When entrepreneurs start their first business, not only is it their first time as a business owner, but also their first time as a CEO.
Being the “CEO” means very little in the early days, but as the company grows, the title of CEO takes on more meaning. Defining your role and your style as the CEO of your company takes planning and specific effort on your part. It may even feel a bit awkward at times, but you have to establish what your role will be as the CEO.
Growth Changes Your Job
Many entrepreneurs start their businesses because they like the hands-on part of their business. Engineers like to engineer. Furniture makers like to build stuff. At some point in the growth of the business, the entrepreneur begins to move away from the hands-on part of what their company does. This can be a painful and frustrating period.
As they move away from the hands-on, entrepreneurs must learn the other strengths and weaknesses they bring to the business.
If you have a knack for numbers, keep the financial management of the business part of your core responsibilities. If you are good with customers, don’t be in a hurry to give up selling and customer relations.
Your “job description” as CEO should be a reflection of your skills, abilities, and knowledge. However, no matter what your specific role as the CEO is in your business, growth demands you start to build your team.
Delegation Hesitation
There are three common mistakes that entrepreneurs make when delegating.
The first mistake is being hesitant to delegate.
When first beginning to delegate to employees, some entrepreneurs might feel that no one can do what they do as well as they can do it. Employees might not care quite as much as the entrepreneur does. After all, this is your business, and your reputation is tied to its success. To employees it is simply a job.
To overcome this hesitancy to delegate, entrepreneurs should remind themselves that sometimes “good enough is good enough.” While employees may not carry out the tasks delegated to the level of perfection you would, they can learn to perform these tasks well enough for the business to run smoothly and for customers to stay satisfied.
Moving Too Quickly
The second mistake entrepreneurs make is rushed delegation.
Rather than being hesitant to delegate, entrepreneurs who make this mistake seem as if they can’t wait to get tasks off their plates. We see this quite often with serial entrepreneurs who are so eager to get to their next new business idea that they don’t take the time to get their current one running properly before moving on.
These entrepreneurs delegate without providing proper training and without giving clear expectations for performance.
In the rush to delegate, tasks and responsibilities can also end up being assigned to the wrong person or mistakenly to multiple people simultaneously. This can lead to chaos and frustration.
To overcome rushed delegation, develop a clear and detailed plan that includes what needs to be delegated, who should be assigned the task and what needs to be done to prepare employees for their new responsibilities.
Trust
The third mistake is undermining the delegation process.
Even after the delegation of tasks and responsibilities, employees will still tend to want to go directly to the entrepreneur to get an answer to a question or to make a decision, instead of going to the person now assigned to that area. If the entrepreneur answers that question or makes that decision, it will completely undermine the authority of the person it has been delegated to.
I developed a “seven-second delay” to avoid this mistake. When I was asked for an answer or a decision I would always pause for a few moments to ask myself, “Is this still my responsibility or have I delegated this to someone else.”
If I had delegated it, I’d answer by sending them to the employee to whom I had given that responsibility.
Delegation is a lot like raising teenagers. At some point you have to begin to let go so they can learn — and grow up. With your business, if you don’t learn to let go and delegate, your business will never successfully “grow up” to the next stage of development.
7 Common Elements of CEO Job Description
As founders build their team and delegate responsibilities to their leadership group, they must pay attention to seven elements that are part of every entrepreneur’s job description as CEO:
- Growth can be stressful for everyone in the company. The entrepreneur must remind everyone of the vision as to where the business is headed and provide inspiration for the company’s potential.
- The entrepreneur must be the keeper of the culture and lead the efforts to create an intentional culture that represents the founders’ values.
- Growth requires resources. As the CEO, the entrepreneur is responsible for securing the necessary resources to ensure successful growth.
- The entrepreneur must work with the leadership team to create systems that will support ongoing growth and ensure customers’ needs are being met.
- The structure of the business should never “just happen” as people get hired into the business. The entrepreneur must ensure that structure is tied to the strategy, culture, and business model of the company.
- As CEO, every entrepreneur must be prepared to be the chief strategist and adjust the direction the business takes based on changing market demands and opportunities.
- Finally, as CEO, the entrepreneur serves as “emotional shock absorber” to keep a positive climate in the business, even when the business faces the inevitable challenges that are part of growth.
By integrating these elements into your job description, you will be on the path to becoming a more effective CEO of the business you founded.
It sounds like transitioning to CEO can be a daunting task, however, it sounds like one’s attitude toward the transition may play a great deal in how easily that transition is made. For example, you mentioned that growth changes your job. As someone who is very “hands on” oriented, I can imagine that losing some or all of that might be frustrating; however, just as life goes, when one door closes, another one opens. I was doing some reflection on my life thus far the other day and had the realization that lots of things from my youth are gone forever, and if I sit around and dwell on that, I could easily become very sad. This bitterness is then met with the realization that, lord willing, I will have a plenty long life and there are so many NEW things to experience that are yet to come, as well. That’s the beauty of life. So, becoming CEO rids of some old responsibilities and brings new ones and new opportunities which can be very exciting if you have the right attitude.
