Treat Everyone Like The CEO?
After a week vacation/Thanksgiving break where I only sent one email, I read an HBR article called The Leaders Calendar that explores questions around use of time in the CEO job. A key quote that inspired this blog post was:
CEO time allocation, then, is not simply a matter of what happens in meetings and decision-making processes. It reflects the far broader set of ways in which the CEO as an individual engages with the organization and its people.
This blog is written to both school teachers+leaders and folks working in corporations like myself.
My Experiences
Currently I have little to no qualifications to be a CEO, but I’ve been fortunate to have interacted with the leaders of previous respective organizations. Specifically, when I was in student government at Fresno Pacific University, I interacted quite a bit with the President of the University and other high level deans and served on committees dealing with hundreds of thousands of dollars as a 20 year old. At ACT, I’ve been fortunate to have been in a number of meetings and even given several presentations directly to Marten Roorda, the CEO. As my role has changed at ACT — first as an external presence coming from OpenEd, then within the enterprise software machine, and now in a new department — I’ve seen various parts of the company. I would say my perspective of “what is effective” has changed with each move. Personally, I’ve genuinely always feel like the work I do matters for both the present and future of the company/organization and the education sector as a whole — but I also know not everyone everywhere does. Why not?
Analysis
The observations in this blog post are comprised from my time at Fresno Pacific University as a student body Vice President who also served on university-wide committees, Fresno Unified School District where I was a teacher-leader and Teacher on Special Assignment for a District-wide project, OpenEd as a contractor then leadership team member, and ACT where I have had a variety of roles. The chart belows attempts to summarize how I’ve felt empowered and in control of my time in various stages of employment.
What struck me about the aforementioned article was how the way a CEO spends their time is not that different from a traditional product manager (which I am now). Mostly you make decisions and set strategy and then constantly am in meetings to affirm that strategy and help move things along to help get things done. If anything, as I was reading it I felt constrained a bit… if the CEO has good ideas of their own they almost can’t just say “this is a great idea we should do this,” — because then the talk of micromanagement may occur etc; the idea would have to be handed off to someone else that will probably be less passionate about it.
Action Items
What if every workers time was treated as if it is as valuable as the CEO’s. Would there be weekly meetings called without clear agendas? Would time be wasted for a meeting that ends, “well I’ll send it up the chain to get a decision…”. Of course the answer is no.
There has to be people doing the actual work — whether it’s teaching the kids, making the test items, creating the curricular resources etc — but those folks time should be treated like it’s the CEO’s time — meetings and communications succinct, time set aside to reflect and discuss about how to do the job better, and empowered to ask real questions that can change the outcome of decisions being made.
Time must be spent socializing all workers and leaders together . highlighting the work pockets of the organization are doing not just to emulate but also just to celebrate. ACT does this well through an app called Kazoo as well as valuable newsletters that often include stories of team members. School Districts are often more collaborative than companies, but sometimes there can be competition and politics between areas in a District of varying socio-political influence that are bad for the kids involved. The more people within an organization know what they are doing is important, that their work matters and is noticed, and feel empowered to make change possible, the better results for all stakeholders.
And of course, as I was finishing this post on my News feed comes: “In Defense of Long, Large, Unfocused Meetings. Really.” There swings the pendulum…
