My first CEO position was for a turnaround in aviation. 3 months in, I had a pre-planned honeymoon to Cuba (i.e. very little internet access) and we had an acute liquidity crisis. An additional 3 months later, COVID hit. Needless to say, I’ve gone through hell and back as CEO.
I vividly remember a former employee looking at me, stating:
You’ve gone through more in your first year as CEO than most do during a life time
I laughed, but as I was in the middle of it, I didn’t have headspace enough to fully appreciate it. Now I see how right he was.
My 3 toughest decisions
Being the CEO at pivotal points in organizations’ lives, means that I’ve made a lot of tough calls along the way. Three of which have stuck with me more than the others.
- Letting go of people I believed in
- Admitting that the board and I had opposing views of what success looked like
- Sending an e-mail that pushed us to a point of no return
Let me break them down, one by one.
1. Letting go of people I believed in
As COVID hit, our business came to a complete halt. It soon became clear that we had way too much staff. The first cut meant letting all consultants go. That one swept by me without much after thought. Looking back, I’m pretty sure the decision was made for me, by the managers in my team (a gold star to them for that decision btw).
The second round was the first of our permanent employees. We laid the puzzle to figure out how we could sort the business we did have with the competences we had. We found redundancies and acted swiftly. It was hard, but necessary.
The third round was by far the hardest. I, and everyone on the team, had believed our first rounds had been enough. They weren’t. In the second round, we looked at operations and how to secure key competence to keep it going. As the third round came, we had to cut deeper than that. We had to start looking at how to survive our business without people who played an important role in everyday operations.
We were exhausted from having fought for several months (little did we know that we were heading for almost 1.5 more years of being in the trenches). It was hard to see how we would even be able to keep the company going by cutting more. But we needed to cut.
The low point was when I came to the hangar, ready to have all the tough conversations. I met a lovely member of my team at the coffee machine. ”So, is today the day I lose my job?” He asked jokingly. I knew it was. He was 5th on our list. I pushed him up to first. Brought him in straight away and delivered the news. He was on the verge of tears. So was I. That started one of the toughest days of my career.
And the biggest lesson from all of this is that it is way better to let people go and re-hire them than making several rounds of staff cuts.
2. Admitting that the board and I weren’t aligned
In my second CEO position, I felt we had it all lined up. I had just stepped down from the chair position to, under a limited time, accelerate the business and re-establish operations across the country.
And I fought hard to make it work. The guiding star, to inspire diversity in engineering, was important to me. As was it to change the industry to prepare for women and marginalized groups to thrive there. Prior to me stepping into the Managing Director position, we had discussed several ideas on how to address this issue beyond what we were already doing.
So, I went with it. Because to me, it was equally important to inspire as to change conditions in the industry. But somewhere along the way, it became evident that the definition of what success looked like had never been formally established. So the board and I had formed different versions. Thus, we were working towards different targets.
Admitting this was painful. Because I believed, and believe in the cause. I wanted to make it work. But the lesson is clear to me: vision is not everything. Unless you can clearly agree on what that vision entails, alignment is hard to achieve. And working without alignment is a foolproof way to cause friction.
At the end of the day, we parted ways. It was one of the hardest blows in my career, but the lesson on alignment and clarity lives in me ever since.
3. Sending that one e-mail that changed it all
My fingers trembled as I pressed sent. For months, I had waited on two key, structural decisions from the our owners.
- Are we allowed to outsource tech?
- Can we make organizational changes?
It had been 6 months (!!) since the board made the decision to support my plans for both. 4 months since they agreed to an aggressive investment strategy for product development. But the owner had pulled the handbrake, because neither was according to the operational model and processes in the corporation.
For almost 6 months, we had been in limbo. Waiting for a decision that could get us to work for the future. 6 months of idle operations. The impact it had on energy, motivation, and morale is not hard to figure out.
I had told the team over and over that the decision was pending. “Any day now,” I said more than once. And believed it every time. Until I stopped. And decided to send the email that I knew would accelerate it all.
In the e-mail I pushed for a decision before a certain date. The date was only a few weeks away. I explicitly told the chairman: “If I don’t get a decision by then, we have to sit down and discuss the expectations you put on this business.”
I then went for a run to handle the nerves of pressing send. When I came home, I found a simple e-mail, where the chairman thanked me for being frank. And promised me a decision.
The decision came before the deadline. They were folding the company. The decision I had feared the most had been pushed through. The team would lose their jobs. I would lose mine. Yet, I felt relief. Because at least I knew that the battle could never have been won. And I just saved us all years of headache trying to.
The difficult part was never intellectual
In hindsight, I clearly see one common thread along all these decisions. In neither, the intellectual part was difficult. It was actually rather the opposite. All information pointed in the same direction.
I know all three decisions had to be made months before I finally made them. I waited too long for the staff cut. I pushed too long under conditions that didn’t work. And I gave the owner too much time to sort everything.
So why did I wait if I knew what was needed?
What I wish I had back then
With time and space I see clearly what I would have needed back then.
- It wasn’t information
- It wasn’t time
It was courage.
All the toughest decisions I’ve made have been irreversible and the lesser of two evils. The answer hasn’t always been crystal clear, but clear enough. Yet, I have hesitated. Because it took me some time to build the courage I needed to take the leap.
And I now see it everywhere. Some CEO are faster than me. Others are slower. Some avoid these decisions altogether (I definitely do not recommend).
The time it took me, and a lot of other CEOs out there, to build the courage has a cost. It does not only cost money, but also time, trust, and a whole lot of energy.
While I acknowledge that courage can’t be created over night, I know the process can be accelerated. I’ve witnessed it in myself and others. I just haven’t had it consistently enough to land the tough decisions on time.
A final note
Being CEO is an extremely hard job. You’re supposed to have the answers to a lot of things you have no clue about. You’re supposed to lead yourself and others, while making decisions no one else has the mandate to make.
And the thing about these decisions is that they are rarely divided into good and bad ones. Either you’re faced with several decent ones or no decent ones at all. No wonder it can be hard to sleep sometimes.
Courage is essential to successfully run a company. And either you let it build over time or you find ways to accelerate it. Because you know, deep down, that the cost of letting it build over time is too high.