Discover the essential leadership skills that every successful CEO must master in the second episode of our ‘From Solo to CEO’ series. Join Gwen Bortner and Tonya Kubo as they explore how to lead your team effectively, whether you’re a small team or a large organization. Gwen shares a powerful story of a solopreneur who improved their leadership skills and saw significant business growth as a result. Get ready to learn the skills that will help you inspire, manage, and empower your team to reach new heights.
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From Solo To CEO: Essential Leadership Skills For A Thriving Business (Part 2)
In this episode, it is the second installment of our Solo to CEO series. We are going to be covering the essential leadership skills that every successful CEO must develop. You can develop them sooner, you can develop them later, but you’ve got to start building them. Whether you’re leading a small team, leading yourself, or you want to scale into a larger organization, these are the skills that will help you inspire, manage and empower your team to reach new heights. Sometimes, you are the team. If you’re a team of one, you’ve got to learn how to inspire yourself.
We are talking about leadership, specifically the key skills you need to successfully lead your team as a CEO, or like I’ve said and I’ll say it a million times in this episode, even yourself. Before we jump in, though, Gwen, I’m curious if you could share a quick story of a solopreneur who you can think of that improved their leadership skills and, as a result, saw a significant change in their business.
Successful Leadership Can Mean Breaking Corporate Rules
Let’s just be honest, anytime we improve our leadership skills, it almost always improves our business.
That was from the Department of Redundancy right there.
It really does. There’s almost no end to the number of examples that we can give, but I’m going to give an example from a while back that is mostly a solopreneur improving their leadership skills, since you talked about that piece, because we often don’t think about the fact that we have to lead ourselves. To lead ourselves, honestly, is one of the hardest things to do. This person really is a solopreneur. They’re an artist and they do creative things. One of the things was actually realizing when their work worked for them.
Part of leading is understanding how do you work or how do other people work? How do you maximize that in a way that works for everybody on the team, regardless of who they are? Even if you’re a solopreneur, if you have anybody else in your family that is sharing your space, you actually have to do some leading with them as well. Even if you have a dog or a cat, there can be some leading there as well. All of these things involve thinking about how we do this.
The issue was, so often, we get caught in what we believe we are supposed to do because it’s what everybody else does. Leading isn’t necessarily about following the path everyone else has followed. It’s about understanding what is the path that’s going to be the best and most direct path for you. Sometimes, that can look very alternative. In this particular case, what was happening was they were trying to do things in the way that they had always done them before. They were working in that corporate mindset of, “I’m supposed to work from 8:00 to 5:00, I’m supposed to work Monday through Friday,” all of these things. However, where they got to was realizing that parts of that worked and parts of it didn’t work. In this case, the part of the leading was saying, “What’s not working? What do I want to do instead, and/or stop doing altogether?”
All of these things, what they started discovering, was that the same amount of work was getting done in way less time. As you start looking at that, all of a sudden, it’s like, is that good leadership? Yes, of course, that’s good leadership. We talked about having space to think and do some other things. If you’ve got tasks that you think take 40 hours a week and you start using better time, you may discover that actually, those tasks only take 30 hours a week. That just gave you ten hours a week for other things, which could be strategic thinking time. In this case, this is a creative person. One of the things that they got back was playtime, where they were playing with art, not doing art as their job or as a product to sell. As an output or task, which, of course, gave them more creativity to do more things. It’s a follow-on thing.
It’s saying what are those tasks? What are the best times to do them? Do I have to do them in the typical time, or do I do them at other times? It’s one of the things that I talk to almost all my entrepreneurs about. Sometimes, you do need to do things from a typical 8:00 to 5:00, depending on what your job is, who you’re serving and all of those others. In this case, she did not. We found that a different schedule actually worked way better for her.
That’s a great example of self-leadership. I think, really, even a more powerful one because it’s self-leadership that looks different from other people. I think, for me, that is really what jumped out because you and I talk about this all the time. As somebody who works from home and has young children, a lot of people in my same situation tend to shift their work later in the day. They may work three to midnight, for instance, because that works for them. They don’t work when school’s not in session. They don’t work weekends and all those things. I shift my day much earlier because I do my work better when everybody is asleep. I really should not be trusted to brain after 8:00 PM. No good thing with me happens after 8:00 PM.
