About a year ago, I went to see a golf coach. He changed my swing so radically that I no longer knew what I was trying to do, let alone execute it.
So, taking a cue from the DIY millennials, I went to YouTube, picked the pro whose swing I liked the most (Justin Rose, for those who might be wondering) and rebuilt my swing on my own over the past year (which now works very well I’m happy to report!).
Along that journey, I came to know that there were three simple but crucial swing keys that I didn’t know about, despite having played golf my whole life. Any one of them is critical to a good golf swing, and I was 0 out of 3.
I find business leaders to be quite earnest about their growth. Very few aren’t trying something, and certainly no-one is falling behind intentionally.
But the truth is that the curriculum a leader has to now build is very, very large. It is impossible to have everything covered such is the fluid nature of the business landscape that requires constant reassessment and reinvention.
Which then begs the question: What don’t you have?
My experience of CEOs and business leaders answering this question is that their answers are not well enough interrogated, and it puts them in a compromised position. Often, this is not even a question that has been pondered, so this moment might be a good opportunity to be more rigorous about this.
The thinking sequence needs to go like this:
- What does my business strategy need me to do proficiently in order to drive it?
- What are the natural leadership gifts that I want to leverage?
- What are the 3 competencies that I need to be excellent at?
- How do I build these competencies?
- Where are my gaps that need to be mitigated by other people?
Let me highlight Point 4: How do I build these competencies, as this is where the rubber hits the road.
Such is the broad nature of a CEO or executive leader’s skill set, it’s unlikely that a one-stop-shop approach will work. Rather, what this requires is more of a DIY approach where your deficit is attended to through a variety of channels: a coach, an advisor, a mentor, a course or two, or some personal research. It’s not an ideal answer, but this is the reality of high-sophisitication CEO skills: they are not buy-off-the-shelf kinds of things.
Seeking out your deficit is something of a mirror in that it will reveal your level of hunger for the role. My hope is that the fire of ambition and purpose burns brightly enough in you to elicit a positive reaction to the recognition of a deficit.