How to Scale as a CEO – Mindset, Strategy & Leadership Shifts | Joe Leech, CEO Coach

Joe Leech is a seasoned CEO coach with over 20 years in tech and a track record of adding $20 billion in revenue across various companies.

In this episode of SEEKERS, Joe shares his insights on the human challenges that often hinder business growth and the mindset shifts necessary for leaders to evolve from founders to successful CEOs. With a background in tech, user experience, and product management, Joe brings a unique perspective to leadership coaching.

Key Topics Discussed:

• Identifying Personal Bottlenecks: How leaders can recognise when they are the primary obstacle to their company's growth.
• Mindset Shifts: The essential changes in perspective that differentiate a founder from a CEO.
• The Inner vs. Outer Game of Leadership: The concept of the "inner game" (beliefs, values, identity) and the "outer game" (strategy, communication, execution), explaining why mastering both is crucial for CEOs.
• Evaluating Team Members: Approaches to assess long-standing team members who may not meet evolving company needs.
• Strategic Hiring: Determining the next key hire to push your business forward and avoiding hiring mistakes that cost momentum.
• The Founder’s Dilemma – Visionary vs. Integrator: Understanding whether you're a "track-layer" (visionary) or a "train-runner" (integrator) and how hiring the right counterpart can dramatically improve your company’s execution.
• Letting Go: The importance of delegation and trusting your team to take the reins.
• Scaling Company Culture Beyond the Founder: Why early-stage founders’ values naturally shape company culture but become diluted as the business grows, and how to intentionally maintain or evolve culture at scale.
• Avoiding Hiring Mistakes That Cost You Six Months (or More): The real cost of hiring the wrong person isn’t just financial – it’s lost momentum. Joe explains how to spot hiring mistakes early and avoid them altogether.
• The CEO’s Role in Creating Effortless Success: How great leaders reduce friction in their companies by setting up systems that make success feel "effortless" rather than constantly pushing uphill.

Joe's Website: https://mrjoe.uk/modernceo/
Joe's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joeleech/
Joe's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@mrjoe-coach

Transcript

Desi (00:03.147)
Mr. Joe, welcome to Seekers. Who are you?

MrJoe (00:04.304)
Good to be here. So I am Mr. Joe. So I am a coach to CEOs. I work with CEOs from at all stages really from early stage startup founders through to tech companies that growing really fast through to enterprise career CEOs of larger businesses.

Desi (00:23.285)
Awesome. And what exactly do you do with those CEOs and why is it important?

MrJoe (00:29.104)
That's a really good question. So I do lots of things with them really. So a lot of what I do with those CEOs who are founders at the kind of early stages of their career, maybe they're a first time CEO, is we kind of, I have a program called from.

instinct to mastery and that's really helping them with the mindset and skill sets that they need to be a CEO really because they're instinctually very good at running a business. I kind of help by giving them a framework to work with their senior leadership team, to work with their product teams, to work with the board of directors, their investors, their employees to develop their strategy. I really help them with the framework that encompasses a new skill set and a new mindset to really be a successful

leader and to move from being a founder into being a CEO leader.

Desi (01:14.307)
Awesome, interesting. from your experience so far, work with so many leaders in tech and in kind of wider industries, what are the most common challenges most CEOs encounter?

MrJoe (01:27.802)
Well, I always sort of say that all business challenges are human challenges. So it's always the people elements of what.

the organisation or of the situation that they're in. So typically often I get brought in at a moment of truth. So maybe they are struggling to enact a strategy or they've got a challenge with their board of directors or their C-suite isn't performing well or there's a particular challenge that they're facing and their usual skill set or playbook isn't working for them. And so typically that's a human challenge. I find that mostly with founders because they're pretty good at building and developing products and strategy. It's the human element they often trip up on. So a lot of what I do is really

helping them to understand have they got the right people in the right seats in their organisation and really are they have they got the skills the skill set to be a leader to be a manager versus a the skill set of being a founder and a visionary is very different from being a leader and a manager and a CEO so I kind of help them not only with their skill set but any mindset shifts they need to make to be working better in essence with the people that are around them.

