The Accidental CEO

If you’re an accidental CEO, you can still be an excellent CEO. I wanna give you some ideas on how to do that.

Is this you?
What do I mean by an accidental CEO? See if you can relate to these things. You’re an expert in your field and you found great success in building a product or a service based on your expertise. Built a team that has allowed you to be successful and your business is growing. So much so, that you are finding yourself in a new role, having to be a leader, having to run your company and make it work beyond just making your product work. And you are struggling with that role. That wasn’t why you got in the business, but it’s essential to how you succeed. There are three things I recommend for you in this role to help you be successful. 

Find your true story
One is, it all starts with being rock solid on the purpose of your business. You may know that, but often you’re really clear on what makes a good product or what makes a really good solution for your client, but you haven’t thought through the bigger picture of who exactly is it that we serve, very specifically, who loves what we do, who needs what we do, and what is it that we give them with our solution. That’s a step beyond what your solution does, and it’s really important to be crystal clear on that mission and the audience that you serve.

Take stock
Once you know that, that gives you clarity and focus. And with that filter, you wanna look at your organization and it may just be you, but it might be more. And you want to take stock of both yourself and your business. What is it that you absolutely need to do, you and nobody else can do? And it needs to be a small subset of all the things that need to be done. What could others do with the proper training, and what could others do with real effort? Because you can’t do everything and you need to find a solution to that. Look at those three levels, and the goal here is to be clear on in your role as an accidental CEO, what part of your product expertise do you keep and what are the other roles you need to also excel at? And how do you narrow the things on your plate so you can be successful at those things that have to be done? This also gives you clarity about who’s needed or what is needed to help you focus on the roles that have to be done by you.

Focus
And then the third recommendation is relentlessly focus in two ways. Focus your time. Time is the one thing you cannot grow or create… you have exactly as many hours as everybody else. How can you use your precious time in the absolute best way? So that means saying no to things to allow you to excel at the things that will make your company successful. The second way focus will help you is to keep the company focused on that true story and say no as a company to tempting distractions and focus everyone on the things that will help you achieve that success for your chosen clients.

So, yes, you can be an excellent CEO despite that not being your career ambition when you started in this passion that you have work with purpose and with focus, and you will achieve over time what you need to to be successful.