Yep, I heard it again. A new client, a CEO, told my team prior to our first work session, “I want my life back. I love working, but I’ve got to stop working 80-hour weeks. Something needs to change around here.”
Sounds logical and completely reasonable to me, but how do you get your life back if you are the only person who knows your job? Worse yet—how do you do that if you are the owner, CEO, or another member of the C-Suite? Who can do your job?
As I have observed over the years, being a CEO is hard. Being the top dog is tough and it’s lonely. There are many things you can share and some you simply have to handle yourself.
How do you find someone to takeover some if not all of your job responsibilities in the near or long-term? How do you do this when there are no apparent ready successors?
- Develop more leaders throughout your organization and not just at the top
- Create more “depth” and not just single-position strength
- For more information/solutions, read my book: Something Needs to Change Around Here: The Five Stages of Leveraging Your Leadership
Now, let me ask you: If you’ve been working 80-hour workweeks, how much of that time are you spending developing others? Let me guess. None or very little. If, on the other hand, you had been spending dedicated time to developing skills in your managers, supervisors, team leaders and front-line staff, you would not feel (or be) so out of control. You would have more control because you would be leading a team who knew what was expected of them, individually and as a whole.
Get Your Life Back!
Get your life back by developing skills in others and by developing leaders throughout your organization. Get your life back by working with your team to develop systems, processes, and procedures that help all of you gain greater control now and in the future. Get your life back by off-loading what YOU don’t need to be doing. Get your life back by building and developing a team to do what your organization needs to have done.
When you create an organization others want to become a part of and where your team members are happy, that’s when you will get back to a life you can enjoy.
Copyright MMXVI, MMIV – Liz Weber, CMC, CSP – Weber Business Services, LLC – www.WBSLLC.com +1.717.597.8890
Liz supports clients with strategic and succession planning, as well as leadership training and executive coaching. Learn more about Liz on LinkedIn!
