Multiply Yourself

A good management system lets the CEO be many places at once.

"What will you do to change the behavior of the individual contributors in your organization?"

This is a question I frequently ask CEOs I work with. Usually the answer is a blank stare. Most CEOs (including my younger self) lack a reliable way to influence what employees DO from day to day.

But those individual contributors are the people:

• building your product

• delivering your product

• interfacing with your customers

And so on. In a business at scale, they are many layers removed from you. This is why the CEO needs a mechanism for changing what people do.

What is this mechanism? It's your management system. The management system is the mechanism you use to:

1. Establish clear strategic intent at the top of the company.

2. Train managers to align employees with that strategy each quarter.

3. Equip them to coach and hold people accountable to meaningful commitments.

Without that mechanism, centered on excellent people managers at every level, the CEO has very little leverage over what goes on in their own company.

Managers as Extensions of CEO Intent

The managers within your company, when properly equipped, are extensions of the CEO's intent throughout the organization. They become your proxies in countless daily decisions and interactions where you physically cannot be present.

In a 500-person company, the CEO can directly influence perhaps 10-15 people on a regular basis. But what about the other 485+ employees? The only scalable solution is to create a cascading system of aligned management.

To create your own system of management proxies, focus on these key elements: