Fit Happens: The Executive Search Podcast

Jason Baumgarten
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I'm Jason Baumgarten and you're listening to Fit Happens, the podcast where top leaders, investors and board directors share the stories, surprises and hard earned lessons behind finding the right fit. Let's get into it. Today I want to talk about how executives sustain performance without burning themselves down. It's uncomfortable, but true. A lot of executives don't fail loudly. They fail quietly. They fail in the role. They mostly hit their targets. They publish on LinkedIn or Facebook, but privately they're depleted. They're a little short tempered, a little tad numb, maybe not sleeping so well, making more reactive decisions and carrying a lot of weight alone. And here's why this matters and why we should care. One, if you're in the role, it's not a great place to be. But two, if you're working for a CEO or you're an investor, when you're depleted, your judgment changes. You don't just lose energy, but you lose patience, you lose range. You stop seeing options and you stop thinking about the midterm or the long term. You're kind of operating in the here and now. If there's ever a time when you need a little more range and a little more vision, it's a time like now where we have enormous uncertainty from so many dimensions. So we need CEOs who have patience and range and optionality and perspective in senior roles. Again, this isn't just a personal issue of how you feel. It's an organizational risk. The CEO research is blunt. Nearly a quarter of CEOs report feeling burnt out daily or frequently, and almost half say occasionally. The reality is that this fatigue impacts decisions and risk, turnover, pressure. So today we're not doing a wellness episode, but we are doing a performance episode. So how do you develop more sustainable performance when you're in a leadership role? And on Fit Happens, we talk about fit as a multiplier. So here's the question for today, the very fit question. Does your role and the way you're leading it fit a human being? More importantly, does it fit you? Because sustainable high performance is not a personality trait. It's not about having willpower or being tougher. It's actually about a system. It's about a team. It's about how you are operating with all of the resources around you. Now, at some points in a career, you have all the weight of the world and almost none of the resources — when you're in the first years of a startup or a turnaround. But even in those moments, always thinking about the system around you can help you feel a little less burnt out and a little less like the world is on your shoulders. And if you don't build that system, the role will build one for you. It just will unfortunately be one that isn't what you want it to be. It'll be built on a hero mentality of urgency and adrenaline and erosion. And at the end of the day, it'll take everything it can from you. So let's think about a simple model of sustainable high performance. Four levers. You have your capacity — the fuel, the energy, the time you actually have. The second is your cadence, the rhythm that you operate on. Linking the data, the team, the metrics. The third are what constraints you have for yourself, for your team, for your organization. And then finally the crew. I don't always use the word crew, but I wanted a 4C model, so there you go. But the crew is your team, the system that makes sure that your team is not letting you be the bottleneck. And if you want high performance without self destruction, you have to manage all of these, not perfectly every day, but consistently. How are you addressing your own capacity, your time, your talent, your energy? The cadence of how you operate with everything around you — not just the people, but the systems, the data, the tools. The constraints — what boundaries are you putting on yourself and everything around you? And then the team, which increasingly is such an important part of how we think about performance at Fit Happens. So let's talk about each one of them in turn. Capacity. The most important thing, especially for new leaders, is you have to stop pretending that you are infinite. I love it when people say, I only sleep four hours a night, I work every day of the week. The reality is this is a dangerous path. You can't operate on the model that if you just get through the current backlog, it'll get easier. Because sometimes it does, but often it doesn't. Capacity is not a mindset of I'll make more, it's a reality of finite. So the executive upgrade, the talent upgrade, is not how do I do more, but about how do I do what only I can do? And how do I get the system and the team around me to do more collectively? Write down activities that only you can do. For a CEO, it might be communicating the strategic direction or the narrative, but even that you might find that you don't really need to be the only one to do it. It might be about developing the top team, building them, evaluating them, nurturing them. But again, you might find that that's true of some of the top team and that some of them might take that better from someone else. It might be about aligning the board or the capital strategy, but again, you might find that these things can be done in partnership with others, or in some cases by someone else altogether, not you. If you're a C suite leader, it might be about designing a great functional strategy, or understanding how to manage trade offs with peers, or designing your operating system. But for all of these questions, treat everything as negotiable and be a hard negotiator. Because it turns out that high performers don't just add more, they actually do less, but