You likely haven’t heard of a company with 500 CEOs, but I’m here to tell you why you should start thinking about each and every one of your employees as a CEO. An environment where each employee is the CEO of his or her domain gives employees full accountability to their success and deliverables. I believe in leading through partnership, and see my coworkers – or fellow CEOs, if you will – as partners with whom I have common goals and aspirations. In order to operate as a partnership, we need two things: ownership and transparency.
As a startup, employees have equity in SundaySky, thus a sense of ownership in the company and over their role. I also think it’s beneficial for employees to see the company through my eyes, meaning they should have the full perspective of the overall activity and strategy of the company, not just what’s happening on their team. Operating as CEO of their domain enables employees to lead their work initiatives to bring about effective change and results for our business.
In order for everyone on the team to have a full perspective of the company strategy, transparency is key. Our leadership team encourages transparency across the board while making sure that everyone is aware of our strategy, goals and challenges. We’ve celebrated many successes in the eight years since our founding, but we’ve commiserated over challenges and failures nearly as often. Having challenges is only natural to a company like ours. Instead of hiding them I prefer to create internal awareness in regards to these challenges and get everyone’s help in overcoming them. There’s power in numbers.
Along that thought of having power in numbers, the strength of our company depends on all of our smart, dedicated team members. I may have the title of CEO, but I know that I am not the subject matter expert on all of our activities. The single thing in which I am mostly proud of at SundaySky is the quality of our team. I know that many of my co-workers are smarter, more skilled and more experienced than I am. I am learning from them all the time and am focused on providing them with the infrastructure to excel. Socrates, one of the leaders I most admire, said that the reason he is smart is because he “knows that he doesn’t know.”
The only way our company will succeed is if we have the right talents and let them excel while providing them the support they need. Each and every person who works for SundaySky has a significant impact on the success of the company and our company culture enables people to manage their activities with that mindset.
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