Desi (02:31.747)
So it's a little bit like therapy for CEOs and leaders.

MrJoe (02:35.792)
I mean, it can be like that. I kind of joke that I save as many marriages as I do businesses, but the reality is, is if, you know, if you're working at your best, and I kind of look at my coaching almost in two ways. So for lot of the people that I work with, they have...

kind of classic what we call the outer games, that's their strategy, the way they talk and appear in public, in meetings, the way that they set their vision, the way they plan tactics, the way that they use their time, that's what we call the outer game. And you'll find a lot of resources on the outer game, know, lot of productivity and leadership and...

visionary and strategy, you know, the kind of the way that they turn up. But equally, we spend as much time on what we call the inner game, which is really themselves internally, what are their capabilities, their values, their beliefs that kind of all wrapped up into what is their identity. And sometimes they have to reinvent themselves, whole identity to be better at the outer game by getting better at the inner game. a lot of the work that we do yet is on themselves. But the reality is a way a lot of that is seen in the results that come from that are in the outer

game in terms of business performance or leadership or anything that really is around business results.

Desi (03:47.395)
Interesting. So let's talk a little bit more about this mastering the inner game that I've heard you saying on other talks and podcasts that I find very interesting. So when you say mastering the inner game, is it this almost like changing who they are as people or is it more about their values and how they look at things or is it more about who they project they are? So what exactly transformation we see in people when they start working in this?

in this kind of mastering the inner game.

MrJoe (04:18.158)
Yeah, I mean, it is all related to identity. So often what you see, over the course of our life, we have a number of things that make up our identity. And our identity can come from the capabilities and the things that we can do, right? Maybe that's...

Desi (04:26.979)
Mm.

MrJoe (04:33.168)
coding or maybe that's spreadsheets or business or sales. We have a variety of capabilities or things that we can do. We also have a number of values that we inherit, right? So values are things like, you know, I always put people first, family first over business first, you know, political values, religious values, values that are kind of set from your parents and from your social situation that are you.

And then we have beliefs, so things like, you if I work long hours, I can get great results, or if I hustle, I will win, or if I put enough effort in, I'll eventually get there, or I can steamroll on my way to a great solution, or there's lots of beliefs about the way you operate that are also there. And all of these things then make up that person's identity. And what you can see with a leader is, and some of the symptoms that I see initially, or people around this leader might see, are when they react.

Desi (05:00.259)
Mm.

Desi (05:12.419)
Hmm.

MrJoe (05:24.88)
to perhaps their capabilities not being as great as they were or their values being questioned or their beliefs being challenged. And they take that as a personal thing, right? And then they react, right? We have something called the, a part of our brain called the amygdala which controls our fight or flight responses. And a third one called fawn. And what you can see is when your identity is challenged, you go into this mode of amygdala whiplash or hijack where you take over and you look to fight.

What are you saying? You get quite angry about something or you run away and ignore it or you fawn, which is where you say, I'm really sorry. You apologize. You're really nice to somebody. So lot of the symptoms that you see when somebody appears to be under stress is this amygdala hijack. And that's often related to a questioning of their inner, their identity. And that can come from the point of, for example, maybe the hustle isn't working for you. You're working 60 hours a week, but you're not seeing the results. Maybe you're

Desi (06:20.077)
Right.

MrJoe (06:20.6)
you're trying to coerce your team to work harder and push harder all the time, right? We all worked just a bit harder, we get there, that's one of your beliefs that that's the way it's gonna work. And that isn't working for you. When somebody questions that approach you've got, you react in quite an emotional manner. And so typically when people start working with me, is they noticing this in themselves? Why am I reacting like that?