Interesting things sometimes happen with you after 8:00 PM. I’m not sure that good would necessarily be the right description.
Leadership Skills Include Strategic Thinking
That is a story for another day, but that is exactly the truth. There are no lies detected there, Gwen. I like that example a lot for that reason. Also, I think of leadership skills. I think of the leadership skills I’ve had to develop over time. Some of the ones were the hardest. I think of the vision setting, the strategic thinking. Is that hard for a lot of CEOs or a lot of people who have been a shop of one, a lot of women entrepreneurs? Is that hard for everybody? Does that have to be hard? Are some people naturally wired that way?
I think true strategic thinking is something that you usually have to have learned in some environment. It is not something that is available to be learned in lots of environments. I also think it gets misnamed a lot where people say this is strategic thinking. That’s not actually strategic thinking. That’s just giant project planning, which is a different thing. I do think that’s part of it. We talked a little bit about it in the prior episode. I think that that’s a piece of leadership. The piece that we haven’t talked about, quite honestly, is the bigger piece of leadership, the accountability piece.
I can tell by your face you have more or were you trying to be polite?
I do have more. I didn’t know if you wanted a specific question or not, so I was trying to give you space.
I appreciate that, but please say more.
I think the accountability piece is the piece that most people struggle with in leadership. Accountability gets a bad rap, because, back to strategic planning, a lot of people think they’re doing strategic planning and they’re just doing big, long-term project planning, which can be strategic, but it’s usually not. I think accountability gets a bad rap. To me, leadership is a combination of visioning and the strategic piece and being able to think beyond the relative immediacy combined with being able to say, “I want to make sure we do all the things that we need to do to actually get to this vision that we have,” because that, to me, is the balance.
A lot of people are really good about visioning, but they don’t actually want to hold anybody accountable if they have a team, or even hold themselves truly accountable, because it’s like, “Yeah, I didn’t really feel like it.” That may be actually a valid thing. I’m not saying it’s wrong because I believe in lots and lots of right answers, but why did you not feel like it? Accountability is a bigger piece. Accountability gets a bad rap.
I think a lot of folks, when they talk about leading and accountability, feel like they’re being the mom. That’s different. Being the mom, that’s a really important job and there is some accountability to it, but that’s not what we’re talking about. When we’re talking about accountability within the business, we’re really talking about are we doing the things that we should be doing at the time that we should be doing them. Are we living up to our promises to each other and to ourselves?
If we aren’t, are we making proactive choices about these things as opposed to reactive choices? Are we making decisions instead of waiting for decisions to happen to us? To me, that’s that balance of vision, decision-making and accountability. Those, to me, are the things that really, really create that leadership piece. For me, using the example that I started with, the self-leadership is actually saying, “Where do I want to go? Okay, how much time do I need? I’m going to make decisions about when I work and then I’m going to be good about working at those times.” That’s actually those three pieces. It’s the vision, it’s the decision and then it’s being held accountable to that decision.
That balance of vision, decision-making, and accountability are the things that really create that leadership piece. Share on XYou mentioned them in different orders each time. I’m like, “How am I ranking those in my notes?” I had to take notes on this, which is not a bad thing. By the way, if you’re reading your first episode, I take notes all the time during these episodes because Gwen says things and I’m like, “I never thought about that.” I have to write it down so I remember it.
People think we’re scripted.
They have no idea how this actually operates. First of all, what I heard loud and clear is it’s not 1 is on top of 2 is on top of 3. If you are reading, I’m sorry, but you’re missing us spinning our hands as if they’re planets rotating around a very large star. We’ve got the vision piece, then we have the decision-making piece, the key leadership skills.
You’ve got to have the ability to vision, vision setting, however you want to say that, making decisions and then there’s the accountability piece, which is living by the decisions you make and also creating a culture where everybody lives by the decisions that are made. I want to break these down a little bit further because I think it’s important.
