When we think of CEOs of companies, our initial assumption is that they are very busy people with no time available for socializing. Sometimes, we even wonder how they manage to spend time with their families, friends, and hobbies. But what if I told you that if you want to be a CEO, there is a way to avoid that lifestyle and still have a life outside of this endeavor?
In this episode, I have Dr. Jim Schleckser, founder of the CEO Project. We discuss how to achieve work-life balance and effective leadership. He emphasizes the Theory of Constraints, time delegation, schedule control, and workplace autonomy. Tune in and optimize your time now!
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Achieve More by Doing Less with Dr. Jim Schleckser
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Perhaps you’re out there thinking, “Okay, I want something more, maybe I wanna try to move up some levels at my organization or I wanna start something on my own and be the CEO of my own company,” but then you’re looking at other people who are high level CEOs or even other C-level and director-level executives and thinking, “I don’t wanna be this busy. I don’t want this lifestyle. I don’t want the lifestyle where I don’t have any time for my family, I don’t have any time for my hobbies, I don’t have any time to just relax and chill and enjoy myself,” and that can be a real daunting possibility here because you’re thinking yourself, “Okay, I still want to be in charge of my own destiny a little bit or I still want to be something more than just a cog in a machine so how do I get there without giving up my entire life and not having a life outside of this particular endeavor?” And that’s where my guest today, Jim Schleckser, who is the founder of The CEO Project, also a podcast host as well as a bestselling author who wrote the book Great CEOs Are Lazy comes into play here.
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Jim, welcome to the program.
Thanks for having me, Stephen. I appreciate it.
Well, thanks for hopping on because I’m sure this is on a lot of people’s minds, right? You know, an important person, whether it be rising to the top of the company you’re already a part of or starting your own company and once you get somewhere, you’re going to have a lot on your plate. What inspired you to start The CEO Project?
A number of years ago, I was doing acquisitions. I worked for a corporate entity and one of our strategies for growth was to buy companies. And I remember these two founders that I was about to buy their company for, I think it was $6 million, I’m like, man, oh man, these guys are not as smart as me, they don’t work as hard, they’ve got four weeks of vacation every summer. I’m like, my gosh, I’m so much smarter than them, I go, wait a minute, I’m about to give them 6 million bucks and they get four weeks of vacation every year. I go, what’s wrong with this picture? And at that moment, I said, look, really, for the same level of talent, you get a very different, meaning better outcome in terms of lifestyle control, economic outcome, and so forth, by running your own business. And at that point, I said, okay, that is the path I’m on. That was a decade at least before I jumped out and started my own business.
So you observed these guys start their own business and have way more autonomy over their lives and decided you want that. What did you experience when you first made that observation? Because you said there was some time of a gap between the two. Was there that similar anxiety of like, okay, how am I going to get there, that type of thing?
I had a plan, maybe just there was another element that drove it. I was a member of CEO peer groups for a long time as I ran various companies so this is a mastermind group that helps you think through your problems. So I was a member of one and I saw that people that were founder, entrepreneurs and same profile, better time control, more economic output, more freedom of action, and I said, I need to do this. And so my goal in the corporate environment was to learn everything I possibly could to increase the probability of success when I jumped out on my own. And so whenever there was a, “Hey, we need somebody to do this,” I go, “I’ll do it,” because I would learn. And so my first, really, couple of decades of work were all about learn, learn, learn, learn everything that I possibly could to become a really, really good business person so when I went out and I was risking my own money instead of somebody else’s money, I’d have a really good shot at being successful. So that was like how am I going to get there?
The epiphany was these guys have a better lifestyle. The plan was learn, learn, learn, learn and then jump out and do it on my own at some point. Share on X
Now, when you talk about volunteering, “I’ll do this,” was there some level of judiciousness around, okay, is this thing going to help me learn or not? Because there might be some tasks out there where it’s like, okay, I’m not really going to learn much from this.
No, I would do scut work, just pay my dues, but generally speaking, the primary factor of should I do it or not is am I going to learn something and if the answer was yes, then I’m in, I’m going to go do that. It wasn’t about money, it was about learning, first and foremost, for a long, long time.
So you basically made your job and your lifestyle, you said, “My priority is learning,” and so most people, their priority is either, one, seeming important enough to not get fired, or, two, moving up the ladder. You said yourself, “Okay, I’m gonna be here but I’m gonna have this mindset and then keep in my mind that my top priority at this point is gonna be learning.”
Yeah. Now, clearly, you have to have an impact, right? You have to do a decent job. You have to have good outcomes. And, by the way, the money and all that jazz, promotions followed because I was trying to do a good job, but in the doing the good job, the meta work, if you will, was learn enough so I can do this on my own someday. So, yeah, you can’t punt on doing a good job. That still has to happen no matter what.
And as you were trying to learn as much as you can, was there any other aspect of your lifestyle that you reoriented around learning, whether it be like reading a lot of books on certain subjects or not watching a lot of junk TV or anything like that?
