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Today’s episode shares the primary roles of a C-Suite and provides advice in building a really great team.

Podcast Transcript

Joshua MacLeod:
I built a career on the fact that really exceptional people are willing to share what they’ve learned and what they know if you ask them politely and/or pay them money.

Podcast Announcer:
Welcome to the Growability podcast, your home for leadership, management, and marketing education, where we teach business and nonprofit leaders the necessary habits to make your organization thrive. Today’s episode shares key concepts in the fourth step of the Growability model, how to empower teamwork by recognizing innovators, equippers, and achievers. Here are your hosts, Joshua MacLeod, and Bernie Anderson.

Bernie Anderson:
Here’s my question today, Joshua, and it’s a big one. How do we build a great team?

Joshua MacLeod:
Let me ask you this question, Bernie. What do all of these organizations have in common? Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Amazon, Google, the Walt Disney Company, and Mattel. What do all of those organizations have in common? You could probably come up with a bunch of things.

Bernie Anderson:
Probably come up… They’re big, they’re creative, profitable. And…

Joshua MacLeod:
And they all started in a garage. So when Apple and Hewlett Packard and Amazon and Google started in a garage, somebody in there had vision, “Hey, this is the change that can be, this is where we’re going to go.” Somebody in there had rhythm, “Hey, I’m going to show up and I’m going to work in this garage 10 hours a day for 40 hours a week or 50 hours a week or 60 hours a week.” And somebody in there had community, “Hey, you know what? I can get my buddy to connect on this. I can get a friend to work on this. Maybe we can hire somebody. I’ll be good at hiring people. We can sell some product, I’ll get our first customer.”

Joshua MacLeod:
So when you launch an organization, you need vision, rhythm, and community. The first thing you do when you build a great team is you ask yourself, “Okay, who is the primary engine for vision? Who is the primary engine for rhythm? Who is the primary engine for community?” If you are a solopreneur… You are. You are the answer for all of those things.

Bernie Anderson:
That’s right.

Joshua MacLeod:
You are the vision, you are the rhythm, you are the community. What we’ve done in our society is we put some big, fancy words on vision, rhythm and community. The vision word we call CEO or chief executive officer. They’re the person that is responsible for making sure that the organization is headed in the right direction and actually meeting objectives and staying profitable and doing the right thing. The person that’s responsible for rhythm, the habits, the systems, the processes, we call them the COO, the chief operating officer. They are responsible, not necessarily for creating the priorities and goals, although they may, but their primary job is to convert those priorities and goals into steps and tasks. So we’re going to go take this hill, that’s the CEO. Here’s the best way that we’re going to take that hill, that’s the COO so that the COO converts the priorities and goals into steps and tasks. And then you have community. This is known as the CMO or chief marketing officer. This is the person that is saying, “Hey, I can go get us customers. I can sell this. We can actually make this thing work.”

Joshua MacLeod:
So I’ve got the CEO, the COO, and the CMO that we’ve discussed. Bernie, who would you say is the next two key roles that you need in any business?

Bernie Anderson:
Well, you got to have someone taking care of the money.

Joshua MacLeod:
CFO. So the CFO-

Bernie Anderson:
There you go. Yep.

Joshua MacLeod:
… That’s right. The CFO is the chief financial officer. This is the person that is handling the money. Do you have a bank account? Is your bank account separate from your personal account? Do you actually know the word account means, do you know where all the money is going? Can you give an account for how much it costs to make these widgets.

Joshua MacLeod:
And then the final role, what would you say then is the final role?

Bernie Anderson:
I would say that would be the person that has to take care of all of the things that are all of your products, all of your teams, all of your managers, I would say would be the next kind of-

Joshua MacLeod:
That’s it.

Bernie Anderson:
… Yep.

Joshua MacLeod:
Exactly. The person who has to take care of all the things. This is actually the people that do all the work.

Bernie Anderson:
Exactly.

Joshua MacLeod:
So the final key role in any business, you got your CEO, your COO, your CFO, your CMO, but now I actually have to have people that are going to do the work.

