In the previous post, I touched upon useful skills a CEO may want to adopt from a project manager. So here are 3 more to bring you a fresh look at the CEO’s routine:
Quite often, there’s a need for the CEO to quickly adjust strategic priorities, reacting to competitors moves or changing market conditions, not to mention the daily adjustments of the personal meeting schedule.
So here’s another opportunity to turn to the project manager who has perfected flexibility at the daily and hourly scales. The ability to quickly re-prioritize things and revise the decisions made not only within separate projects, but also at the strategic level, is challenging enough, but it will make your company more agile and thus more successful.
#6 - Accountability up and down
As a CEO, you are accountable only to your company board that is mainly interested in the share price, not in your daily behavior. On one hand, no accountability in your business routine gives you more freedom; on the other hand, quite often you may lack feedback on your actions. And without honest feedback, it’s hard to evaluate your performance and prevent mistakes.
By contrast, the project manager is normally accountable to the CEO and other senior managers, the customer, his own project team, and perhaps the end users of the solution to be implemented. Accountability makes jobs hard, but it makes projects, decisions and actions better. The best way to measure your efficiency as a CEO is to ask your employees how they see their work in the organization. Simple questionnaires will help you see if your team shares the company vision and if they try their best to fulfill it.
#7 – Develop team member relationships
Your team’s results depend deeply on the relationships between its members. A good working environment makes people eager to work and unwilling to leave the company. It’s definitely one of the CEO’s major roles to establish the right relationships. And yet, it’s not an easy thing to do, due to your position of authority in the company.
A good project manager is an expert at developing relationships. She or he does it on a regular basis with each of his or her project team members in order to get the most out of collaboration and gain their following and trust. A good project manager also will tell you that when it comes to relationships, every single detail matters.
How often you talk to your employees and the way you do it, your reaction to their mistakes and rewards for the extra time spent in the office – all these are the bricks in your corporate culture. Putting more regular efforts into building good and sincere relationships in your team will be rewarded greatly with your people’s enthusiasm.
What are your thoughts here? What areas do you think CEOs need additional skills in – where could they learn more from skilled project managers who survive in the trenches every day? Please feel free to join the discussion.