Yeah, I am a voracious reader and I’ve probably read a thousand books on business. I mean, I would read anything, and if I got three or four decent ideas out of a book, it was considered a win. You accumulate 24 books a year, every year on business, you build a huge knowledge. I also went and got more education on business. On the flip side, when I was in the corporate environment, I really didn’t have schedule control and that was a problem because my life balance in terms of spending time at home with my kids and things I like to do, it was just upside down bad and that was one of the real drivers to say I don’t want to keep doing this, it’s time to do something different, because that lack of schedule control is just painful. It’s really painful.
Yeah, and the schedule control is a really big deal for a lot of people, and I believe that’s even part of the popularity of what people are referring to now is like the gig economy, probably like the easiest way to get schedule control is to become a freelancer or somehow join the gig economy. The problem is you have to be pretty special, earn good amount of money on some of that, at least how it stands now, I’m not going to comment on the future because the future might be quite different on that.
First thing is, as a consultant, gig economy, you’re a consultant effectively, you’ve got to plan on being about 50 percent busy, half the time finding new work and admin and half the time actually doing things that make you money. To make $100,000 a year, which is good money, but you have costs against that, you’d need to be charging $100 an hour. So you have to do something that merits that or better or you’re just not going to – the pieces won’t work for you, right? And these people, they go, “I’m gonna go out on my own and make a half a million bucks a year,” I go, okay, what do you know how to do that’s worth $1,000 an hour? That’s got to be super special stuff.
So when it came to all this reading of business books, first of all, is there any specific books right now that are on your mind at this point that you would recommend anyone listening?
Well, besides my own, of course, I just had Kim Scott on my podcast who wrote Radical Candor.
Oh, yeah.
I think that’s a really excellent book. She also has a new book called Radical Respect, which is more about how you culturally build an organization that has respect for the people in it. Those are quite good. The problem is I’m so eclectic in what I read, I don’t have anything on my desk at the moment that I just finished that’s relevant but, yeah.
When you’ve read that many books, it’s almost like, so this is, I think episode number 135 of this podcast, and so you get to a number where people say, “Well, what’s your best episode?” and I’m trying to think, like, okay, well, there are a few that have more downloads, a few that emotionally impacted me more, and then, of course, there are some categories, like I’ve interviewed a lot of people who are life coaches, business coaches type of people and they’ve been well received but it’s hard for me to just point to one. I usually point people to the website with the search function, drop down and you can try to find everything.
And that that’s kind of the book answer, right? Tell me what you’re trying to figure out, I’ll tell you a book that will help you figure it out, because that’s probably a better way to think about it. Like the other day, I was talking to a CEO about project management, like product development, project management, and there’s a book by Eli Goldratt called Critical Chain that talks about a very different way of thinking about project management and I introduced him to that book.
Since you brought it up, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your book.
I interviewed CEOs over time and literally thousands of CEOs, what I found is that you could ask a couple questions and figure out if a CEO is a good one or a bad one. Good ones were working 50, 55 hours a week, pretty much in control, had vacation, time with their kids or family, whatever. Bad ones were working 80 hours a week, just spraying their time all over the business trying to make something happen. And it turns out that the really good ones were using a theory. They didn’t know it, but they were, from a guy named Eli Goldratt. Goldratt was an Israeli physicist and he developed this general systems theory which is called the Theory of Constraints. Now, Goldratt applied it to a manufacturing operation but the simple idea is that any system you can name, one point of constraint controls how the system performs. So the simple example is a garden hose. Trying to get water through a garden hose and then there’s a kink in the hose. Well, I can do work anywhere I want on that hose but if I don’t go find the kink and open it up, the water isn’t going to flow. Same thing’s true in your business, the same thing’s true in your life.
There’s usually one primary dominating factor that controls the outcome. You change that one factor, you change your outcome. Share on XSo when you think about work, you go, well, the most valuable thing I can do is work at the point of constraint, at the kink in the hose, and everything else is way less important so why the heck am I hanging around work doing it if it’s not very important? And that allows you, as well as some other techniques, to shrink your amount of time and still get really great results, which is what these excellent CEOs were doing.
I see, yeah. So it’s kind of like being discerning about, “Okay, what is worth my time essentially because I don’t need to be involved in everything.” And one of the things that you talk about is delegation.
