CEO’s also have to be detail oriented. What looks like a detail on their radar is an entire department with employees, budgets, forecasts, products, services, customers, clients, vendors, and everything else.
I’m not a CEO. I’m more like a project manager. Even in my limited world of business, I’ve made mistakes that cost, let’s say, days for employees to correct. The higher you get in the hierarchy, the more likely that a detail – or what appears to be a detail from your perspective – will have larger consequences.
One approach is to make sure the CEO is detail oriented, that whoever’s driving the ship makes as few mistakes as possible on ever level of minutia. And of course that is what we do, or try to do. But doing that, by itself, seems like it’s betting on people, instead of setting up a system to make it difficult people to fail.
It seems to me that a more solid approach would be to hire someone else who can take the CEO’s details and make them their priority. In fact, that’s exactly what you see. CEO’s surround themselves with a team of people who help them manage the various details in their work. On the super granular side, an executive assistant schedules meetings, takes inbound phone calls, and so forth. On the higher level side, a CFO might manage the entire financial side of the business, further delegating out the details to others who can make them a priority.
What I’m getting at is that there’s often this sense that if I’m missing details, it’s my fault. Ultimately, it is. But there’s more to it if I want to fix it. It’s not just a matter of buckling down. That’s just setting myself up to fail. It’s more a matter of putting a system in place so someone else can make my details their priority: delegating.
What technology has allowed us to do is make a machine responsible for keeping those details its priority. For instance, one detail most of us have to address is how to get up on time each day. Most people use an alarm clock. The alarm clock’s sole responsibility is to sound an alarm at a given time each morning to alert us to get up. It’s a detail for us, but it’s the alarm clock’s priority.
I’m not a CEO. I don’t usually have the option to recruit a whole team of people to handle one or two of my details. What I do have, though, is technology. When I can use technology to manage as many of my details as possible, it puts me in a better spot to focus on my priority.
