I was thinking about what I already know about how to be a good CEO, and a lot of that involves thinking about what makes a bad CEO that I’d already seen before.
thinking that other people, to be productive for your company, would be doing what you yourself would be doing if you had extra time - aka being mini me’s or extensions of your own mind. In reality, if this is the assumption, other people would really frustrate you and you’d end up believing nobody is capable of doing any real work. This would frustrate a competent team into quitting, and you would end up with a company that has a ceiling for good people because the kinds of teammates that convince you that they are doing what you count as productive by your standard of “is this something I myself would do” rather than productive in the sense of “does my company make money” or “does my company do what I want it to do?” would be a certain kind of person that you consider lesser than you almost definitionally (they don’t have better things to be doing than your overflow work, and doing your overflow work is the most productive thing you see them as doing), and therefore not people you trust to keep an eye out on your blind spots or do things you have a harder time with (and therefore not actually creating real synergy).
a bunch of people have an idea of being a boss or being a CEO without as much consideration around what it means to them to be that and how it simply relates to their ego structure rather than how it relates to how they want to be a leader in the world or how the concept of CEO relates to what they want to create in the world.
A bunch of people don’t think very much about how they are different from other people, including being very different from people they admire, and including being very different from people they do not admire! There are many differences between people and this means that different things matter to them. If one person does not get a Christmas card they really do not care, but for another person this can really impact their motivation to work for you.
If you are setting it up such that you can’t take a sick week or a sick month and things still be fine, then you aren’t setting it up in a great way, because it means you will always be working.
If you want to look cool for people who you aren’t ever going to hire you because they are doing different things from you, and also aren’t ever going to be your customer, because they are doing different things from you, and you consider these people “cooler” than your actual team and you praise these people in ways you never praise your team, or insult your team in ways you never insult these people, something is really wrong.