The CEO ‘Whatever it Takes’ Hangover
Every SaaS CEO I’ve ever worked with has decreed “do whatever it takes” during an important month or quarter. I’ve done it myself more than several times. So I get it. We just get to the point where we feel that “whatever it takes” is the wide-open empowerment needed to motivate people to take it to get the company to the next big milestone or target. And it works. So then maybe we do it again, and again. And again?
This is a cautionary tale for CEOs to use short-term “do whatever it takes” motivational tactics sparingly. To understand the consequences. And to manage the risks.
“Whatever it takes” first and foremost suggests that you’re not already doing the things to make your numbers.
Diminishing Returns of Short-Term Tactics
Before we get to the hangover from this party, I’d like to focus on the diminishing returns of the “whatever it takes” psychology. “Whatever it takes” first and foremost suggests that you’re not already doing the things to make your numbers or hit your deadlines. Once in a while, you can play that card. Do it more often than once in a while and you’re sending the message that your everyday way of operating is misguided. That doesn’t translate into confidence in you as the CEO, your leadership team, or your strategy.
But Dad Said I Could Do It
…people begin to wonder why you have the rules if you really don’t need them.
Another downside is the permission to blow up the rules. Again, occasionally blowing up processes is fun (maybe even therapeutic). Beyond that, people begin to wonder why you have the rules if you really don’t need them. Well-designed startup management processes are explicitly designed to scale, scale, scale. The whole point of the model is growing well, and nothing should impede that. So, if the very processes you’ve put in place to help you scale fast are actually in the way of that very mission, you’re sending a very dangerous signal to your organization.
Staying Off the Road to Bad Habits
To me, the kicker is that the organization needs to experience negative consequences from doing “whatever it takes”. Otherwise, you’re on the road to some very bad habits that may be arguably not-so-bad. And that’s very, very bad. Three-year scalability and value can be completely undermined by bad habits borne of short-term CEO management tactics.
Three-year scalability and value can be completely undermined by bad habits borne of short-term CEO management tactics.
Owning the Fallout
I believe in management transparency. And the hangover moment is a perfect opportunity to practice some. When the organization experiences the negative consequences of the CEO’s mandate to blow off the rules, she or he needs to own that responsibility.
One, rather than hide them, you need to make everyone aware of those consequences.
And two, you need to take the full burden of accountability for them.
This helps frame short-term thinking in longer-term value and helps you pull your people and processes back to the things that will make your strategy truly and sustainably successful.
Sharing the Why behind the Whatever
Next, you need your organization to understand why it was so important to blow off the rules. (Hopefully, you had a good reason.) Perhaps you needed to make a number to qualify for more funding to keep growing. Or maybe sales or customer success was so painfully close to making their stretch bonuses that you just wanted to make sure they got there. Maybe you contractually promised a big new feature by a certain date to land a big customer. Hopefully, the big picture makes sense, and the reason was valid.
And hopefully, it wasn’t that your goals were baseless and unrealistic. That would trackback to mismanagement. But, if you did make that mistake, own it. Learn from it. And let everyone know how it happened and how you’re changing to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
What you don’t want is the perception that everything was normal and you popped the stack without a reason. Disrupting people’s jobs for fun isn’t the best way to inspire confidence and retain talent. Disrupting their jobs for the greater good has a much better ring to it.
Steering Clear of the Hangover
To summarize, at some point, your CEO motivation is going to sound a lot like “do whatever it takes” or “just make it happen” with no regard for process, operating cadence, or cultural norms. The keys to invoking that tactic lie in understanding and managing the consequences.
Use this short-term tactics sparingly
Justify the reason for the disruption through transparency and discussion
Own the consequences if there any
Explain why exceptions can’t be norms
As long as you can keep short-term tactics from causing you long-term pain, use “whatever it takes” to make your point. But the moment the organization crosses that line from order to chaos, it also crosses from short-term value-building to long-term value-crushing. Three-year scalability isn’t served with mayhem. Keep the wheels on to keep rolling.