How To Cultivate A Powerful CEO Mindset

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1. Choose Success Over Being Right

If you (and by you, I mean your ego) want to be right more than you want to be successful, you will limit your success. Just as there are 250 ways to wash dishes, there is rarely just one way to approach a challenge. When you dig your feet in on something, ask yourself if you want to be right or successful. Surely, there are many ways to approach the problem you’re struggling with.

2. Choose Culture First

Your company values and culture should guide all of your company decisions. Who should you work with? What kind of work should you do? Let your company values and culture guide your initiatives. This isn’t easy. This takes deep thought into what you want your company to be and commitment to those ideals, but the clarity it brings is priceless.

3. You’re Always In Training

A growth mindset is far more likely to produce the results you want than a fixed mindset. A growth mindset looks failure in the face and says, “I learn the lessons that propel me forward when I make mistakes, so let’s dance, failure!”

4. Process Is Your New Best Friend

Always be thinking about how to make your efforts a repeatable, trainable process. Processes are critical to building a sustainable business. You need a repeatable sales process to train your team. A client onboarding process will increase your client satisfaction. A marketing system will help you get more leads faster. (I’ll be focusing on marketing processes in my talk on How to Add Marketing to Your Strategy and Get Higher ROI on Your Marketing Dollars. You can Register here.) Go braid each other’s hair, or down some brewskis together, but do whatever it takes to make process your best friend.

5. Train and Delegate

If you’re trying to control everything, you are doing more of the actual work than you should and you’re headed for CEO burnout. No one will measure up to your expectations and nobody wants to be micromanaged, so stop that nonsense. Instead of trying to control how everything is done, your mindset should be, “Train and delegate.” Then just let go and let people do their jobs so you can do yours, which is to grow the company.