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As the CEO of your business, delegating projects and tasks is part of your daily routine. Unfortunately, that daily routine can also include occasional conflicts with your CFO. In this episode, Cameron offers his thoughts on the importance of delegation, as well as a few tips for managing conflicts – simple models that you can use to defuse any situation and come out stronger.
In This Episode You’ll Learn:
- Why the second in command’s role is to help make the CEO a better executive.
- Why so many CEO’s have difficulty with delegation.
- How to work through ideological differences and manage conflicts in a healthy way.
Resources:
Connect with Cameron: Website | LinkedIn
Get Cameron’s latest book: The Second in Command – Unleash the Power of Your COO
Subscribe to our YouTube channel – Second in Command Podcast on YouTube
Get Cameron’s online course – Invest In Your Leaders
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Before we jump into the episode, you need to know about two important ways that we can help you and your company grow. 1) Check out the COO Alliance. It’s for COOs, Presidents, VP ops, or whoever’s your company’s Second in Command to the CEO. The COO Alliance is the world’s leading community for the second in command, and it gives COOs the tools and connections to grow themselves and the company. Head over to COOAlliance.com to learn more about our members and the results, the program, and our 10x guarantee. If you qualify for membership, you can set up a complimentary call with our team to discuss if it’s right for you. I’ll tell you about number two in a bit, but first, let’s start this episode.
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As CEO, you’re always delegating projects and tasks, and you likely also have occasional conflicts with your COO. In this episode, you’re going to read my thoughts about both. Delegating is a key skill, and I’ll give you the secrets. Managing conflict is similar. There are simple models that you can use to diffuse any situation and come out stronger. You can also just keep doing what you’ve been doing and being frustrated with it as well or you can learn my secrets. You’re going to love this episode.
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CEOs are, by nature, very creative. They’re often wonderful relationship builder people, but they can have a hard time letting go, especially founder CEOs. I work for a company with cofounders and my CEO is a wonderful visionary, but delegating to others, and in addition, it becomes a challenge sometimes with making sure that the team is more solution focused. When the team runs into a problem, they will say like, “I have this problem. Here you go, CEO. Fix it for me.” She does. Part of my role is to help break that. Do you have any advice to help me accelerate that so that we can get into a better spot?
It’s very similar to raising kids. We all went through this. When you’re raising young children, you do everything for them. You pour the glass of juice, you make every sandwich, you make every egg. At some point, you’re like, “Pick up your own toys. Put your own toys in the toy box. Make your own bed.”
I used to have to brush my kids’ teeth. Teach them how to brush their teeth and how to do their own showering. Our job is to grow our children to become happy, healthy, independent adults so they can get out of the house. Our job as leaders is to do the same with the CEO. We have to grow the CEO’s skills to be a better executive, chief energizing officer, delegating, and growing people.
Task Delegation: We have to grow the CEO’s skills to be a better executive, to be a better chief energizing officer, to be better at delegating, and to be better at growing people.
Our job is to grow our employees so they can make decisions aligned with core values and core purpose within their budgets, and have confidence in their decisions and support them. It’s a skill, and I actually talk about that. By the way, I would get 3 to 5 of your managers going through the Invest in Your Leaders course.
Anybody who’s a COO, this is the stuff we talk about all the time at the COO Alliance. You should really look at getting yourself involved in that. Tell the CEO to really work at growing people, their confidence, their skills, and not doing it for them. Years ago, my son, who was fifteen at the time, came to me and said, “Dad, can you make me an egg?” I said, “Yeah, I can make an egg.”
I went out to the kitchen and I said, “Grab two eggs out of the fridge.” He goes, “I only want one egg.” I said, “I’m going to make you an egg. You’re going to make me an egg.” He started laughing. I said, “Grab the frying pan. Put some butter in the frying pan about this much. Swirl it around. Here’s how you crack an egg. Okay. You crack an egg.”
I literally did it and then we sat down and ate an egg together. The next day I came in and he was making an omelet from scratch. I’m like, “Where’d you learn how to do an omelet?” He goes, “I knew you weren’t going to do it, so I looked it up on YouTube.” I’m like, “Good for you.” We need to do that with our employees always do it as like making lunch for them until they’re 35 years old and that gets old really fast.
It does. It’s just a challenge getting the team to do one thing and then the CEO aligning. I appreciate that very much. Thank you.
Get the team and the CEO both going through the course and they’ll both learn how to coach and how to be coached. They’ll both learn about one-on-one coaching and delegation, some strong skills in there for both.
Wonderful. Thank you so much.
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I wrote another book. This book isn’t just another book for me. It’s actually for you, the visionary CEO that is looking to grow and scale their business. This book is called The Second in Command: Unleash the Power of Your COO. As a Founder and CEO, you’re used to making all the decisions, but the business you have isn’t the one you envision. We’ve all been there. The thing is, you know what you need. You need a COO, someone who can help you build the company you don’t know how to build on your own.
The Second in Command: Unleash the Power of Your COO by Cameron Herold
The Second in Command is your go-to guidebook when you’re ready to scale up. I go through all the details in every aspect of the process, from knowing when you need to hire a COO to identifying and hiring the right candidate and successfully onboarding and working with them and so much more. Go to www.CameronHerold.com/NewBook to get your copy.
The Second in Command reveals the benefits COOs bring to companies and explores the many ways a COO Mastermind or a COO forum can help grow the COO skills. You’ll meet the types of COOs and understand the role each type plays, discover how to bring on a COO into your company with the least disruption and avoid common problems before they arrive. There’s no need to go it alone. We’re in this together. Now, back to the show.
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Gerard, you’ve got a question.
Thanks. You were at 1-800-GOT-JUNK? where you and Brian Scudamore were two parts of an arrowhead as COO and CEO. Whenever you had an ideological difference in certain things, do you have any anecdotal insights or thoughts briefly on how you work things out from those honest scenarios, in an isolated scenario, for instance?
First off, Brian and I were best friends. Three months before I joined him, he was the best man at my wedding. We had an unfair advantage because we had been in a CEO Mastermind group together for four years as part of the Entrepreneur’s Organization. He was the best man at my wedding three months before I joined him to start working with him as a COO.
We had an extraordinary amount of trust and an extraordinary amount of respect for each other. We were friends and we did it together. We leaned back on that relationship a lot. We went for runs in the morning and went for beers together. We hung out with each other’s families. We really spent time together as people because we liked each other as people, and we leaned heavily on that relationship first.
We had some coaches. We worked with a couple of relationship coaches who worked with us on communication and rebuilding trust. We would do a lot of walks and talks where we would disconnect from the office and go for a walk. We’d go for runs together and just disconnect. I think leaning on trust and on the relationship is what we did most to get us through the tough times. One of the other modules in the Invest in Your Leaders course is Conflict Management. It talks about how to actually manage conflict in a really healthy way.
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Hopefully, that was helpful for all of you. I just wanted to do an Ask Me Anything for all the amazing second in commands out there, COOs. Subscribe to this show. Definitely look at joining the COO Alliance if you’re $5 million or greater. Check out the Invest in Your Leaders course. Most of all, remember none of this matters. We’re all going to die. This is just what we do to make money. Let’s have some fun along the journey because this is what we do to make a buck. Have fun, everybody.
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