Typically, it's because your identity is under attack as you see it, because your beliefs and values are being questioned, or your capabilities are like, maybe you're not the best coder in the world, maybe you aren't the greatest at spreadsheets, maybe you aren't the greatest at sales, that's okay. There's many, many, many things that you are great at, but the reality is if you feel you're being questioned, then you lash out and you have that emotional reaction. And that's normally a typical sign that you're not playing the right in a game.

Desi (07:07.937)
How important is it for the CEO's personal values, what you're saying, who they are as a person to align with the company's culture and the company's values they're trying to build and project, especially for smaller startups and early stage founders? I suppose that almost needs to be the same thing, isn't it?

MrJoe (07:29.253)
Yeah, mean, you're absolutely right. Nearly on they are because as a leader, you can be when there's five or 10 or 20 of you. It's very easy for your values to be the same cultural values as the business because you're a small unit. spending a lot of time together. There's a lot of low level contacts that everybody has with you. And so they understand your values just by being in the same place as you a lot of the time.

Desi (07:50.039)
Mm.

MrJoe (07:50.222)
As the organization grows, that's when the disconnect can come because again, more people create more values come into the business and the culture can start to shift away from perhaps that of the founder. Now, either the founder can change or the business can change, but when the two start to diverge, that's when there's challenges for both sides of the business. So you're an employee coming into a business and you're like, every time you meet the founder, you come away from that feeling like, this doesn't feel like the business that I joined.

And equally as a founder, can feel your business is kind of slipping away from you to a certain extent or the people you're hiring are not the right people. But you can't put your finger on it. Maybe they're good at the jobs they do. Again, we talk a lot about, there's a book called Traction by Gina Wickman and in that book he talks about...

right person, right seat. You can have the right person in an organisation who's a good cultural fit, they have the same values as you, but they may be in the wrong seat, right? They haven't got the skills to do that. Equally, you could have an amazing programmer or an amazing salesperson who's great, sat in the right seat, but they may not be the right person for that job because culturally they're not a good fit. So you need to split those two things out and that's...

harder when you're a founder and a leader away from recruitment, away from the team, for you to be able to control and have work on. at some point you need to be very intentional about how you set up the culture. It needs to move away from, it's obvious, which is often what a lot of early stage founders say was obvious what the culture is, because you we live it and breathe it all the time, is when the organization grows you need to be much more intentional about setting that out, codifying it, writing it down, interviewing for it and talking a lot about culture.

So for example, a lot of the enterprise CEOs that I work with spend probably a vast amount of their time on culture, the way people do their work rather than specific decisions that are all around the way people operate, the way that they do things, really the culture of the organization that becomes their primary focus as the business grows a lot larger because that's really how you dramatically affect your leadership style as you are.

MrJoe (09:47.652)
projecting culture onto the organization rather than in essence telling people what to do or how to do it, which is what you do as an early stage founder. And that takes a profound shift in an individual to move from one mode of operation, basically having all the right answers and knowing what to do, early stage founder, to being a leader where you are setting the cultural norms of the organization. You're asking more questions and you're giving answers. As you said earlier on, you really do have to reinvent yourself at a number of stages as your organization grows.

because you need to keep in step with what your organization needs.

Desi (10:19.907)
So it's this kind of process of...

adaptation and know when exactly it's time to change and shift your style. So let's talk a little bit more about the founder CEO specifically because as we know they face like a whole different set of challenges compared to an enterprise CEO like a person leading a large organization. I heard you share an interesting anecdote about how you're ready to let your daughter get wet in the rain so she can learn to not forget her umbrella.

but you would never let her jump in front of a bus for her to learn road safety and that's like...

It's so logical, right? It makes so much sense. And what you're referring to that many early stage founders and CEOs, they often treat each problem as if it was a bus problem. They're trying to prevent their team from like a catastrophic challenge or something catastrophic is going to happen in the organization if they don't step in.

