Top 3 Things I Learned at my CEO Retreat

I just wrapped up my CEO retreat here in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin with my CEO group.

My CEO group has been so instrumental in the growth of Thank God It’s Natural (tgin) as a company over the past three years. One of the key things they helped me to accomplish is to STOP working in the business and START working on the business. They are the people that I can come to with any challenge whether it relates to an employee, compensation, business strategy, etc. It’s so awesome being part of a team of other CEOs, where you feel you can be vulnerable both on the personal and professional level without feeling threatened because you’re competitors. After the end of the retreat, I realized that I need to put together a budget for 2020, and work on comp plans for key employees for the rest of the year.  Those were my tactical takeaways, but here are my high level strategic takeaways:

1. Have a vision and share with your team.

Your team can’t go where you want them to if you don’t share it. Many CEOs, myself included, have their vision in their head and have not written them down and shared them with the team. As a result, neither they nor their team are clear on where the company is headed. I’ll be posting an exercise to my blog on crafting and sharing your vision for your company with your team.

2. If you say it out loud, your fears can’t control you.  Sometimes part of the reason we don’t share things with others, including our employees or teams, is because we’re scared of the outcome. That can be failure or a bad result. Owning your fears, and acknowledging they exist is the first step to conquering them.

3. Know your communication style and the style of your key reports. Adapt when necessary to make better communication. On the DISC profile, I’m a D, which means I can be direct, driven and focused on results, but not that sensitive to the feelings of others. This means I have to adapt and be a little bit more flexible when it comes to how I work with my team. I’m learning that you have to ask yourself are you trying to get your way or are you trying to get results. Getting results means you have to be adaptable as well as aware of your blind spots.

Opening up myself to this type of accountability has created new levels within my business and team thus inspiring me to plan a company retreat for my key team players which I will share on later.