Yes, yeah. And delegation is a big part of it because if you’ve got 50 things on your to do list and you’re like, “Okay, I’m gonna spend less time on things,” well, how do I get rid of 25 things on my to-do list so I can focus on the point of constraint, the kink in the hose and that’s this delegation model. We talk about taking the list, rank order it in economic impact so the highest is at the top, lowest at the bottom, put a line halfway up, everything below the line, three Ds, Delegate, Defer, Don’t Do. So Don’t Do is one. Literally cross it off your list, you never do anything with it. And it’s weird, we get this little endorphin hit, even though we didn’t actually do the work, just the crossing off, you’re like, “Woohoo,” it feels good. Defer is another one. Things that you think are important today, let a little time work on it, and all of a sudden you’re like, you know what? It’s not so important anymore, and you just cross it off the list. And the third is Delegate. And Delegate is the hard one because as high performers, which a lot of CEOs and leaders are, like, “Well, there’s nobody as good as me,” well, okay, you’ll never delegate anything if you think that. So we use what we call a 70 percent rule. If somebody’s 70 percent as good as you, delegate it to them. So you’re aggressively delegating. Lots of people are 70 percent as good as you. And then when you delegate, you don’t delegate all the way. You start with low level of delegation. “Hey, go check it out. Come back. We’ll talk about it. I’ll decide,” to, “Go check it out. Come up with a plan. Tell me what your plan is. If I don’t tell you no, just go do it,” up to what we think of as delegation is, “You take it, it’s yours. I don’t wanna see it anymore,” and that’s just scary as heck. We give guidance on how do you decide how aggressively you delegate around experience, risk, and reversibility. So high risk, irreversible decisions, we don’t delegate those too quickly. Low risk, highly reversible decisions, delegate the heck out of those.
And then part of it is also trusting, right? Because I think the thing I have in my head is this idea of delegating trust and so it sounds like what you’re talking about is a mechanism in which someone could build up that trust so that you have this person, I can trust this person to make decent decisions, it won’t always be exactly the decision I want to make, it won’t always be done exactly the way, it’s not going to be the same important satisfaction chart, oriented exactly the way I would do it, but I still trust that the outcome is going to come out well with this person in charge.
Some people struggle with releasing that kind of control. They struggle to trust but, yeah, this idea of I delegate at level one, you do a couple of good projects then we go to level two, level three, level four.
Oh, yeah.
You become the point of constraint. You become the kink in the hose.
Yeah, everyone’s leaning on your pool for everything and you become the CEO that’s working 85 hours a week and can barely get over a million a year in revenue, right?
I always think of, and maybe it’s an old example, but those old switchboard operators where somebody would call in and they’d plug in to wherever the call was going.
Oh, like in the 1940s in those movies where they would like – and it used to be like a bunch of women just kind of like –
Yeah, that’s it. Well, think about it, maybe one of these people could handle 100 phone calls an hour, right? Well, what happens when we start to grow and now there’s 200 phone calls an hour? Well, you can’t grow another arm. You can’t –
Yeah, like you have to –
When all the decisions are coming to the CEO, they’re playing that switchboard operator and, eventually, they run out of time and, therefore, the company stops growing.
So when you see that second category of CEO, the one that is working 85 hours a week and just can’t let go, do you see them they could potentially grow into the other type of CEO? And is that something that you help a lot with in The CEO Project?
We do, and there’s really two questions, what is your point of constraint? What’s the thing that if you could change in your business would make a massive difference in your performance, revenue, profitability, depends on what you’re after? And then, two, can you control your time and spend 30, 40 percent of your time at the point of constraint? So when we talk to CEOs, most don’t know what their point of constraint is and most don’t spend a third of their time on it. And so if you can do that, just I know my point of constraint and I spend a third of my time on it, you’re in the top 25 percent of all CEOs and leaders. Right there. Two things, that’s all you need to do, and you’re in the top quartile. Yeah. It’s shocking. You’d think like they’d know it, like, “Oh, I know exactly what it is.” Yeah, I spend lots of time on it, nope, not the case.
No, this just reminds me of people discovering their superpower, you’ve probably heard this phrase. One thing that afflicts a lot of people is that there are things that naturally come easy to people that people tend to discount how talented they are for it because it’s become so easy. They think, “Oh, everyone can do it.” So, CEO, that’s like, “Okay, yeah, I looked at my entire operation, I looked at everything, I found my point of constraint and I’m working on it,” probably it comes so naturally to that person that they probably don’t even realize how much of a talent it is that they got right down to it.
Yeah. We’ve seen a similar thing where if somebody’s like a great salesperson or a great marketer, it comes easy to them because they’re so good at it, they get stuck in the role, meaning, “Hey, dude, you’re supposed to be the CEO but you’re being the number one product manager,” you know, because you’re so good at it, nobody’s as good as you, we get that, that’s not your job anymore.
Your job is to run the company. And so when you’re being uber super-duper product manager salesperson, nobody’s running the company. Share on XAnd that happens all the time. And it’s so hard to get out of it because it’s ego gratifying. You go in, you did a great job, product is perfect, the pricing is right, the design is – you did everything great and you feel like, “Man, I’m killing it. I’m adding value.” Well, yeah, but nobody’s running the company, so it’s a little – nobody’s at the steering wheel while you’re doing that stuff. We see that happen too.
