“No one is born a CEO, this is an acquired skill”, says Dropbox co-founder Drew Houston. Furthermore he says, you learn the skills on the job.
So what are the key skills in the journey to learning to be a CEO? The journey has three stages to it:
Stage 1: Followership
This stage calls for reflection on one's personal values and belief systems and attempt to bring about congruence between them and those of the immediate boss and the organization.
This stage can very often call for great soul-searching and can be quite tortuous.
Stage 2: Managership
This stage calls for learning new execution skills - trusting others to deliver just as well as you, building collaborative teams and learning to balance between giving too much control and too much leeway to team members
Stage 3: Leadership
As a CEO one has to graduate from managing people to managing ideas. Not only does one need come up with one's own Ideas that inspire people, but also to encourage your people to think and to come up with ideas of their own. This means learning the key skills of empathy and listening.
