092: NOT Lonely at the Top

For Love of Team™ | Winston Faircloth

In this week’s episode, we talk about a familiar expression that founders and leaders of businesses often face. “It’s lonely at the top”.
Tim Cook, CEO of Apple famously said, “It’s sort of a lonely job. The adage that it’s lonely — the CEO job is lonely — is accurate in a lot of ways. I’m not looking for any sympathy. You have to recognize that you have blind spots. We all do.”
As Cook notes, it’s in these blind spots where the feeling of loneliness can be most apparent.
As a business grows, a founder can no longer keep up wearing all of the hats so a TEAM begins to form.
Even with the most capable leadership team, there is only ONE person who has their mind on the team -- YOU the founder. And in many established organizations, the founder/CEO is also the only person with a deep, historic understanding of all of the key performance indicators (KPIs) over time.
Many leadership team members know their part but they don’t see the entire picture in the same way you do -- blending an overall mastery of the individual trends with the context and history of the road that brings you to this moment in your business, which can leave you feeling isolated.
There is a way to NOT be lonely at the top - We call it UNLOCK Innovation™
UNLOCK Innovation™ starts by rounding up the data points which tell the story about your business over the past 3-5 years. And over a two-day intensive workshop, we unpack those metrics, discovering trends and coming to a shared understanding about which ones are most important to the business.
Want to learn more? Listen to the full episode now!