they do those fewer things better on purpose. They don't just do the thing reactively that comes at them. They get really crisp at what they're excellent at, what their context needs them to be doing, and then marrying the two to do great things. So ask yourself what only you can do, not just because of your role, but who you are and the context you're operating in. For cadence. Often your calendar tells the truth. I always ask CEOs what your intention is, what do you want to spend your time on? And they'll always talk about long range planning and strategy. And then I'll ask them, well, what did your two weeks look like? And what I find is that most of them have an enormous amount of time built around the reaction to others inside the organization and outside. And it turns out we're all training people to create emergencies so that we can jump in and be effective. And let's be honest, sometimes that feels really good. We're jumping in to help, we're saving the day. It turns out that sustainability requires a little more rhythm because things are going to happen that are outside of your control anyhow. But having that cadence reduces the surprises and actually does increase your control. So one of the things to think about is what is your cadence? What does your calendar tell you about your cadence? A great exercise is to print out every day for two to three weeks — a minimum of non-exceptional weeks, right? If you're on vacation, don't print that week out. If you had a board meeting, don't print that week out. But if it was a normal week, a run of the mill week, a typical week, print that out. Print two or three. They can be in order or they can be picked at random throughout the year. But the point is, do a time audit of how you're not only spending your time, but how are you managing the cadence of your time. Are you doing weekly reviews, monthly reviews, quarterly reviews? And as you think about the world we're in, we've all been trained to do things on a certain cadence. We have three year strategy planning, annual budgeting, quarterly reporting, monthly roll ups, weekly standups. But in today's environment, where things are changing a tad faster, where you can ship product, change partnerships, reinvent marketing campaigns much faster, think about whether that cadence is well suited to the environment you're in. The other piece is, what is your recovery cadence? Do you take time for yourself? Not just a fantasy vacation where you work from the beach and people occasionally hand you a cocktail or you occasionally say something to your kids, but a real protected block — not just for rest time, but for deep work, for perspective, for thinking. If you don't schedule those, you're not too busy. You're actually operating without the oxygen to fuel what you alone can do as a leader, which is to think about what's coming next. So as you think about that cadence, think about the recovery cadence, not just the operating cadence. So capacity and cadence are two very important pillars. The third are constraints. This is where people get uncomfortable. They think about it like a weakness. They aren't. Constraints are actually discipline. They're strategic discipline. Because constraints separate leaders that can sustain from collapsing leaders, or leaders who are operating on the edge. And we've all watched those meltdown moments where a leader just gets pushed a little too far and says something they regret in a team meeting or in a public relations setting or in an analyst call. So a few things. Constraint A is when do you not want to have meetings? Constraint B is what decisions do you not want to come to you? Constraint C is ways to block communication so you are not always on call and available. These sound harsh. Shouldn't you be always on, always ready to take a decision, and jumping in and out of meetings like the invisible man walking between walls? The reality is, no. You need time to do the work of a leader. You need time to not take every decision or your team isn't learning what decisions to take. You also need communication boundaries so people can't beat down your door. This is true of CEOs, but it's also true of early stage leaders. Now, that doesn't mean to be unapproachable — delegating every decision and unavailable for any conversation. But it's about setting those boundaries that are appropriate for the role you're in and the context you're in. I've worked with CEOs staging massive, complex turnarounds that decide that they're going to have their weekly stand up cadence on Sundays so the executive team can prepare for the week ahead for everyone else. But they also make sure they have some time to think before those meetings and ensure that they can prepare. If you're the CEO and your executive team is coming in on Sunday, remember, not every request is your problem. You might sit there and say, are these actually decisions that are moving the needle on the mandate? Are they things we need to decide on? Are they actually just kind of trivial decisions that are floating around because somebody feels like they need to make a decision, when in fact the best thing you can do is say, I don't think that's very important. So that gets us through constraints, it gets us through cadence, it gets us through capacity, and it gets us to our 4C of crew. Burnout at the top is often a team design problem or an organizational problem. CEOs become very isolated. Executives carry too much. The leadership team is talented, but not operating as a team, but instead as hub and spoke executives. Decision rights can become muddy, information can become siloed, and everyone escalates to the same people. That's an architectural problem. One CEO I worked with got