Well, I mean, it’s an important thing because a lot of people come out and you have your daily list of things to do and you check them off and you get that dopamine hit, it’s like not that dissimilar to the thing that I try to battle in my business, which is helping people overcome the dopamine hit of getting likes on Instagram, which really doesn’t matter, like unless you’re on the verge of becoming the next Mr. Beast or something like that, whether you got 50 likes or 100 likes on your Instagram post really does not impact your life at all, but it feels good in that moment. The same thing with that checklist, and one thing that you probably help people do and discern is, okay, there’s a bunch of things in the list but what am I putting on the list? Why am I putting it on the list? Just because someone said this needs to be done, does that need to be put on my list for today or even for later in the week?
I mean, I have the sort of master list of all the big efforts I’ve got, but on a daily basis, I’ll write two or three things on my list. The most important thing that I need to get done, those couple of things, usually near the point of constraint or not urgent but really important, those are the hard ones. There’s no urgency but – like writing a book. When you write a book, there’s no urgency but it’s important because it can help your business. And, man, it is so hard to apply time to it because everything in the world is drawing you to do something different. So if you were trying to write a book, you’d spend one hour on the book today. Buckle down and do it, and then whatever else you get done on the day is a win. You got your win for the day at that point. So I look for shorter daily lists. That seems to help me, at least, when I’m doing it.
Now, what role does focus time and/or expectations around responses to messages play in all this? Because I think there’s a lot of organizations that work in this constantly putting out fires. Have you ever heard someone say that? Like “All I did this week was put out fires”?
Yeah, but why? This is sort of what an A player does versus a B player. An A player will put out the fire, of course, but then they go, “Why was there a fire in the first place? And how do I stop the fire from happening so I don’t have to get on this merry-go-round where I’m constantly putting out fires? I wanna end it so this doesn’t happen anymore,” and so I think, organizationally, you have to elevate and say go one layer deeper. Why is the fire happening and how do we stop that from occurring? Because that’s the way to get long term success, because otherwise you’re just running back and forth, solving immediate issues that are maybe not important but they’re urgent so they’re in that quadrant of urgent important.
Yeah.
That’s the one, yeah. Exactly, yeah. And if you spend your life there, you’ll never get anything interesting done.
And that’s an easy trap to fall into.
It feels good. Hey, problem arose. I rode in on my little fire truck, put out the fire. Man, I feel great.
Yeah.
It’s addictive. It’s like likes, it’s addictive to put out fires all the time. Here’s the funny thing. If somebody’s in that mode, like a firefighter, and there’s no fires, you know what they do?
They look for them, yeah.
They start one.
Oh, they start – yeah, oh.
They’re arsonists. They’re like, “We need a fire, man,” and they don’t mean to but they’ll go stir up some hornet’s nest and now there’s problems. And I know a couple of CEOs that do that. If there’s no fire, they’ll start one.
To me, it seems like there’s a certain amount of anxiety around, “I’m not doing anything right now,” which is what really intrigues me about the title when you talk about the lazy CEO. Is part of it being okay with, if someone’s used to a certain amount of workload, and I’m not saying as a CEO there’s ever going to be no workload, but let’s say you always have a to-do list that’s like 85 items long and then, one week, because things are running smoother, it’s only 40 items long and you have time to go out to dinner or maybe go for a bike ride or go for a hike or something like that and to be able to do that without having that nagging feeling in your head of being like, “Oh my god, everything’s gonna go to shit. Everything’s gonna go to shit because I’m not excessively busy, I’m not excessively doing this, this, this, this, and that.”
I had a boss, he used to use this analogy. He said, “I’m not a very good swimmer, so when I get into the pool, I splash around, there’s water going everywhere, lots of noise, but I don’t make very good progress.”
Yeah.
And so that’s what that is, right? You’re always busy, you’re splashing your arms, they’re going in every direction, are you truly making progress? And you have to shift your mentality to I could actually spend less time potentially, if it’s on the right stuff, make better progress but not have the splashing around and the activity level, but there’s a huge amount of guilt around that, I think. I feel guilty that I’m not busy, or, even worse, I’m not as busy as people who work for me are and that doesn’t seem fair and we get all in our headspace. Here’s how I comfort people when they get down there, I’ll go most CEOs, when you say how many hours a week do you work, well, they go, “Well, the in-the-office number but, frankly, if I’m awake, I’m thinking about my business.”
Yeah.
So they’re really working, thinking, which is the job, 100 hours a week, 80 hours. I mean, they’re watching their kid’s soccer game and the little computer is going in their head all the time. So you got to get comforted that you may not physically see me at work or working but I’m thinking, which is actually the real work of the job.
And I’ve told people this before, I’m a huge cyclist, a couple thousand miles a year, and I’ve actually come up with some of my best ideas while riding my bike. Part of it’s because the inputs are gone, and, to me, it’s always hard. If you have 16 messages coming from here, here, there, you’re not generating some good ideas at that point, you’re just responding to stuff.
