PROTECTING WHAT YOU BUILT
There’s no doubt that the culture, writ large, both in the documented things like core values or key leadership principles and the unwritten rules of how we do things here — the rules of the game, so to speak — those are heavily influenced by the CEO, the top leader in the company.
To let go of that, I think, is a mistake.
If your desire is to hire professional management, move on and be the owner, and then own other properties or do other things with your time, I think that that’s fine. I would just say that, again, the gap is that if you want the culture that you created, that you spent so much time forming, building that team, creating this thing, this system, this business –and then you expect it to stay that same way with you being perhaps disconnected or doing other things — just please don’t be surprised when you come back a year later and it’s a different culture.
Because that leader, whether it’s your integrator, your COO, business partner, someone you’ve hired, whoever is running the business day-to-day when you’re not there, will slowly, over time, change that culture because of the influence they have.
As CEO, I’m making decisions of what’s acceptable, what’s not acceptable, what behaviors we want to recognize or reward, which we want to downplay or correct.
I don’t think you can overstate the influence that the CEO has on the culture. And I think if you want to maintain that, you can certainly build it through your leadership team, through the middle management layer, throughout the entire organization. But you, the CEO, are the living, walking, breathing, talking example of that culture.
What you do helps define that culture, and influences it. And what you don’t do, or what you do that pulls away from what you’ve stated is your culture, will erode that too.
And so, a gap can exist when a CEO is too externally focused or too disconnected from the business. Whoever steps in to fill that gap will then shape the culture into the future.
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