Bernie Anderson:
A lot of times, I think people think that the C-suite folks are, they’re the leadership, of course, they’re the leadership, right? They’re the ones that are running and everybody’s like, “Oh, C-suite, what’s happening behind these closed doors here.” And it’s like this big mystery, but I think it’s important to remember from a leadership perspective that a good C-suite is actually empowering the managers to lead. Leading leaders, your managers should be people who are leading, are leading teams, they’re leading product lines, they’re leading… Really a C-suite is a leader of leaders, but they need to empower those leaders to actually lead.

Joshua MacLeod:
Yes.

Bernie Anderson:
I think ineffective C-suites are going to really-

Joshua MacLeod:
You won’t have many.

Bernie Anderson:
… Yeah.

Joshua MacLeod:
You won’t have many because the organization goes out of business so quick.

Bernie Anderson:
Yeah, that’s right.

Joshua MacLeod:
If your organization stays in business and you don’t become one of the statistics of the 8 out of 10 small businesses that fail, your C-suite is actually doing a good job. You might not think they’re doing a good job. If you work at their company, you might think, “They’re just a bunch of idiots that don’t really care about anything.”

Bernie Anderson:
That’s right.

Joshua MacLeod:
If you’re in business, they’re doing a good job.

Bernie Anderson:
Yeah, that’s right.

Joshua MacLeod:
They’re working their butt off, they’re keeping the payroll happening, they’re keeping the thing up be built. Traditionally, if you look at an org chart, the org chart looks like here’s the CEO at the top and then it branches off into these other positions and then it branches down. Really, I think whoever designed the org chart in the first place should have flipped that thing upside down. Because when you talk about support and supporting people in an organization, the person at the bottom is the one that the whole weight of responsibility for the organization rests down on that person.

Bernie Anderson:
Exactly.

Joshua MacLeod:
The CEO, they’re the one that bears the weight of responsibility for will our product work and flourish in the marketplace? The COO is responsible for the fact, are our systems and process is good enough to give people jobs and to keep people in jobs and to create profit? The CFO, they’re responsible to make sure that we’re paying all of our bills on time and the government isn’t going to sue us because we did something stupid with taxes. The chief marketing officer, they bear the responsibility of is our message the right thing, or the activities that we do out in the marketplace. So when you think about your C-suite as those master equippers, like you were talking about, they equip everybody over them to accomplish and produce their job better.

Joshua MacLeod:
So I’m a CEO of an organization. I forget that sometimes. I get frustrated with, why aren’t they doing this stuff? Well, the answer is because you haven’t equipped them to do the stuff. So if you give them the tools, then they’re going to go do the stuff. If you’re frustrated that the stuff isn’t getting done, hire somebody. Well, I don’t have enough money to hire somebody. Okay. Do really, really good with what you have so that you get enough money to where you can hire somebody. And until that point, you keep doing it because you are responsible to see that thing through.

Bernie Anderson:
I had a question about this, and I think we touched on this last week, but I think it’d be good to touch on it here as well. You referred a minute ago to the fact that if someone is starting a business and they’re a solopreneur, they’re getting started, they’re the ones who have to be responsible for all of these areas. Would you say that it’s important for that solopreneur to understand where they excel and where they need to be a B-? You’re going to be A+ here, you got to be at least a B- on everything. You may need to get some training, some help or coaching or whatever. How would you advise a solopreneur going through this process and figuring the org chart out when it’s just herself?

Joshua MacLeod:
Absolutely. One of the smartest things that any business leader can do is think about your business, not from your own lens, but through the lens of your customer. My customer doesn’t get a product until somebody comes up with what the product is going to be and do to serve their need, the creation process, the production process, where you build that product and you make it excellent and you make it worthy of paying money for, and you make it reliable and you make it bigger, better, faster, cheaper, quicker, it has an advantage, it brings a lot of value that you got to produce it. And then I’ve got to get it to where I am as a customer. I’ve got to distribute it. Is it at Walmart or is it on Amazon or is it at the flea market, the C level in any company, the CEO, COO, CFO CMO, they’re responsible to make sure that all of those things get accomplished. The product is created, the product is produced, the product is distributed. That’s their responsibility.

