Are you a CEO of something?

What are you CEO (Chief Executive Officer) of? Recently read a great article from The New York Times that Scott Harrison had recommended.

The article is an interview with Mark Pincus, founder and CEO of Zynga.

In the article, Mark talks about the importance of each member of your team determining what they are CEO of. This is a really helpful exercise, and one I am doing right now with our Catalyst team.

In quoting Mark Pincus in the article:

"I’d turn people into C.E.O.’s. One thing I did at my second company was to put white sticky sheets on the wall, and I put everyone’s name on one of the sheets, and I said, “By the end of the week, everybody needs to write what you’re C.E.O. of, and it needs to be something really meaningful. And that way, everyone knows who’s C.E.O. of what and they know whom to ask instead of me. And it was really effective. People liked it. And there was nowhere to hide.

I think that was a big lesson for me because what I realized was that if you give people really big jobs to the point that they’re scared, they have way more fun and they improve their game much faster."

Obviously there are only a few leaders over the course of their career who will ever have the title of CEO next to their name. But this is a great exercise, and a great way to engage your team/staff in embracing their areas of responsibility/ownership.