Regarding trust and delegation, ensuring trust is something that I’ve always found myself to struggle with since one of my past ventures developed a sense of PTSD for me in this aspect. Although I cannot give a first-hand experience of responsibility delegation on the level of a large established company, I certainly did experience this struggle in my Instagram business I ran a couple of years ago. Basically, I ran multiple Instagram pages that posted pictures of luxurious cars solely for the entertainment and dream motivation of my followers; and we generated revenue (that almost translated directly to profit due to the lack of expenses) by “shouting out” other pages that were much smaller than mine so they could gain followers themselves. Due to the fact that I had 4 pages I was running, it got to the point where I was on my phone 24/7 and not paying attention to life around me; so, I decided to delegate the posting to others. Quite literally as soon as I assigned one of my friends the responsibility of finding and creating these posts, what was then posted was quite possibly one of the ugliest modification-contaminated automobiles I had ever seen. I lost an abundance of followers and read many negative comments undermining my knack for knowing what is considered an “attractive” automobile. It was not long after that I ceased the delegation and eventually had to quit my business due to the mental toll it was taking on me and the effects it had on my level of focus in other extracurricular activities.
I tell this because I know the importance of what Dr. Cornwall is saying and can only imagine the impact delegation can have when not executed correctly and carefully on a much larger scale. Ever since that episode, I have been more careful when assigning tasks of any kind, be it in business or not. Some might call it a trust issue, others might call it being a control freak, but as of now I still consider it effectual. Eventually I’ll learn a thorough method of the hiring and delegation process; and I am very confident that when the day comes, I will execute it successfully.
In my personal opinion, you can read all the books and textbooks you want; but to truly learn, experience is key. Although it was a rough patch for me in letting go of what I had created for just a couple hundred bucks, I walked away with knowledge and experience that cannot be bought with money.
This semester of college has been my first experience with entrepreneurship. Throughout our class time, in Foundations of Entrepreneurship, I have been thinking about the responsibility of being the CEO of your own business. It seems overwhelming, that is why I appreciate that you discuss both delegation and job description in this post. In terms of delegation, I agree when you say that entrepreneurs may feel like they need to do everything themselves. I think this is a natural tendency for everyone but especially when it is your company that is at stake. It is because of this that I see why it is so important to have clearly defined responsibilities for yourself. This also brings in self-awareness, knowing what you are good at and how much you can handle, and recognizing what is out of your reach and needs to be delegated.
Going from having a great idea to being a CEO is a big jump! You are not only the one who holds the vision for what you want your business to be, but it is your responsibility to execute the tasks that will get you there. As a person who lives my life by the motto, “if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself,” I definitely would understand the struggle and hesitation that comes with delegating tasks to other people to complete. Though CEO’s must have more on their plates than I can imagine, if I were in their shoes, I would likely burn myself out trying to take on so much to ensure it gets done the way I want it to. This post provides a lot of helpful information that would be very useful to someone who thinks the way I do!
Hi, Dr. Cornwall!
I think this is especially relevant for numerous entrepreneurship students at Belmont; many of us are creatives who are instead in starting businesses that allow us to control our art. With such identity and passion tied to our craft, I can only imagine how hard it will be to shift from the founder of a small company to the active CEO of a growing brand. I find delegation without double-checking incredibly hard, but I know to grow a successful film business that allows me to focus on telling and creating stories, purposeful delegation is something I will have to do.
I really enjoyed how you talk about delegation and issues that stem from certain aspects of it. Hesitation is really interesting because you need to know when to delegate and when not to.
This my last semester at Belmont and my first time really taking an Entrepreneurship class and figuring out how it all works throughout the time it starts to succeeding. I can agree with having the name of CEO comes down to your skills, perservance and work ethic behind making you better along with company growing due to you pushing it. Growth always changes your job experience, job purpose and where you are at a company or if you are running it. I believe sometimes delegations get mixed up and given to people that it shouldn’t be given to which make it a mistake on behalf of the ceo. Altogether becoming a CEO is all the same jobs you were plus making sure the business continues to run smoothly and increases profit for growth within the company.
I had never really considered that the shift from Founder to CEO would be such a difficult thing to do, but reading through the most common mistakes made me realize that I would definitely make one or two of these if I were to be going through this same process before reading this post. For me, I think I would end up trying to have too much say-so in every single process because a part of me would not trust those who I delegate to. But now that I can recognize that I might lean towards this side of things, I hope that if that time does come I am able to avoid this.
I think that this is a very important post to read when thinking about scaling your business. It is an important thing to think about when moving out of that hands-on role and transitioning. I liked the addition of continuing to do tasks that bring you joy such as financials or customer relations. It is strange to think that one day you might become the CEO of a company but it is the reality for many entrepreneurs.