilities to feed their family and have a future. You no longer screw up and lose an account and it just gets you bummed. You screw up and lose an account and people literally lose jobs. They can’t feed their family.
I don’t have a super long post this week where I feel the need to dive really deep with a long winding story. This was just something that I’ve been thinking about and wanted to share. I think we feel alone sometimes, lost as a leader who is expected to know what to do. And sometimes we don’t know.
Hopefully hearing that other people, too, feel lost in knowing what to do at their jobs will help take a little bit of the weight off. I can tell you there were many times as a CEO where I just stared at the wall and I had no clue what to do next. There were no instructions.
And it turns out that was ok. I figured it out and we kept trucking along.
How about you? Have you had those moments at your job where you felt completely unqualified and unsure how to proceed? Comment below so others can see that they aren’t alone in this feeling.
Most of us CEO's Have No Idea What We're Doing
Sometimes the hard reality of being a CEO or in charge of anything is making the best decision out of a bunch of bad choices. It's a hard skill to develop and hard to swallow for some people in the long term. Definitely not alone!