Ged: [00:00:00] A quick flick through this one.
Milan: Yeah.
Ged: It’s funny, I, I, in my mind, we’ve done this one, but I’m happy to do it again. It’s a, or, or, or not. If we haven’t done it, it’s not a big deal.
Milan: Yeah.
Ged: Just one, a similar one that we to, we touched on this as a concept.
Milan: Yeah, I think, I think we probably did. The thing is that, you know, as, as you mentioned it, I was like, I double check three times. So unless did record it and lo Luke lost it, you know, we definitely don’t have that episode. But Ged: Yep.
Milan: I am having a you know, secondary dejavu just because you’re talking about it.
Ged: Mm-hmm.
Milan: Okay. So we recorded even the break, or did you hit pause?
Ged: I can’t pause and Luke likes to leave it running, so, you know Luke can just grab through that. That’s that’s fine.
Milan: Yeah.
Ged: Yeah. Okay. So shall I [00:01:00] intro this and then, then put it to you? ’cause I mean, this is, this is an interesting one. This is, this is framed from the perspective of, of a founder but even when it’s not a founder.
The problem still, or the situation often still occurs. It might not be the founder, it could be, it could be a salaried CEO who just turned it around or got it to a point but couldn’t take it any further.
Milan: Yes. Yeah. It’s from the founder perspective is a bit harder, right? Because they don’t have anybody tell to tell them that they’re, that they suck. You know, they have to have that recollection themselves..
Ged: Yeah.
Milan: So, but you are absolutely right. Like, you know, how do you recognize that? Maybe, maybe a little bit over your head and then you need to make a decision. Either you are going to grow pretty damn quick, right? Get a coach or you know. [00:02:00] Yeah, I think that we have material there, so should be alright. Right.
Ged: Yep. Yeah. We can riff this one. Yeah. Okay. I will lead us in.
A second. My dog’s just coming into the office. He’s,
Milan: Head
Ged: Been successful.
Milan: Your head is so much bigger on the screen than mine, so I have to scroll it to come closer.
Ged: I can move back.
Milan: Just, yeah.
Ged: If I move too far back, I can’t hit the mute button. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Welcome back to podcast. The podcast where Milana and I chat through a card drawn at random from the deck of cards. A deck of cards just like this. So let’s shuffle that deck and see what pops out today.
Milan: And we have a club card. So club [00:03:00] cards are about the mindset and inner game of the CEO, but you know, obviously it doesn’t apply into CEO be because who isn’t the CEO if nothing else, you’re a CEO of your own life. So this really generally applies to everybody. Ged: Now this card’s been written from the perspective of a founder. But I, I, reading through this a while back, I was thinking that this can apply to anyone at any stage in a company’s growth cycle. It’s more the, the situation of what, what do you do when you come to the realization or it’s brought to your attention that maybe you are not the right person to get it to the next level. So talk to us about your, your, your thinking here.
Milan: Me add two
Ged: Hmm.
Milan: Right? It is like you are not the right person for the next step, whatever that is. And you might not be the right person for that yet. [00:04:00] It just means that you need to grow into that role, right? It is about the misalignment of the needs and the capacity, right?
Whether it’s a your maturity level or whether it is your, competency that doesn’t matter. It just means basically that. You are not up for whatever the next challenge is. And the reason why it started from the founder point of view is because for a founder, it’s actually much harder decision or it’s much harder realization because, hey, this is my company.
I should be able to do that. And they do have tendency to live in a denial sometimes for way too long. The advantage of the non founder is that they usually have somebody to tell them, right? Or there is that there is that feedback loop. There is a hopefully [00:05:00] some kind of accountability mechanism that starts raising the flags and say, Hey, maybe not everything is golden in here. Founder will have the tendency more often than not to suffer from a little bit of a tunnel vision and from, Hey, I should be able to do this syndrome without realizing, hey maybe I am not. The right one for this company anymore. And the, the, the trigger is generally that it really stops being fun for them to do you know, what they’re doing.
That’s, you know, the best signal is just to, you know, go to your gut and figure that out.
Ged: What happens when the founder or. The CEO doesn’t see that.