Solopreneurs Have a Vision; CEOs Can Transfer Their Vision to Others
With the vision, something that I have seen, Gwen, because we all talk about the importance of vision, we vision cast, we have vision boards, we go on visioning retreats, we know that it’s important to have a clear, compelling vision for the business. I think most people understand that that is a hallmark of strong leadership. Here’s where I think people fall apart. This is where we fall down on the job of being the visionary leader for our business. It’s transferring the vision.
Transferring the vision is really hard because, often, the vision is very intuitive. That means there’s a whole lot of stuff that we don’t necessarily have words to, particularly when we’re talking about solo to CEO. When we’re in the solo mode, the vision can really be all about us and figuring out how does this actually apply to the bigger world if we start bringing other people in. Although, if you work with me, you’ll hear me say, “It still needs to be a lot about you because you’re still the one driving the business.” If you’re creating a business that makes you miserable, then that’s actually a bad thing.
There still has to be a balance, but how do you make it compelling enough? This is totally my opinion. We’ve never talked about this before. I think part of the problem is sometimes, we get too sold on the vision. It needs to be this big, dramatic, very cool thing. Often, that’s easy for a lot of the folks that are drawn to entrepreneurship. Translating that into practical, tactical, “”How do we sell this to a bunch of other people,” is really hard. If the vision is actually relatively simple, which is not how we’re taught to think about visions, we’re taught to think about them in these big fluffy clouds and luxury and all and it’s like, no, it really needs to be simple because it allows it to translate.
As a marketing professional, I have sat in a lot of strategic planning meetings for large organizations. I’ve come from higher ed and I’ve worked in a lot of educational systems. You say the vision is supposed to be simple and I’m 100% with you. I very rarely have seen a vision that is fewer than 450 words and requires a dictionary to figure out what they’re talking about. Sometimes, I think the vision is written to sound like you have vision more than it’s written to actually be lived out. You’ve talked about the vision needing to be very simple. Can you give me an example of a simple vision if somebody is like, “I think I have a vision, but I don’t know if it counts?”
Sometimes, the vision is written to sound like you have vision more than it's written to actually be lived out. Share on XIt always counts. There are times that the vision is, “I need a way to be able to feed my family. I need to have enough flexibility to not be working for somebody else, because I’ve got all sorts of things.” That’s actually a vision. It’s not cool. It’s not exciting. It’s not all the things that we want a vision to be but that in itself is also a vision. It is the driver for it. My vision is not actually very complex. It could be, but my vision is I want to help people have businesses that they love and that I can help them solve the problems that they don’t even know are problems.
Our vision for the show is we want women to stay in business if they want to stay in business and not to exit their business out of burnout or frustration because they think that the only way to do it is a way that makes them miserable. You’re right. That’s very simple. The question then is, how do you transfer that to others? Do you not need to? Maybe that’s not important.
You do to the point that it matters for what they’re doing. Using my previous example of “I need to feed my children,” you don’t necessarily need to transfer all of that. There’s probably going to be something about why I’m doing the thing that I do. “I happen to love,” fill in the blank, “That’s why I’m doing it.” That’s great. “I have huge experience in that area,” fine. You need to let the people that you aren’t enough so that they don’t start leading it in a different direction. This is one of the places where we talk about culture, which we haven’t even touched on. I don’t know if we talked about culture.
At some point in a future episode, but not now.
That’s what it is. It’s enough to know what the culture is. You can verify all of this, because when you started working with me, one of my first things was I don’t have a fixed answer for anybody about anything. There are some that I am usually 98% sure that this is what the first answer is going to be. I still test it every single solitary time.
I don’t have one solution. I have lots of solutions. That’s part of my vision. We talk about it all the time. Context matters. That’s part of my vision. That’s the part that’s important for you to know as my marketing person and it’s the part that’s important for our customer support people to know. We want to do things in a consistent way, but we also aren’t so consistent that we’re rigid. We want to be able to do the things that make sense for each client as appropriate.
