Grinding
“Every business calls for its leaders to grind on things; and grinding takes time. ”
Traditionally, CEOs would commonly share stories about the crazy long hours they put in and heroic decisions they had to make at 2 AM, etc. Acknowledging how hard they work and how much they sacrificed was a badge of honour. Lately, it seems, some CEOs are making bold statements about quite the opposite - how little they need to work or how few hours they put in each week. It’s starting to become more popular for the CEO to openly espouse their work-life balance; and there is nothing wrong with that. They might tell us they are tapping their raw intellect or using more modern productivity methods to deliver greater success than others. And this allows them to let their brains be otherwise engaged each day by 4:30 PM. I find this part curious, and a more than a little disingenuous.
To be fair, this message sells. The CEO that broadcasts their 38.5-hour work week is more than implying that everything in his or her business is all figured out. The subtext is: mine is a great business and the kind of place where you can work smart and expect to go home early too. It suggests that this CEO must be great at making decisions and scales really well. Clearly, they are on to some superior way of approaching life, success and leadership!
I want it to be true, but it never is.
I think that if you are a CEO claiming to have never worked late or on a weekend, then you were not doing the job or someone else was doing it for you. I have NEVER in 20 years seen a business work well where the leader was not working some of the longest hours in the company, sweating the details and relentlessly challenging their own opinions to keep it real. Every business calls for its leaders to grind on things; and grinding takes time.
As a leader, you grind because there is something new blocking you and it’s hard to understand. You grind because the decision in front of you has new risks that need to be characterized. You grind because nothing can be certain and you are not a robot, so you have to spend time with hard things to get your head around them. Even if you are hyper-efficient at research and employ a magic decision-making framework, grinding will still take time because ultimately grinding is not a solitary activity. As a leader, you can grind solo, but to make anything happen, you will then have to also grind collectively with your staff. This is true if you are a team leader or a CEO and it’s fundamental to how talented humans come together to break down issues into actionable things. If you are not grinding half the time or if you have somehow delegated all the grinding, then you can’t really understand your business and generate the clarity you need to drive performance.
So, I applaud those who somehow build healthy companies with half this effort. And I would love to see a world where everyone else can follow suit - but there will always be the grind. The need to grind does not always happen on schedule. Grinding has unpredictable outcomes, it is time consuming and a necessary part of doing anything new. This is true if you are a new leader, or a seasoned expert. Everybody grinds - I say let’s embrace it.