Milan: It will have, have a lot of, sorry. It’s a, it’s a very, very good question. It will show [00:06:00] as massive slew of. Disjointed and seemingly independent signals from the organization, right? You will start seeing turnover EM employees. You will start seeing the company plateauing. You know, maybe the sales are not there.
You will have suddenly a higher mishi rate, right? So many, so many little things just start going wrong. And it’s very, very simple because, you know, the, the CEO does not anymore, whether they see it or not, they do not have the capacity to hold it all together.
Ged: Yeah, well, I, it was a bit of a leading question ’cause I, I have a experience of this situation directly myself. A few years ago I was, I was asked by a board to spend some time with the CEO of a company that was going through exactly the symptoms you’ve outlined. [00:07:00] And the CEO didn’t wanna meet with me.
You know, he kept on canceling meetings. You know, it was probably about three or four months after the board had asked him to meet with me that we actually finally got to meet. And he was very defensive. He was wasn’t prepared to sort, you know, share any information. And it was clear to me that the call was going nowhere.
So the question I put to him is, do you know why the board has asked us to meet? And he looked at me and without a hint of iron, he said, I have no idea. So I said, well, maybe you should go and ask them.
Milan: Yes,
Ged: And do you, do you think he did? No, he didn’t. And within the month he was gone
Milan: Yeah.
Ged: Because he wasn’t reading the signals that the board was clearly giving him.
He wasn’t taking up the opportunity that the board had given him to speak to [00:08:00] someone to maybe get a different perspective or maybe get some help or maybe help him see what he was not able to see himself, you know? So he was given the opportunity of having a blind spot remover, and he didn’t take the opportunity
Milan: Mm-hmm. That was even bigger blind spot then, you know, had big enough blind spots to cover the fact that he had blind spots. Ged: Well when his blind spots ended up in him getting blindsided.
Milan: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. What I usually see is that I would talk to a founder, CEO and they would just be tired, right? They would just be done or they would be desperate in, in some way. The, the, the core of the [00:09:00] situation is that they got to where they are a sheer will and talent and their natural abilities. But it takes you only so far in
Ged: Yeah.
Milan: Organization growth. And either at that point you decide, alright this is okay. Meaning I want a lifestyle company that is going to take this and this is how we’re going to go. And that’s fine. And you know, I will never, ever, ever criticize somebody for doing that because again, the company is there to serve their life, not the other way around. But putting that aside, if they want the company to grow, if the ambition is there to take it somewhere, you know, if their BHC is, you know, still pretty far out, then really it comes to those two decisions, right? Either. Okay. I have to now. Stop being just the founder. I need to really transform myself into a [00:10:00] leader, or I will need to find a leader to do that for me.
And therefore I need to leave. And leave doesn’t mean necessarily to leave the company, it just means to leave that particular position. Right. I’ve seen that, you know, people would go to non-executive roles on the board. People would go to, Hey, I’m just really good at the technical stuff and so I’ll stay the CTO or, you know, whatever, you know, whatever that is. Assuming obviously that they’re the right fit for that position. ’cause I’ve, I’ve seen even that happening when people would create a position for themselves that they also were not the best fit for. That is also dangerous. So some blind spot remover and somebody, you know, having a conversation with and figuring out what that path is for that organization and for that leader or for that founder is is quite critical because. Again, you know, the, the blind spots are part of the game here. And know, tunnel vision is is [00:11:00] definitely a massively massive re common symptom.
Ged: So, so there’s the realization that maybe they’re not the right person to get it to the next level. So the choice then is, okay, I can bring someone in and I can then either leave the role or leave the company. You know, either of those are, are options. But you mentioned earlier on, you know, sometimes it’s a, it’s a fact that they’re not ready yet.
And, and I’ve seen the situation where the CEO. Realized that he wasn’t gonna get the companies to the next level. So he stepped out into his sort of, you know, innovator role brought in a new CEO. They then worked together as sort of, you know you know, a visionary integrator type of a relationship. And then three and a bit years later, about three and a half years later, when the CEO left, he then stepped back into the CEO role. But he’d had three and a half years of watching [00:12:00] someone else be the CEO, and he’d learn from that. He’d learnt to the point where he’d now elevated his capabilities, elevated his competencies, so we could lead the new company as it was at that point in time.
So it doesn’t mean you’re stepping out forever now. Sometimes you might, but you don’t have to. It could be just for now.