Right. I also have this concept of time horizon. So the human brain doesn’t shift time horizons quickly. So if I’m in the one-second, 10-second, one-minute time horizon, like figure out a task, respond, I can’t think about what’s going to happen in a month or two months or a year because my brain, I can’t click years into that different time horizon so quickly. It takes a little bit of time to click, click, click, click, click, click, okay, now I’m in that longer time horizon, I can think about implications. I had the same experience when I was running marathons. When I’d go out run 10 or 15 miles, I’d come back with – people hated it because I’d always have lots of ideas. They’re like, “Stop running, for God’s sake.”
Oh my gosh, that is amazing. I see here that your other book is about professional drinking. So I have to convey kind of a terrible story but we’re going to be 100 percent open and honest and vulnerable. My first times attending professional networking events way back in 2018, I was not very well versed in it, and I ended up a couple times getting into the trap where I’d be trapped in a conversation I didn’t want to be in. We’ve all been to the networking event where someone instantly puts you into their sales funnel without even getting to know you. My excuse to leave that conversation was always, “I’m gonna go up and get another drink,” and before I know it, I’m in a networking event where I’m supposed to be professional and I’m drunk.
Oh. Yeah.
And I’m admitting the lessons I learned all the time because when you try something first time, you’re always going to do it wrong and then learn your lessons over time. You have, obviously, an entire book about drinking in professional settings and business strategies.
Yeah, and it turns out, rule number one is don’t get drunk in a professional environment, but we’ve all done it. We’ve all had more than we should have and you’re like, “Ooh, that was a mistake.” As long as you don’t end up dancing on the table, you’re probably okay.
Yeah.
But here’s where that book came from. Well, one, and I told you, I love to learn. I learned I like wine. I like learning about it because there’s like history and geology and chemistry all coming together to make wine so it’s fascinating and I decided to become a certified sommelier, which is part of the guild of Master Sommeliers. So took a couple years but I did that, was a great fun project. I’m like, well, now what am I going to do with that information now that I know it, and my CEO clients, masters of the universe, command of their company, you hand them a wine list, their hands would shake, the flop sweat would start, and you’re like, “Isn’t this crazy that such a little thing made people so uncomfortable?” So the book was about, well, how do you get comfortable entertaining around wine and spirits so that you can make your guests comfortable, so you can be comfortable? So that’s really what the book is about. It’s not strictly speaking a wine book but it’s how do you manage yourself in a professional setting around wine and liquor.
That makes sense because I think everyone’s had the situation where they’ve observed people who either completely abstain from ever drinking any alcohol and people that never drink with your coworkers, or the person who, as you said, ends up dancing on the table or something like that, and, obviously, I’m not big on the whole perception, like someone can occasionally overserve themselves and have a little bit too much to drink but still be a very competent professional in the rest of their lives, I do believe that that’s possible.
Absolutely, absolutely. You know, the best tip that’s in that book is when you’re in a little bit of a fancier restaurant and they’ve got a sommelier, they’ve got a wine person, most people don’t know what wine they want but they do know how much they want to spend. I want to spend 50 or 100 or whatever my number is, so here’s the trick. You open the wine list, you run your finger down the prices, with the sommelier behind you, nobody else can see what’s going on, you land on the price you’d like to spend, let’s say it’s $100 and you go, “I’d like something from this region, please,” and the sommelier sees the $100 and every sommelier on the planet knows he wants to spend $100 on a bottle of wine. They’ll go, “What’s everybody having for dinner?” I’m having the steak, I’m having the whatever. “I’ll get something from that region I think you’ll all really enjoy,” off they go to the wine cellar and they find you a great bottle. So I’ve taught this to a bunch of CEOs. I shouldn’t give them up but there are a bunch of them that that’s their go-to move, like they look like they know something about wine, they know nothing about wine, they just know how to point at a price.
Wine is something either people, some people are really interested and they have the wine palate. One of the things that I get embarrassed by is I can’t really tell by tasting a wine what’s a good wine and what’s a bad wine. Usually, I can tell the next day by how hung over I am, to be honest. It’s usually that delayed but it does suggest a not so discerning palate, like I know not to get like Boones Farm or any of those like traditional $8 bottles of wine and stuff like that, but you don’t mean like kind of like that deep level of understanding that you expect from someone who drinks wine every night whereas I usually don’t.
When I went through the sommelier training, one of the things you do is what they call blind tasting. So they’ll pour a glass of red wine, you don’t see the bottle, and they go, “Okay, what’s the grape? What country? What region? How old? What’s the quality?” and it seems like a magic trick but, really, all it is is it’s training your nose and your mouth to understand what to look for, but also it’s the vocabulary. So here’s the problem. Your nose can pick up like 2 million different scents. Something like that. Yeah, super sensitive. More sensitive than your tongue, actually. But there’s only like 40,000 words in the English language and most of them have nothing to do with flavor or smell so how do I describe 2 million things with 5,000 words? And the answer is it’s really, really hard. So when you drink it, your brain goes, “It’s a thing, I know I’ve smelt this before but I have no idea what the word is for that thing that I’m smelling,” and what you learn through repetition is that’s black currants or that’s mushrooms or that’s olives or that’s whatever, over time, and those are the indicators that tell us what grape it is and where it’s from. So it’s just training, like I’m not an amazing taster, like there’s a bell curve of how many sensors you have on your tongue, I’m in the middle somewhere, but, you know, anybody can be trained. There’s hope if you really wanted to.
