Seven principles, each with one exercise you can run this month.
Most of what a CEO is paid for is the quality of their decisions. These seven principles come out of Vistage’s coaching of roughly 250,000 owners and chief executives over 65 years. None of them is a trick. Each one is a habit that has to be maintained.
Each principle below ends with a single exercise. Pick one and actually run it.
1
Reject shortcuts to growth
Treat your own development the way a serious athlete treats training: continuous, deliberate, and owned by you rather than delegated to someone else. The leaders who compound are the ones who keep asking what they still don’t see.
Two questions that surface blind spots
From AmyK Hutchens, leadership consultant and Vistage speaker
What am I missing? Having an answer for everything hardens into fixed thinking. The question forces the opposite posture.
Where’s the truth in the feedback? Ask for candid input, then take it without defending or interrupting. Do the real reflection afterward, alone, against this question.
2
Create space to work on the business
Running in reaction mode costs you perspective before it costs you anything else. Time away from the operation — to think, read and reset — is what keeps the long-term direction in view while the day-to-day gets handled.
Four ways to make room for reflective thinking
From Gair Maxwell, Vistage speaker on disruptive innovation
Book one day a month for critical thinking. Phone off, email closed, one subject: the business.
Get out of the office. Many leaders think better moving — a run, a trail, a gallery. Whatever clears your head.
Read outside the business shelf. Fiction lowers stress and tends to loosen up creative thinking.
Take an offsite that isn’t a conference room. Build it around something your team actually wants to do.
3
Challenge your thinking with fresh perspectives
Insular thinking and confirmation bias are occupational hazards of the corner office. The correction is other chief executives who have faced the same problem in a different industry — close enough to understand the role, far enough to have no institutional stake in your answer. In a room where candor is the norm, the effect compounds.
A drill for rooting out confirmation bias
From Thomas Redman, writing in Harvard Business Review
Assemble the data you would need to argue the opposite of your current position.
Set it beside the data you used to reach your original decision.
Re-decide against the combined set, not the half you started with.
4
Stoke curiosity
The strongest operators run high on curiosity and low on ego. They treat not knowing as workable rather than embarrassing, and they ask questions to pressure-test their own assumptions — not to steer the room toward a conclusion they already hold.
Five ways to ask better questions
From Beth Miller, Vistage executive coach
Drop leading questions. They return your own view.
Ask open-ended questions, and vary the kind you ask.
Ask questions that create clarity rather than display knowledge.
Ask questions that point to action instead of assigning blame.
Ask questions that make people reason, not just report.
5
Apply discipline to decision-making
Consistent decision quality comes from a repeatable process: instinct, experience and data, plus input from peers, mentors and the people closest to the work. Run every decision the same way and you get better calls in less time. Sorting by urgency and importance is the first move.
The Eisenhower matrix
Important and urgent — do it now.
Important, not urgent — schedule a time to do it.
Urgent, not important — delegate it. Who else can?
Neither — drop it.
6
Find a trusted guide
A coach or mentor who will challenge your assumptions, name your blind spots and hold you to what you said you’d do is a structural advantage, not a luxury. The best ones deal with the whole person, not just the executive. Look for someone who has actually held the seat, and ideally knows your market.
1095 journaling
From Philip Liebman, Vistage Chair
What did I do today that had a positive effect on someone I encountered?
What did I watch someone else do today that had a positive effect on someone?
What did I hear or read about — but not witness — where someone did something good for another person?
Why three a day
Three entries a day is 1,095 observations a year of things that are plainly good. Liebman’s argument is that the record itself changes what you believe is possible, and that leaders who can see something worth working toward tend to perform closer to their capacity.
7
Rise by helping others
Helping another leader think through their problem sharpens your own judgment, and it is how a group of peers becomes worth more than the sum of its members. The discipline is to help them find the real problem rather than treat the symptom they walked in with.
Finding the right problem
Ask for the background.
Ask what they’re actually trying to accomplish.
Ask why it matters.
Ask what they’ve already tried.
Ask where they want help.
Then stop. No observations, no suggestions. The questions do the work; the clarity has to be theirs.