Milan: Or it just means, okay, you have to accelerate your learning journey. You
Ged: Yep. Mm-hmm.
Milan: Can we say that here? Get a coach,
Ged: Mm-hmm.
Milan: Help you, somebody to accelerate the growth because, you know, often, the area of misalignment is not necessarily the whole role. It might be just a part that needs to be managed, and it may be just change in a mindset that needs to happen.
And sometimes I see turnarounds like that done within a quarter. Right, because it’s literally just about realization, okay, this is how we need to go about it. And you know, quite often what you just mentioned, [00:13:00] meaning finding the integrator, right? Because I would that most founder CEOs are probably a little farther on the visionary scale because if they weren’t, they would not have the idea to, you know, to get things going in the first place.
They have to have some kind of vision. So very often the, this. Type of emotional burnout with the business that we see as a flag is the part that they just really need somebody to compliment them, right? We talked about the, in the time audit episode we were talking about, you know, the things that give you joy and drain or energy and, you know, we all know that burnout is not necessarily there because of too much work is there because of there is too much of the wrong work. So quite often it’s about redistribution of accountabilities. It’s about teaching them or, you know, learning from the from the leader’s perspective to actually rely on their team better. You know, stop being the bottleneck in the [00:14:00] organization. Having a or building a leadership team that will execute even when they’re not there, and so on and so on.
You know, all of those things that we talk about in different episodes and write in different cards. You know, the mix is different for everybody, but. If they want to say, okay, I want to actually stay, I want to see this true and as a decision point means that, hey, that means that you will need to change your behavior. Right.
Ged: It’s about, it’s about having the self-awareness.
Milan: Exactly, exactly. So, and that’s, you know, that’s where we come in, right? We’ll help them and we’ll coach in that behavioral change because it’s all what we are doing right? We want to get rid of some habits, we want to install new ones, and, we need to change the way we act so we get a different results.
Ged: Yep. Mm-hmm.[00:15:00]
Milan: Okay. I guess, yeah, as you were talking about it, Laura, I said, yes, we’ve had this conversation before exactly this one. Like, where did that come from? So, I, I don’t know,
Ged: Yeah.
Milan: In a different episode. Well,
Ged: Yeah. Yeah.
Milan: It’s buried
Ged: Well, and I, even if we published with this one twice, the chances of anyone actually picking it up are pretty, pretty slim.
Milan: And even if they do, we can also refer back to the repetition is good episode.
Ged: Absolutely. Yeah.
Milan: Okay.
Ged: Just do a couple of call to actions and then we can do the the intra, well, the,
Milan: I
Ged: What do we, what do we talk about?
Milan: The call to action and then we can do a couple of extra call to action. But, but we’ve already done those, you know has a few, so Ged: Okay. Okay. If you don’t think we need the cause of actions, that’s fine. Yeah.
Milan: Yeah, let’s
Ged: Yep.
Milan: Just do a outro with a call to action this time. That’s all
Ged: Okay. [00:16:00] Yep,
Milan: You wanna start.
Ged: Yep. Yep.
In the next episode, we are talking about the card lead or leave which is a tricky one for founders who don’t necessarily have the self-awareness to recognize when they’re not the right person to take the company to the next level. So, Milan, this was a relatively long episode. What do we talk about in this one?
Milan: It was interesting, right? Because you called out that this is not just a founder issue, that quite often it happens at different levels and you are absolutely, you are absolutely right. It’s just that for founders, it’s particularly hard, to deal with this. And we were talking about, hey, how to recognize, how to pick up the signs. What are the you know, that this might be happening and what are the. Potential. Is the potential fallout of the situation if it doesn’t get handled? And then we were talking about [00:17:00] the different ways of how to handle it and how to possibly get help to navigate through that change and through that decision.
Right.
Ged: So some real gems in that episode. In, in this episode. And if you’re enjoying these episodes, don’t forget to like and subscribe and hit that notification bell so you get informed of future episodes as they drop.
Milan: Okay. So we’re good for the day three
Ged: Yeah, let me,
Milan: That buys us a little bit of time.
Ged: Yep. Mm-hmm.
Milan: Hit kill. Kill the recording.
Ged: I will kill the recording and let’s see how the upload is going
