Summary: Your venture isn’t great if it isn’t great without you. As the CEO, you may be the driving force of your company that keeps your company afloat. We don’t want your venture to be too dependent on you. Hence, you have to not just delegate tasks–you have to develop people.
To develop people, you have to install the company’s DNA to all your people so you can attain a shared purpose that will guide, automate, and self-correct the decisions from the executives to the operational legs.
Most CEO’s just delegate–they throw tasks to different departments expecting execution to be perfect. This becomes a growing problem since the “boss” expects the operational leg to just do it, even without the right training and competency at hand.
Companies usually hire with over-the-fence competence standards, decades of experience, multiple international credits, and proven expertise in the hopes that when these new hires enter on day 1, they can just throw tasks and get it done. This is one of the reasons why principle-wise, the Philippines is lagging in venture development. We hire talent, not people fit for the company’s development.
This problem is caused by failure in organizational design. Where: 1.) the company doesn’t know its purpose (therefore it does not have a shared, attained DNA that resonates from all legs of the venture from the operators to the executives); 2.) the company did not develop a culture (therefore it does not have a unified way to behave, and it does not know how to move as a collective).
As the leaders of the company, this is the CEO’s jurisdiction. This problem roots from the common misconception that the CEO as the chairman and the leader must “delegate better” and choose the right people for each task. However, at CEO Insights Asia, you’re not meant to be either. You aren’t just a chairman, you aren’t just a leader, you’re meant to be a facilitator.
Your venture isn’t great if it isn’t great without you
Take yourself out of the picture. Say, get a 30-day break out of nowhere, and let your company run itself. Let the other executives decide, let the managers delegate, let the movers operate. When you get back from your 30-day break, do you think you’d still have a company to get back to?
A venture isn’t great, if it isn’t great without you. If it’s great now with you, it doesn’t mean that your company is great, you are. Those are two different things, it means, you’re the one carrying the back of the company–which is the best indicator that you have to shift from being a “leader” and “chairman” to become a facilitator.
The Facilitator Role
The difference between those two is that the facilitator does not just delegate, they develop. As facilitators, we develop three important skills: 1.) soft skill, 2.) hard skill, and 3.) DNA skill. The third one, is always the most important and often the most overlooked part–you have to install your organization’s DNA to your people, so you can align, agree, and hold each other accountable to other metrics that you would want to reach.
Your organization’s DNA is your purpose which applies to all people from the operators to the executives, to the board. For our venture development firm our DNA is this–we build legacies by scaling ventures 100x through strategic management services. Ask anyone from the firm, and they would repeat the same thing.
It is important that attainment is reached from the DNA first, as we cannot multiply and scale if the fundamentals is not attained. If everyone from your organization cannot grasp the same purpose, you cannot maximize the way you operate because there is an outlier that does not share the purpose and the vision of the company.
Think about it this way, you’re a collective of say, 25 people pulling your side of a rope to win the tug-o-war of business. You lose so much opportunities if 5 people do not know where to pull (i.e., they’re pulling in the wrong direction), and you lose so much power and morale if 20 people do not know why they’re even pulling (i.e., they are not driven to pull).
As the CEO, it is your job to facilitate the installment of your company’s DNA from the executives and all operational legs of your venture. This attained, and shared vibrating and pulsating DNA–an unforgiving, undying, and uncompromising one–is what makes great ventures.
At our firm–Balangkas Ventures–the first and only venture development firm in the PH and Asia, all of us are called DEVelopers. The word is even etched into our core values–DEVs–we are all Driven, Evolving, Visionaries who build for legacy.
Summary
As there’s a genius, and there’s a genius maker–and those two roles are of different competencies–the goal for every CEO is to multiply. Good CEOs cannot be great if they do not develop the right people to run and manage their ventures. Hence, it is important that even as Chief Executives–people who manage execution from the top down of the company–we must not only delegate tasks; rather, we must develop people to be able to execute and achieve greater heights.
To develop our people, we: 1.) infuse the DNA, 2.) install culture, 3.) improve competence, and 4.) mentor. As facilitators, we are meant to lead the people-development component of our ventures. A CEO self-actualizes when they have successfully developed their people to operate fully without them.
