Published on
January 27, 2023
As a CEO, you are pulled in many directions and your workdays can be intense. While intensity is necessary when building something big, it is important to be intentional about the activities and meetings you focus on. One powerful filter for focusing is the impact that these activities have on your energy. By focusing on this, you can free yourself from activities and responsibilities that hold you and your company back.
All we have is our days and our time, and it is important to make the most of it. Let's take a look at two CEOs as they go about their workday.
CEO 1: This CEO wakes up, opens email and Slack, and immediately gets drawn into things. She responds to issues and requests before beginning her workday packed with meetings. The meetings are across every department, as she is responsible for the entire company. Lunch is spent in a meeting, and she is often late for meetings because they are scheduled back-to-back. By 6 PM, it's time to shut down work, and then it's parenting mode with more firefighting. By 11 PM, she crashes.
CEO 2: This CEO wakes up and works out, showing up to work fresh and energized. She knows what the top priorities are for the day and schedules those first. She has surrounded herself with a strong leadership team, which allows her to be more strategic about where she spends her time. Her super power is sales, and she feeds off of it. She focuses on helping close big deals and staying as close as possible to customer needs. She has a close pulse on both the sales pipeline and product roadmap. Detailed operations and finance reviews are handled by her leadership team.
This CEO knows that if she is to be at her best in front of customers, then she needs to manage her energy. She takes small breaks between meetings to reset and remind herself of the purpose and objectives for the next meeting. She schedules time for email and Slack in the morning, afternoon, and a little bit in the evening, to set her priority focus for the next day. After family time, she likes to read a book or listen to a podcast as she winds down.
As you can see, work is happening to the first CEO. She is reacting and it is in charge of her. She has no boundaries between work and personal life. She has not built in routines to maximize energy and happiness. On the other hand, CEO 2 is in control of her work. She is in charge and knows her super powers. She has designed her team and work around that, being intentional about what she needs to accomplish each day and mindful of the boundaries needed to have enough energy.
To get to CEO 2's routine, it's important to first identify your super power. What are you uniquely qualified to do in your company? What kind of work puts you into a state of flow where you are harnessing all of your creative power? Where you don't even feel like you are working?
Next, build your entire company around this self-awareness of your super power. Knowing your super power, what leaders do you need around you to leverage it to the fullest? Which meetings and activities do you need to keep and which ones do you need to remove? This is likely an iterative process, but by allocating more and more of your time to activities that leverage your super power and give you energy, you will see that work becomes deeply fulfilling, rewarding, and sustainable. Your leaders and perhaps entire company will see this, and this is where you want to get to: a truly sustainable flow.
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