CEOs and Time

I recently spoke to a CEO about the legal issues he was dealing with. He was referred to me by his coach because the amount of time the CEO was spending on contract issues was eating into the time he should be spending on things that would really move the business forward.

The contracts the CEO was dealing with were complex and high value. But thinking about the CEO’s workload it struck me that there were three things to consider.

Urgent v Important.  The CEO was dealing with urgent issues, and these were distracting him from his leadership role. The first task was to get work off his plate so he had more hours in the day to do the important and impactful CEO-stuff.

Process. CEO time is precious. Before matters reach the CEO, there needs to be a filtering process so that anything which can be decided below the CEO level is, in fact, decided below the CEO level. Clearly, there was something wrong in the internal process.

Legal. If you are the GC in a company, you rarely get asked to do the things that are legally the most important: 99% of the things you get asked for are in the urgent, but not important, category. Most people don’t get legal stuff, and it’s up to the GC to identify what’s important and get it done. Because of the scenario that this particular CEO was operating in, there was a good chance that the GC was not addressing all the necessary issues.