How a DIY Mindset Holds CEOs Back

In this 5 Minute Growth Tips article series, I’ve shared overviews of the key best practices for growing a thriving company.

Yet, you may be asking, “how can I implement each of these best practices? how can I actually make them happen?”

For example, how do I define the right functions on my leadership team? How can we set clear priorities for change and improvement? Or, how do I get my leadership team members to change their mindset?

One way is to figure things out yourself. Another way is to use an outside expert, like a coach, consultant or advisor, to guide you step by step.

Many leaders try to figure things out themselves.

Some of these leaders don’t know there are experts who could help them in these areas. Others have had a bad experience with an outside expert and are nervous about trying it again. Other leaders are concerned about what the cost might be. 

But oftentimes, leaders think it’s their job as a CEO to have ALL the answers.

While figuring things out yourself is certainly an option, it’s the “long road option”. 

For sure, CEOs and owners can get there on their own, over time. They’re smart, passionate, energetic and fast learners.

But they’ll get there a lot faster with the support of an experienced external advisor.

As I mentioned in my previous article in this series, business owners and CEOs often have a high internal locus of control, meaning they believe they have control within themselves to make things happen and influence the world around them.

Sometimes, this belief shows up in a counter-productive way, where they influence the world by doing too much themselves, rather than getting help from others. As a result, they become the bottleneck, slowing down the company’s development, growth and profitability.

That said, let’s consider the option of figuring things out on their own.

They could read a book that includes dozens of these best practices in one convenient, integrated package, tailored specifically for mid-size companies...like Scaling Up or the 7 Attributes of Agile Growth monographs. And then they could read a book or two on each of those best practices, ideally with how-to guidance, and implement them with their team over time.

They could even attend a workshop where they get a chance to practice a bit with a handful of best practices.

With each of these approaches, it’s then up to the CEO alone to implement their learning in their team and company.

So, what are the pros and cons of this DIY approach?

Some pros are:

• The hard cost is minimal: only the cost of books or training.
• There can be a sense of autonomy and control.
• It can feel flexible and like they can go at their own pace.

Some cons include:

• Given this will be the CEO’s first time implementing a particular best practice, they’ll likely have to make more than one attempt to achieve their desired result. Every additional attempt will take time and will have an opportunity cost such as not seizing other opportunities or not implementing other best practices.
• Every additional attempt will be faced with skepticism, or even cynicism, by their team and other managers and employees, leading to resistance and yet more difficulty implementing that best practice and others in the future.
• Even if the CEO implements a best practice effectively, it may be out of sequence, meaning, it may require other best practices be implemented first in order for it to produce results. For example, implementing a best practice weekly leadership team meeting structure will have limited benefit without first defining clear metrics and targets for the team and specific priorities to accomplish over a certain time period.

In short, the devil is in the details. And there are alot of them.

And why is that?

One word: complexity. 

Some specific best practices are straightforward, like defining a goal. You can Google how to set a goal like you can Google how to change the oil in an engine. These narrow, individual problems have a straightforward, known solution that applies in most situations.

However, improving how leaders lead and how companies operate isn’t so straightforward. These changes involve a variety of interconnected organizational and leadership best practices. 

For example, strengthening accountability takes much more than setting a goal. And how the goal is set depends on other things like clearly defined individual accountabilities.

Improving how a company operates is more like tuning a whole modern day engine than just changing the oil. There are multiple parts involved and multiple interacting solutions needed. And only an expert mechanic can help diagnose the issues and determine the solutions.

There are a few other disadvantages to a DIY approach:

• The CEO and their leadership team may have blindspots about some of their own actions or behaviors that are contributing to a particular challenge. For example, they may not be aware that their leadership team conversations bounce around from topic to topic. So the team solves few problems and makes few decisions. Only an experienced, outside set of eyes would be able to point that out.
• Getting leadership team buyin to something new and different is more difficult for a CEO when they are not perceived as being an expert. Busy team members will be hesitant to commit to the new ways of doing things if they don’t have enough confidence that it is needed, that it’s the right solution or that it will be implemented effectively, work and be worth the effort.
• The CEO has no one holding them accountable for successfully implementing what they’ve learned. There likely isn’t any one encouraging or challenging them to follow-through on the effort. This can result in further delays and team member cynicism and resistance.

As the Gravitas Impact Voice of the CEO survey showed, the results of a DYI approach are low productivity, market share, revenue growth, profit and/or cash flow. The survey also found that CEOs often feel unsure, stressed, frustrated, scattered and reactive.

In contrast, the owners and CEOs that get the furthest fastest tend to take a different path. They don’t focus on how to make things happen, but on who they need to learn from and partner with to speed up the process.

In fact, the Voice of the CEO survey also showed that CEOs who engaged a qualified Gravitas Impact business growth and executive team coach saw significant improvements in employee engagement, overall productivity, revenue growth and profitability. They also felt more focused, clear, confident, balanced, calm and strategic.

Did Mahamad Ali, or Lennox Lewis, or any successful athlete, rise to the top of their sport by figuring everything out on their own? No. They each had a coach, an experienced advisor.

Or Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, or Eric Schmidt? Did they build and grow thriving, enduring companies by taking a DIY approach? No, they also used coaches and advisors.

In my next 5 Minute Growth Tip article, I’ll compare the pros and cons of some options for getting dedicated and tailored, external expert guidance, from strategic planning facilitators and business consultants to CEO forum groups, business coaches and executive team coaches.


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