Happy CEO, unhappy staff: understanding the engine of your company

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I have been involved in many companies, but only once as a CEO.

That experience taught me one lesson really sharply: the CEO has to know how every part of his or her business interacts.

He has to understand how sales relates to marketing, development to them both and finance to all three. He is overseeing a complex, inter-connected machine that needs to work in harmony to deliver on his strategic vision.

That’s the easy part

I realised relatively early that understanding how the business functioned was the easy part. At least it was much easier than the hard part: making everyone else understand why each part of the business mattered.

I can explain this using a car analogy. The only problem is that it talks about departments as cogs, a deeply unfashionable concept in our knowledge economy. But here goes, I’m going to do it anyway.

Every department is a cog

To the CEO at the wheel of his precision-engineered corporate machine, life is good. He is accelerating down the autobahn, foot to the floor, the wind buffeting his face as he revels in his exhilarating ride.

Zoom further in, under the hood, and you see a different picture. To a cog in an engine, there are two types of other cog: those that give them energy, and those that take it away.

The ones that take energy away are BAD. The marketing team that wants a dedicated microsite to tempt new customers. The business development bods who want a bespoke integration for a big client. The finance department who want everything allocated to cost codes and projects. The tech team who want to be left alone to develop and not have their time wasted by all these side projects.

The truth is that to propel the car at 140 mph down the autobahn, these cogs have to work together. Taking the energy from the previous part of the chain, working on it, then passing it on.

The easiest life for a cog is if it can take the energy and keep it, disconnected from the energy-sapping cogs that surround it. Easy for the cogs, perhaps, but the CEO’s ride would come to rapid halt.

I’ve concluded that the job of a CEO is (alongside recruitment and capital raising) to make everyone understand how they are vital to the whole. To quash the natural silos that make the marketing team and development team bitter enemies; to make the finance department understand that their job is to help the whole thing run smoothly, and to make everyone else understand how they make it happen.

There’s no right way to do it

You can convince the parts of your business that they need to respect all the other parts in many different ways. You can explain how the business interacts; you can tell them to shut up and get on with it; you can inspire them to work for you irrespective of the downside. Whatever works for you.

The important thing to remember is that, as you sit at the wheel, having fun, there are a lot of people sweating blood and tears to keep you there. You should do everything in your power to help them understand why the whole machine, working in harmony, is good for everyone.

Otherwise the friction in the system will eventually overwhelm you.

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