Decision Fatigue is a CEO’s Worst Enemy
I like that. That’s the vision piece. Now I think it’s important to talk about the decision-making piece. I think it’s easy to be like, “Well, I don’t have a problem making decisions. I make decisions all the time,” because you do. In business, most of us have decision fatigue, quite honestly, because we make so many decisions. I think there’s a difference between, “I do all the things, I wear all the hats,” decision-making and CEO-level decision-making. How do you describe that?
For me, it’s the bigger decisions that are more likely to go wrong. I’ll use one that we did. My big decision was I’m going to invest significantly into marketing in a way that I never have before. That was a strategic decision. As part of that, you put together a plan, which was great. We looked at it and agreed to it. We made a decision and said, “This is what it’s going to be.”
It's the bigger decisions that are more likely to go wrong. Share on XAlso, part of the decision-making is when something comes up and it’s like, “Does this fit? Does this not fit? Are we making an adjustment?” Quite honestly, the show is one of those things that wasn’t actually planned in that marketing plan that we agreed to. However, as we talked about it, that was a strategic decision where we said, “Yeah, no, we’re actually going to do this. It’s going to change the budget, it’s going to do some things, but we’re still going to do it.” We talked about whether we were doing just audio or doing video. We had reasons we chose to do both, but all of that is the strategic part.
This is one place where I have a great strength, I make a decision quickly. I don’t dilly-dally over decisions, because the time spent thinking about it, unless there’s more data to be gathered, usually doesn’t provide much more insight, but it does take up a whole lot more mental cycles. To me, that’s the difference between a CEO and a task person, because the CEO will say, “I’m going to make this decision and it might be wrong. If it is, I will make another decision.”
That’s the nice thing about owning your own business. There is never not another decision to make. You always get a chance to make another decision.
A lot of the CEOs that I work with, that’s one of the things. They will get caught not making a decision. My mom, in all of her wisdom, it was years ago when I was in the process of thinking about getting divorced. She said, “You need to understand that not making a decision is also a decision.” I’ve lived with that for a really long time. I feed it back an awful lot because people are like, “Well, I’m just not sure.” It’s like, well, you’re starting to make a decision by not making a decision.
For our readers, I just want to clarify. We’re not talking about Arlis. We’re talking about Gwen’s life before Arlis. Imagine a poor reader like, “She just dropped a bomb.” Old lives, new lives.
This was decades ago. This was a really long time ago.
I just felt the need for Arlis. I knew his co-workers listen to the show. I didn’t want any of his co-workers to be like, “Dude, we got to tell you something.” I really did think you were going to go into, “Oftentimes, when we’re in the thick of it, we make these reactive decisions.” When we start to step into our CEO role is when we get much more proactive. We’re thinking ahead, we’re planning, but you covered that. You also talked about it’s being comfortable with making decisions where the stakes are higher and starting to develop a comfort with evaluating risk.
You didn’t say this explicitly. This is just my interpretation, but it’s evaluating risk. It’s understanding that there’s risk in every decision, whether it’s small or big and being okay emotionally, physically, in all the ways, with moving forward, even though you’re never going to know 100% whether you are right or wrong until you’re on the other side.
Often, both decisions would have both been right and both would be wrong because that’s the other thing. Often, we’re choosing between two things that aren’t a yes and a no. They’re potentially both yeses, or they’re potentially both noes. We’re just saying, “This is the yes I choose today.”
That reminds me of when I was talking to a solopreneur. They’ve been going back and forth between do they build out their business, or do they go and get a job? Do they just say, “I’m going to put entrepreneurship on a shelf for now. I’m going to go get a job, I’m going to get something settled, straight and then I’m going to come back to it, or maybe I’ll never come back to it.”
You’ve seen this happen before, Gwen. As they were talking it out, they came to the understanding that one is not right and the other is not wrong. It’s like, “I could actually do both of these things. What I have to ask myself is, ‘Based on everything I know, what’s most likely going to take me to a reality I actually want to be in?’”
How Accountability Builds You CEO Muscles
I love it when I have life experiences that match what you say on the show, it just ties things up in a bow so much better for me. I want to keep us on track, though. Vision was the first leadership skill we talked about that has to be developed and then we talked about decision-making and just getting comfortable with living with the decisions we make.
