Hey. Hey. And welcome back to the Scale to 7 podcast. This is episode number 73. And here's the thing. I know that you have the title of CEO if you own a business, but the question is, are you spending your time like a CEO. Most of you are not. And I can say that with confidence because I've worked with hundreds of CEOs, maybe even 1,000, I'm not counting these days, but the point is I work with so many of you that I know that you're feeling trapped inside of your business.

And if a video camera followed you around, what would be captured in that footage would not make people think that you're the CEO. Think about it. What job title would people who watch that video footage think that you have? I doubt it would be CEO. And some of you might be thinking or asking, what does a CEO even do? I'm not even sure what I should be doing. If I'm not doing the work in the business, what am I supposed to be doing? What does that even look like? And I get that question a lot too. So many of you, as you begin to Delegate, and you think about getting things off of your plate, you ask that question, what am I supposed to do with my time now? I'm not even clear on that. And I'm gonna help you with that today. Let's get into these responsibilities because this is where you should be spending at least some of your time.

And the amount of time is really gonna increase the closer you get to 7 figures. So if you're just crossing the 6 figure mark, don't feel like your entire job description needs an overhaul, but you want to just take some baby steps and start spending some time on each of these elements and then as you, again, get closer to that 7 figure mark, as you cross that 7 figure mark, you should see all of these represented in your responsibilities, in your day to day schedule, and you should be dedicating more and more time to it. So first up is vision. Your first responsibility is all about making sure that you have clarity on your own vision for life and business, yes, both, because if you are just like me, then you believe that you're building this business to support the life that you want and not the other way around, so you need that clarity on the big picture vision for both your life and business, and then you need to be communicating that vision to your team consistently. If you aren't clear on the short, medium, and long term vision for your life and business, or you haven't been communicating that vision clearly to your team, that I want you to go add that time to your calendar right now to get clear on your vision. Go spend a block of time just thinking about it, getting it out of your head and onto paper, and then I want you to communicate that to your team in all of your meetings. I want you to really vision cast and help them see the bigger picture of where you're headed. So that's the first responsibility.

It's all about vision. Your 2nd CEO level responsibility is team leadership. And this is different than team management. It's all about the big picture, leading your team. Now, if you don't have a second in command or an operator in your business and you're still in that role, then you're still going to have the management responsibilities as well. But I just wanna note here that the management side of a team is not part of the core CEO responsibility list. And some of you are probably just sighing with relief because for many of you, I've heard that you avoid hiring, you avoid delegating, you avoid managing because you don't feel great at it. It's not your strength.

You really don't want to deal with managing a team day to day. And I think that that's okay now. You need to learn some of that, and we can teach you what you need to know. But, ultimately, as you get closer to 7 figures, you're going to build out a leadership team to help. What you do need to do, what is part of your CEO level responsibility is leadership, not just the management, but leadership. So it's not about managing all the details. It's not about managing all of the projects and the deadlines. That's the stuff that you'll hire someone to help with, but leading your team it's your responsibility.

It's your job to really help motivate them and to really drive the business forward. Now the way that we do that, the way that we teach our framework is alignment, autonomy, accountability. 1st, you wanna get aligned, which is why I mentioned vision, but this is also going to include values and goals. It's going to include expectations. It's going to include the project details as well if you're getting into the management side, but big picture, you're looking at vision, values, mission, and just overall expectations, and you wanna make sure you're aligned on that. You wanna make sure that your team and their leader, whether that's you or someone else managing them, are aligned on strategy and just approach to accomplish a goal. Then you wanna give them space. That's the autonomy piece, giving them room, allowing them to do what they need to do, allowing them to learn and fumble and fail a little bit, still being there to support them, of course, but giving them space to learn and grow.

But not just staying away, providing that accountability, which is that third Peace, you have to follow-up, you have to make sure things ultimately get done, and that they are held accountable to not just checking a box, but creating results, creating an outcome based on their responsibilities. When you focus on team leadership and you really have this dialed in, you've got alignment, autonomy, and accountability, all 3 dialed in, then not only are you going to have greater trust in your team, but you are gonna see that your team is developing and growing and just getting better and better, which only increases trust. And it's just this big cycle where each of those feed into the other, you trust the team more, they learn more and develop more, you trust in them more, etcetera, etcetera. So it's gonna create this great symbiotic relationship once you got all 3 of those pieces dialed in. The 3rd responsibility for a CEO is thought leadership. I want you to think right now, are you feeling like a best kept secret? Do you know exactly what you are known for in your industry? Do you feel like you're an expert, or do you have imposter syndrome? And really question whether you have anything new or exciting or different or unique to add to the space. If not, thought leadership is an area for you to develop in. I believe strongly that this is something that you need to bring to the table as a CEO, and that means developing some intellectual property, some proprietary frameworks.

And so a few questions around that are how much of that do you have in place? Are you protecting it? And how much does your intellectual property depend on you to create. Can you really share the vision and then have a team help develop that, but continually working on and leading the development of intellectual property within your company, that's concepts, frameworks, systems, processes, all of that that belong to you. 4th up is relationship building. If right now you are focused internally, in your business only, your entire focus is in the business looking inward and not looking outward to other partnerships not networking, connecting with other leaders outside of your company, not looking for opportunities that are mutually beneficial to help grow your business alongside someone else's, then this is another area for you to work on. So you want to build those relationships. You want to, as you elevate in your role of CEO, start to look more outward and hire a team that can focus on the internal side of the business, and running the day to day operations. Responsibility number 5 is strategic decision making. This is huge for CEOs.

You need to be very intentional and strategic in your business. You need to really guide the decision making at a high level, but only at that high level. That means only you focusing on and deciding the things that only you can do. Right? Only you should make decisions that only you can make, and that means not making decisions that other people on your team can make. This is going to help you prevent decision fatigue where the more decisions you make, the lower quality decisions you make. This is going to help your team again develop. So this goes back to team leadership. You're developing your team by helping them learn how to think and make decisions from some of the same criteria, so that decisions are made consistently in your business, whether you're making them or another leader is making them.

A big part of this is first making sure that you're making consistent decisions, and you're using that criteria when you're thinking through decisions. Right, you've gotta have that clear vision, clear values, clear goals, clear strategy that you're aligning your decisions to, and filtering essentially every decision through. If you're still struggling with decision making and either you're overwhelmed by the and find yourself in a place of analysis paralysis. Maybe you make decisions, but you second guess them and you're giving your entire company whiplash as you change course and direction constantly, during either of those places, strategic decision making is going to be an important focus for you. And you really need to get to a place where you have competent ownership of decisions. You can make decisions that do weigh the pros and cons and do, you know, consider the factors that are important, but you can still make those decisions relatively quickly and confidently. Not too fast, but not too slow, and most importantly, confidently. Now there's, again, a different level of decision making that you need to make versus the team needs to make.

And some of those decisions that the piece of criteria that I use is, is this permanent? If it's permanent, it's a one time decision, then I need to be making that decision. But if it's something that can be easily changed, then that may be something I can delegate. Right? You need to learn how to delegate decisions as well, and you stay focused on the highest level strategic decision making. Alright, these are the 5 responsibilities of a CEO. I want you to think, how are you doing on these? Are you spending time on all of these? If you had to rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 for each of these responsibilities, how are you doing? How would you rate yourself for vision, team leadership, thought leadership, relationship building, and strategic decision making.