Do you encounter people that are trying too hard, that are like, could be like, “It is a bold, bountiful flavor, reminiscent of the manifest destiny in the American West”?
I have a friend who – I’ll show them blind tasting, okay, I get red currants, I get this, I get this, so he’ll bust on me and he’ll go, “I get a newly minted rubber tire. Goodyear, I believe. R15, 265, with the white walls.” He goes on and on and on. Yeah, yeah. So, yes, there are people that try too hard.
I mean, I love the opportunity to be goofy sometimes too. You can’t be 100 and serious all the time, right?
No, absolutely not. And then, Steve, which is his name, is very happy to be goofy. So, yeah, he’ll jump out there and be goofy, which is way fun and I don’t take myself that seriously so I can laugh at it. I’m sure there are people that be like, “You can’t do that. This is very serious stuff.” It’s wine. Come on, man. It’s like it’s fun.
So the other thing that you say about The CEO Project is that you aspire to impact positively millions of lives.
One million, specifically, is the near-term goal.
Now, when you say near term, what does that mean? Like within the next couple years or…?
Well, we’re working on it. There’s a book called Halftime by a guy named Bob Buford. He’s passed but I ended up going to his institute in Dallas probably about when I was having a midlife crisis and like, well, what’s next? And his idea was from success to significance. So first you make money and you become successful and then you – this happened to him. You pop your head up and go, “Geez, I haven’t made the world better at all.” And shift into something that will make the world better is his idea. And I’m like I think he’s wrong. And wrong in this way. Wrong in like if you’ve got a platform which is a company or a thing you do, why wouldn’t you just direct that towards purpose and doing good? And so that’s what we did with CEO Project. We said, look, we can help CEOs make better decisions and improve their business and grow their business and make it more profitable, which positively affects everybody in the company, because now Mario can afford an F-150 pickup truck and Sally can send her kid to college and everybody has financial security. So if we help the CEO, we’ve positively impacted all of those people. So we keep track of how many total employees we’re affecting on a regular basis and right now, it’s like 350,000, right in that zone, so we got a little work to do to get to our million but that’s our idea is help CEOs get better and make better decisions, lead their companies better, which helps everybody in the company.
And then when you talk about leading companies better, because what I’m thinking about is the difference between what you’re talking about, the CEO that works 50, 55 hours a week that knows how to delegate and trust is going to be one work culture, and the CEO that’s paddling in the swimming pool and splashing all over the place is probably creating a lot of anxiety for a lot of the other people too. So, when you kind of do that transformation, is there an aspect of it that goes beyond just, okay, this one’s become more profitable and the jobs are more stable and people can earn more money, but also creating a work culture that’s going to make everyone working for that CEO generally happier, have a better work-life balance, maybe even let the workers have some schedule autonomy that a lot of workers don’t have right now.
Yeah. I mean, style points matter. There’s ways to get there and ways to get there, but if we could actually get somebody deploying this lazy CEO strategy, it also works down the organization. So if I’m the VP of marketing, I should ask myself the question what is the highest and best economic use of my time and let me spend most of my time there and very little of my time elsewhere and, oh, by the way, the boss is doing it exactly the same way, so he or she won’t mind that I’m doing it, and so forth and so forth down the organization.
So I think it does transfer. People that don’t really adopt this approach and just throw hours at problems and hope something works, people end up looking like their dog or the dog ends up looking like the person. So the company is going to look like the CEO, like if you’re frantic and frenetic and stressed out, your company’s going to look that way and it won’t be a lot of fun to work there. And I’d be willing to bet you’d see it in the turnover. People go, they’ll come in, they like what you’re doing and then they’ll experience it and they go, “Oh, boy. Yeah, no, thank you. I think I’ll go somewhere else, please.”
I’ve referenced the Gallup survey, 32 to 36 percent employee engagement number in this country so most people are not engaged, 60 percent unengaged. Now, for most employees, at least especially for younger generations, one of the big drivers of engagement, drivers of workplace satisfaction and employment, is a level of autonomy. And autonomy, we talked about the scheduling autonomy but there’s also a level of autonomy around how you do your job, the whole thing with micromanagement, and so as this tactic that you’re talking about of focusing on the kink in the hose cycles down from the CEO to the CIO to the VP of engineering to the team leads and everything you know in between, does that mean that even your standard employee will be more engaged because, naturally, through that method, that standard employee will likely be getting some more autonomy over how they set up their jobs and how they – the things they do to make the work feel more authentically theirs?