really focused on what is it that the top team can do — after working on the exercise of what only they can do. And they got really focused on the team operating as an excellent team. So when you think about the crew, a few things to think about. First of all, who owns what? If you can't name the owner, the single owner, then guess what? As the CEO, you're the owner, because it means multiple people will come to you. The second thing is think about how do you have a second brain or a monitor, or almost a team ombudsman, who can think about calling out the CEO or the team for not setting the right priority, or over committing, or pointing out patterns of bad behavior. That's something that you can do as a task, not a permanent role, not a full job for someone on the crew. The third thing is making sure that the pressure, not just the workload, is distributed. In fragile teams, pressure consolidates to one person. The work may be distributed, but the decisions of weight, the consequential things, can be concentrated. And so how do you think about spreading out the work and also spreading out the pressure? If everything funnels to you — the decisions, the catch all for the team — then those things are problematic. And you need truth tellers and cheerleaders. You don't need all of one or all of the other on the team. So let's talk about the traps. The reality is that most traps for most leaders is that they move into hero mode. They want to solve a lot of problems personally to prove that they're valuable. They want to jump into every detail, they want to make every hard decision, they're always on. And that's great up until either you break physically, you break mentally, or you just start making bad decisions because you're not actually in command of all the decisions and context you think you are. It also trains the team to stop thinking, because guess what, you're going to do it for them. And it trains you to stop setting any limits. So you do become indispensable until you are totally unsustainable. So if your leadership identity requires you to suffer, it's probably not good leadership. If you start every meeting with how busy you are, it's not good leadership. If you define roles as just get some stuff off my plate, it's not good leadership. It's actually self harm with better branding. So I recommend a 7 day reset. Get some high performance with a lower tax on you. Day one. Write your mandate in one sentence. What are you hired to do this year, really? What decisions do you have to take? Day two. Audit your calendar for things that are sucking your energy, where you don't have to be there, where you're present but not essential, where decisions are unclear because meetings exist simply because they've always existed. Cancel things, shorten them, delay them, or just don't be involved. Day three. Create real thinking blocks. Take some time to do deep work. Put your devices away. Get out a pen and paper or whiteboard. Day four. Create some decision filters — mechanically or with people. Are these things I have to do? Are these decisions that matter? Create some filters for what's coming to you. Day five — it's getting dicey. Delegate something you've been hoarding. Not just a task, but actual ownership. Take something that you've had ownership of and move it to someone else. Day six. Think about load sharing with your team. Talk about how to distribute the pressure, distribute things that are weighing on you to others, and get people thinking like owners, not passengers. Think like the CEO. Years ago, great bit of advice — somebody said, how do I become a CEO? And an author wrote, make your boss look good and your boss's boss look better. If you're on the top team and you're not thinking about what your CEO and your board need, then you're a passenger, not an owner. And then day seven. Create that recovery ritual. Not about going on vacation once a year. This could be something meaningful that you're going to add into your calendar routinely. A workout, a no-phone afternoon, a protected morning. Something that allows you to not just have sort of casual time, but real deep reflection time. And again, the goal isn't work-life balance or a perfect lifestyle. You've signed up for something hard called leadership. And the trick is just making it more sustainable. So the deeper point is that fit is not just about the role, the skill, the context. It's also about how you as a human work. It requires you to set a pace that doesn't destroy you and still drives high performance, and doesn't create some sort of slow motion failure, day on day, hour on hour, week on week. And if you're a board member, an investor, or even a CEO hiring an executive or a leader, be conscious of all of these things. Because leaders are fragile, they're expensive, and the decisions they take are critical. How do you make sure that they have the capacity, the cadence, the constraints, and the crew to be effective? That's part of your job as a leader. So here's your takeaway. High performance without self destruction is not about working less. It's about being smarter. It's about operating smarter. It's about managing the capacity, the cadence, the constraints, and the crew. And if you do nothing else after listening to this, pick one thing, put it on your calendar. Protect it like revenue, protect it like EBITDA. Because in the C suite, your mind is the asset, your team's minds are the assets. And if you burn them to the ground, you don't get results. You don't ship product, you don't ship services, you don't hire people, you just burn to the ground. So again, sustainable performance is not accidental. It's designed. It's part of making fit happen. I'm Jason Baumgarten. See you next time.