What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology

(en) —via @jorgecortell— "…if you don’t like choosing between horrible and cataclysmic, don’t become CEO…"

What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology // Ben Horowitz

"… If someone was promoted for all the wrong reasons, that was my fault. If we missed the quarterly earnings target, that was my fault. If a great engineer quit, that was my fault. If the sales team made unreasonable demands on the product organization, then that was my fault. If the product had too many bugs, that was my fault. It kind of sucked to be me.
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Given this stress, CEOs often make the one of the following two mistakes:

1. They take things too personally
In the first scenario, the CEO takes every issue incredibly seriously and personally and urgently moves to fix it. Given the volume of the issues, this motion usually results in one of two scenarios. If the CEO is outwardly focused, she ends up terrorizing the team to the point where nobody wants to work at the company any more. If the CEO is inwardly focused, she ends up feeling so sick from all of the problems that she can barely make it to work in the morning.

2. They do not take things personally enough
In the second scenario, in order to dampen the pain of the rolling disaster that is the company, the CEO takes a Pollyannaish attitude: it’s not so bad. In this view, none of the problems are actually that bad and they needn’t be dealt with urgently. By rationalizing away the issues, the CEO feels better about herself. The problem is that she doesn’t actually fix any of the problems and the employees eventually become quite frustrated that the Chief Executive keeps ignoring the most basic problems and conflicts. Ultimately, the company turns to crap.

Ideally, the CEO will be urgent yet not insane. She will move aggressively and decisively without feeling emotionally culpable. If she can separate the importance of the issues from how she feels about them, she will avoid demonizing her employees or herself.
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My friend Jason Rosenthal took over as CEO of Ning about a year ago. As soon as he became CEO, he faced a cash crisis and had to choose amongst three difficult choices: 1. Radically reduce the size of the company or 2. Sell the company or 3. Raise money in a highly dilutive way.
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Techniques to Calm Your Nerves:
Make some friends
Get it out of your head and onto paper
Focus on the road not the wall
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Great CEOs face the pain. They deal with the sleepless nights, the cold sweat, and what my friend the great Alfred Chuang (legendary founder and CEO of BEA Systems) calls “the torture.” Whenever I meet a successful CEO, I ask them how they did it. Mediocre CEOs point to their brilliant strategic moves or their intuitive business sense or a variety of other self-congratulatory explanations. The great CEOs tend to be remarkably consistent in their answers. They all say: “I didn’t quit.” …"