Well, and it goes to the delegation thing. Like, “Hey, Stephen, take a look at this, come up with the plan, let me know what you want to do and I’ll give you the thumbs up.” That’s a lot of autonomy to how you’re going to solve the problem, and I didn’t go, “All right, you’re gonna do this and this and this and this and this and in this order and that’s gotta be blue,” like that’s no fun. I’m a flesh-colored robot at that point, right? I mean, that’s no fun. But if I give you the scope, I truly delegate it, I think that does relate to autonomy. There’s a good book by Daniel Pink called Drive and he talks about APM, Autonomy, Purpose, and Mastery. So purpose to the organization. What’s the bigger reason we’re here? Simon Sinek says start with why. Why are we here? Autonomy, to your point, I’m going to give you the backyard and then you go do your thing within. Here’s the fence and here’s the fence, but outside of that, go do your thing. And then mastery is the ability to become expert at what you want as a profession. And all of those are motivating for people. So, yeah, but I think autonomy is a big one. But that goes back to proper delegation. Those two are linked, I think.
Both Simon Sinek and Daniel Pink are authors that I’ve read as well, so –
Good.
I think I might have remixed it when I talk about purpose, autonomy, and advancement is what I most commonly use, like a good organization, if someone really performs well, they’re given the chance to move up to team lead and then move up to manager and then move up to division director, as opposed to not seeing those.
But you know what’s funny, not everybody wants it. I had an engineer working for me, and for a bunch of reasons, I got rid of my engineering manager, my VP of engineering, Napoleon was the best engineer I had, by a lot. So I went to him and I go, “Hey, Napoleon, I need a new VP of engineering and I wondered if you’d be interested in the job.” To his credit, he looks at me and goes, “What did I ever do to you that you would do that to me?” He had no interest in that job. He was super good at what he did, he was masterful at it, so I just kept throwing good projects and money at him and he was happy, happy, happy so he could make more money as a very, very high-level individual contributor, never manage people because he had zero interest in that, and he probably would be bad at it, on top of it, so not everybody wants the corporate laddery thing. They’re like, “Just give me better projects, give me ability to learn and become great at what I wanna be great at.” And so mastery can sit there too. But there are others that are like, “I want the promotions,” and I was always that guy. I want the bigger job.
And I think the advancement doesn’t have to take the perspective of like a promotion and physically managing people, because I know Google famously allows kind of two different career paths, one for management, one for subject matter expertise.
Technical, yeah.
Yeah, which also reminds me of professors and researchers in academia, because if someone really moves up in their subject, it’s not like we see a lot of professors becoming the boss of other professors and researchers, they’re just publishing more, becoming more sought out as the thought leader on that particular topic that they’re researching.
I’ve been in a couple companies that had a technical track like that. The only negative that I’ve seen, and maybe Google solved this, the number of extremely senior technical roles where you can make the big money is far smaller than the number of top-level managerial roles that are available. So, on average, you’ll economically do better on the managerial side, but at least it’s a nod to like, hey, this stuff really matters, having really smart people on the technical side matters and we want to keep them and this is how – it’s a great development. It’s not quite in balance, I think, yet. It’s not equal. It’s still just a little behind, but it’s a great career progress. Great progress.
That makes me wonder if a lot of organizations are too top heavy and have too much managers because they don’t delegate as much and if people delegated properly, we wouldn’t need as much management and…
There’s something to that.
Especially larger organizations. It’s probably not as bad at the smaller companies and the startups where you can’t afford to have someone just sit here and check yes/no all day long.
I always have this concept of a working manager versus a pure manager. A pure manager passes paper and you do this and you do that, never actually does any of their own work. No, no, I want you to do work and manage, no matter what your job is. So that tends to keep them honest, I think.
And it’s also good to have managers understand what their employees are doing, right?
Yeah, yeah. I remember talking to some CEOs and you’d ask a basic question, they go, “Well, I don’t know but I got somebody who knows.” I’m like do you know anything about your business? Because they weren’t in touch. They were so lofty and like regal CEO with sitting on the throne that they weren’t mixing it up and seeing what’s really going on and I think that is a super dangerous move to make. You really put yourself at risk. If you’re not putting the eyeballs on and collecting your own data, you’re very at risk, because the political class will manage your data flows so you’re going to hear what they want you to hear and draw the conclusions they want you to draw and they may or may not be the right ones so that’s very, very dangerous territory.
It seems like there’s a balance between being too – or maybe it is not so much a balance as much as it is understanding the operations, understanding the day to day, understanding what’s going on but without so much attachment that you have to start telling people every specific, like do it like this, do it like that, do it in this order and stuff like that.
Yeah, no, that’s a mistake. We actually say that CEOs should spend a percentage, 20 percent kind of number, in what we call player mode, meaning go and do. Go and do. Go help find a sales call. Let’s say you have a call center, you go spent four hours working in the call center, you’d have a page and a half of notes about how to make that a better call center, which should be a great development so, go and do, go be a player and see what happens.