Joshua MacLeod:
We have a tool that we use at Growability where we ask the question, “Okay, are you an innovator?” Which is really good at that creation process. “New ideas come easy, I got 17 new ideas for how we could improve. I wake up in the middle of the night and I’m like, ‘Oh, we could do this. We could go into this market. We could do this.'” Or are you an equipper? “Hey, let’s build all of the systems and processes. I don’t have to come up with the ideas. I like coming up with ideas, I see the ideas, but I really like making sure that people can flow with the ideas. Let’s make sure that the communication goes well.” That’s the equipper in the middle. And then there’s just the achievers. “Hey, let’s just distribute. Let’s get this stuff out the door. I need to do sales calls? We’re going to do 50 sales calls. Okay. We need a warehouse? Okay, I’m going to find a warehouse. We’re going to just get the thing done.”

Joshua MacLeod:
So one of the first key ingredients to answer your question is asking yourself, am I primarily an innovator? Am I primarily an equipper? Or am I primarily an achiever? And then looking at everybody else on your team and saying, “Okay, are they primarily an innovator, primarily an equipper or primarily an achiever?” Now, if you’re a solo entrepreneur, you don’t have anybody else to look at. So what you do is you have to build community outside of yourself and say, “Okay, what am I? Am I an innovator? Am I an equipper? Am I an achiever?” And then if I’m an innovator, “How can I be positively influenced or get advice from an equipper?” If I’m an equipper, I might say, “How can I be influenced by, or get advice from an innovator?” If I’m an achiever, I might say, “Hey, how do I know that the product that I’m using is innovative and that I’m fully equipped to do the job?” If you can’t hire people to fill those roles within your organization, what you can do is you can go out into your community and at least be influenced by people who are experts in those areas.

Joshua MacLeod:
I built a career on the fact that really exceptional people are willing to share what they’ve learned and what they know. If you ask them politely and/or pay them money. Or books. If I want to read about innovative companies, read about innovative companies, look what they do, and then go, “Oh, wow. Hey, there’s some really good innovation there. I can adapt that. I can pick that up.” But the best advice typically comes from high respect, high capacity individuals. I can get free advice from the teenager at the convenience store any day of the week. They are full of really good free advice. What I have found though, is you can go to the CEO of a bank and ask for advice. You can go to the CEO of a 100 employee company and get free advice. Take him a lunch, ask him a question. Say, “How did you build this? How did you grow this?” So the easy answer for the solo entrepreneur is, “Well, I can’t.”

Bernie Anderson:
Right.

Joshua MacLeod:
Okay then, stop. Stop trying to be an entrepreneur. If your answer to every challenge is, “That’s never been done before. I don’t know anybody for that.” Then go find a different career. When you’re an entrepreneur, you find a way. My friend Oxana says you, “You got to be an earthworm.” You got to go, okay, we can’t walk over this. Well, we can dig around and get underneath it and figure out how to get in there. If you need information, you hunt people down. Look, if Apple and Hewlett Packerd and Google and Amazon and Walt Disney could grow the kind of organizations that they grew, they didn’t do it by sitting around and waiting for somebody to come and bring them anything.

Bernie Anderson:
Exactly. Right.

Joshua MacLeod:
They did that by getting out there into the market, finding the advice they needed, finding the leaders they needed, finding the team that they needed.

Bernie Anderson:
When it’s those essential things like vision, rhythm, community, leadership, management, marketing, creation, production, distribution, all of that has to be done. And if you are of the mindset of, “I’ve got great vision for this thing, but just, I’m terrible at administration, I’m bad at management.” You can’t do that. You can’t say that. You’ve got to go be an earthworm. You’ve got to go figure out who do I need to talk to, to make myself better as a leader? Well, we sure do appreciate everyone who has joined us today for the Growability live lunch and learn. And we want you to remember that you are doing better than you think, you have much more potential than you know, and we appreciate you growing with us at Growability.

Podcast Announcer:
Thank you for listening to the Growability podcast. The mission of Growability is to equip leaders to flourish in their life and work by developing vision, rhythm, and community. To discover the necessary habits to make your organization thrive, visit Growability.com and speak with a certified Growability coach. Bernie and Joshua are also who available for speaking engagements, workshops and conferences subscribing to this podcast helps Growability, equip leaders throughout the world and we appreciate your support. Please consider sponsoring an episode or sharing with a friend.