Finally, accountability. What I love about how you talk about accountability is really saying what we’re going to do, doing what we said we were going to do and then double-checking that everybody is doing what we said we were going to do how we said we were going to do it. Why do you think that is such an important leadership skill? We’ve talked about the whole, “Some people think you’re parenting adults.” What is it about that almost three-way look at accountability? What is it that makes that specifically leadership versus you’re just a really good project manager?
The real thing with accountability is it’s not just making sure people do things. It’s making sure that we’re all, including us, the leader, doing the right things, the best things, the most productive, and the moving-the-needle things. Often, accountability is being associated with checking off all the boxes, but that’s only making sure that we’re busy. That’s not making sure that we’re actually moving the needle in whatever way we want to be moving the needle.
Often, accountability is associated with checking off all the boxes, but that's only making sure that we're busy. That's not making sure that we're actually moving the needle. Share on XI’m feeling called out right now. Thank you. Keep talking.
We all feel that way from time to time, but that is part of accountability. It’s being able to have someone say that to you and for you to be able to reflect back on that and say, “Yeah, am I doing that or am I not doing that?” We have a relatively new client who was actually talking about that in her weekly course of action, which we use as our accountability document. She’s starting to feel overwhelmed and her natural response to being overwhelmed is doing lots of busy work that doesn’t actually move the needle in the way that it’s supposed to move.
That’s really great accountability because she’s being reflective about what’s going on. To me, the accountability piece is to say, “I know what I’m supposed to be doing and am I doing it? Should I still be doing this and really being curious?” Part of that curiosity is whether that appropriately aligns with the vision, so now we start making that circle around and around and around. Are all three of these things connect to one another? Was that decision the right decision or is it time to make a different decision? That’s also part of that accountability process.
It’s not just about, “Did I do all the things?” However, it also is, are you doing the things that you’re supposed to be doing? That is part of it. If not, then we start asking questions to say, “Why are we not getting the things done? Is it because you’ve got 800 things on your list and you have time to do 500 of them?” That’s why 300 of them aren’t getting done. Are you doing the right 500?
There’s lots of conversation that goes on with that accountability. We’re always afraid that it’s going to be about shame on you. Good accountability is never shame on you. It’s like, “Why is this not working? Let’s figure it out.” If it’s not working because you’re not the right person for this job, it’s not, “Shame on you.” It’s, “Let’s release you out into the workforce to find the right job for you. Let’s find someone else who will actually be the right person for this job.” That was a lot. I’m sorry.
It was a lot, but it was so good. You took us to the essential leadership skills. I’m just going to recap this super quickly. If you want to be successful in your business, whether you want to label yourself as a CEO or you like to be a small business owner, whatever title you like, what you need in order to be highly effective is you need to be able to cast that vision. You need to be able to use that vision as your framework or as your test against the decisions that you make. You’ve got to be able to make the decision.
You made that abundantly clear but we all know that. As you said, no decision is also a decision. The accountability piece and I never get tired of hearing you talk about accountability, mainly because you’re one of the few people who talk about accountability in a shame-free, judgment-free way. I do think that’s so important.
I think more people would be open to accountability if they had experience with it without shame or judgment tied to it. These skills, I think anybody reading would say, “They’re actually pretty good human skills,” but they are critical skills if you are in a place and you want your business to grow from where you’re at to a different place, whether that is larger or simply more efficient. Doing the same results in fewer hours, any of that. I’m going to leave us here because we have another episode coming up in this From Solo to CEO series.
If you want to dive deeper into developing your leadership skills, please visit us online at TheBusinessYouReallyWant.com. Don’t forget to come back, because for the next episode in our Solo to CEO series, we’re going to talk about Delegation. Yes, the big D word. How to delegate effectively and how to build a high-performing team because your ability to delegate actually impacts their ability to perform for you. We will see you then. We hope you are enjoying the series so far. Let us know what you think.
Mentioned in the Episode
- This is Part 2 of 4 in the Solo to CEO series. Listen to all episodes in the series:
- Find all resources mentioned in the episode at The Business You Really Want
About Your Hosts
Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.
Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.