And when it comes to anyone that’s aspiring to reach that level, whether it be starting a business or moving up the ladder, for lack of a better way to put it, at an existing organization, what do you think is the number one mindset that stops people from getting to that level or stops people from being effective at that level?
Confidence is number one. I don’t believe that I have the ability to do that job. I’m worried about the possible negative outcomes. I over observe the risk and under observe the opportunity. People think that entrepreneurs are these giant risk takers, and I actually read an article about this.
They’re actually amazing risk managers so they understand the risk and then they manage it to try to get the best possible outcome they can. Share on XThey don’t obsess over the downside. They manage to try to get the upside. So I think that confidence of trying to get positive and even expecting positive outcomes really gets in people’s way. And there’s research on this so I’m not talking out of school. Men tend to overestimate their abilities and women tend to underestimate their abilities. So when it’s time for a promotion, a guy will go, “Hey, I’m ready to go. Give me the job, boss.” They may not be ready. And the woman, although she’s massively qualified, might go, “I don’t know if I’m quite ready for that job, maybe the next cycle,” and so they’re underpromoting themselves because of this confidence, this sort of my abilities versus the need and misestimating it in my book. I suppose the men who misestimate it but we do it the other way, unfortunately. We have too much confidence sometimes.
But you need to know that you’re – or feel that you’re going to be able to create those good outcomes before you’re actually ready to step into that role.
Yep, and I used to have that conversation with people, particularly women that work with me, they’re like, “I need you to do this new, bigger job,” and they go, “Am I ready? I’m worried,” like they’d be really transparent. I go, “Look, I’m asking you because I know you can do this job and I know you can be successful,” and sometimes that’s all it took was for me to have complete confidence in their success for them to go, “Well, he believes in me, I should probably believe in myself,” and then they do a great job. I knew they had the ability.
That’s a good way to get the right people elevated to the right roles, right? Because, I mean, that’s like pretty much moving up the ladder is not going to be for everyone, starting a business is not going to be for everyone, and, in this podcast, I’m not really all about telling you which path you need to be on, I’m just here to share some stories about people who follow their paths and give you some ideas as well as inspiration for you to go out and find the path that’s going to work for you and go out and get that and get the lifestyle that you want as opposed to where a lot of us find ourselves stuck, which is something that’s not really matching who we are and not really serving us well.
One of my last points are it was kind of a God thing for me in that when I was at a point where I was sort of maybe time to jump off and do something, I got fired. So, hand of God came down, plucked me out, and instead of go back into the craziness, which I was really unhappy with my life balance and my time control and all these things, I said, “Well, that’s a sign, it’s time to go start my own thing.” So, sometimes, we don’t do it on our own power. I didn’t. I was probably too chicken, right? I had a mortgage and I had kids and scary as heck. I got booted out and forced to figure it out and I said, “Okay, this is the moment. This is the time. Now I’m gonna do it.” And if that had not happened, I could still be doing the corporate – sure, I do fine but I probably wouldn’t be as happy as I am now.
And probably not as impactful too, right?
Probably not, yeah.
With the 1 million lives thing. Maybe it was a little bit of a Freudian slip in saying that not only impacting 1 million lives but hopefully impacting millions of lives in the end.
Well, once we get to a million, we’ll be talking about two, right? So, yeah, 100 percent.
Undoubtedly. Well, I wish you luck with all that. Jim, I’d like to thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes, telling us a bit about The CEO Project. By the way, is there a website in case anyone is interested in contacting you?
Yeah, sure. Go to theCEOproject.com or you can send me an email at Jim@theCEOproject.com and we’ll get back to you. But we’re on all the platforms, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, we’re on everything. Easy to find.
Anyone out there listening, if you’re interested in connecting with Jim, it’s theCEOproject.com, and just remember that you can move up, you can have a life where you impact people positively and have the type of life that you want without having to become a total workaholic that has no time for yourself and no time for anything else in life.
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About Dr. Jim Schleckser
Dr. Jim Schleckser is the CEO and Founder of The CEO Project. He is also a bestselling Author and a podcast host.
Jim has guided hundreds of CEOs to profound business and profit growth across multiple industries. Leaders wanting to grow to the next level seek his insights into CEO effectiveness. Jim offers a distinctive CEO advisory program that combines peer group work sessions with one-on-one advisory sessions, all led by former CEOs.
These curated advisory boards provide CEOs with rare, unbiased, and valuable guidance He created the “Lazy CEO” concept, emphasizing focused efforts, efficient delegation, and time management to drive business change and growth. The creative tools to identify your business constraints and the high-leverage roles of the leader are learnable and teachable to your team. By providing a group of High Caliber Peers, an Experienced Advisory group with decades of experience, and a Comprehensive Approach, the CEO Advisory Group Framework is a formula for success!