I suppose that's the most difficult part for many early stage founders is to learn when they should back off a little bit and let their team deal with the challenges and learn by their mistakes and also just get them a little bit wet in the rain. So how do we know when is the moment for us to start making this transition and stepping back a little bit?

MrJoe (11:47.524)
you can look at symptoms. So symptoms are things like, you know, general employee dissatisfaction. Nobody likes to be micromanaged. If you're a founder CEO, would you like to be micromanaged? Well, of course not. And so you often don't see it as micromanaging when you're in that position of doing it. You see it as being, you say things to yourself like, well, if I wasn't here, this would never happen. Or I just need to clone myself to make this better. Or...

when you've got challenges with quality control or people just don't care as much about the detail as I do, you find yourself saying these phrases. Now they're all true, okay, and the challenge you have to do is to change your leadership style to suit the size of the business you are. So if you are five people and you're working on your MVP or your early stage product, absolutely, you can be all over the detail. As the business grows, you can't, and you at that point become a bottleneck. Now logically, you can see that, you know that you're becoming that.

That doesn't mean you're going to let go and stop becoming that bottleneck. So the first part of it is really acknowledging the fact that you cannot do everything. And you may feel that you can do everything better than everybody. And that's maybe the culture you've created in the organization right now, but you need to let go of that. So I talk about it like you're driving a, you know, you're driving a car and your hands are tightly gripped on the wheel and your knuckles are white. And you're so scared that if you let go that this car is going to crash or go into a ditch. Part of the work we have to do is slowly

changing that way that you see things, right? Slowly taking your hand off the wheel so somebody else can take over. And it's not suddenly something you can do overnight. The first thing you want to have to do is to change the way, right? You're realising that this is holding you back and holding your organisation back. That realisation has to come that I've got to step away from this because I'm becoming a bottleneck. We're not moving as fast as we could because everybody needs to run things past me. First thing is acknowledgement. And then bit by bit you need to slowly give things away.

And part of that, exercise that I do, and actually I'll give this away to, I'm free to, to listen to the podcast. I have a template for helping understand two things in your life. It's to list the things that energise you, that get you really excited as a leader or as a human being generally. List of all the things that drain you as a leader or as a human being, right? You create a big list. These are people, situations, work that you want to do.

MrJoe (14:05.52)
And typically in getting a leader to write down or anybody to write down the things that energise them and the things that drain them, you get an idea of what you can give up early on as a leader, right? So you can start to pull away from the things that drain you and give those to some other people. And that's how you build up that muscle of delegation. Because again, when you're at an early stage startup, you're used to doing everything all the time.

The reality is you have to start delegating and the best thing to give up first of all is the stuff that doesn't fill your heart full of joy, the stuff that drains you of energy. You give that away first and then you get to a point of view of the things that energise you. And in that list, there's going to be some things that have made you great so far. Maybe that is looking at the detail of the product. Maybe that is setting the vision. I'm not sure what that stuff is that energises you, but you focus much more upon that.

and you're very intentional about the work that you do. So maybe you do have a great gift for the vision of the product and the detail associated with that product. Fine, right? Use that and be intentional about how you do that rather than feeling like you have to do all the work, intentionally decide how you want to give input onto that area that really energises you, again, so that your team are energised by you being there as well. But the best place to start is to list the things that energise you and drain you.

delegate the things that drain you, focus on the things that energise you, and focus on how you work on those in a very intentional way. As I said, I've got some resource that people can email me about that can help you figure out what energises you and what drains you.

Desi (15:27.309)
That's also fantastic compass and kind of it could be almost like guidelines who and what kind of people you should be hiring because the hiring mistakes are probably the biggest mistakes and early stage CEO would potentially do. From my experience the opportunity cost here is much much bigger than the financial implications because spending six months with somebody who is not right for the road for your team or

for like what I've proposed to hire them for would.

have like a catastrophic problem back on the trajectory of the company because sometimes these six months are so important for the early stages of the business. And what I see is many founders, either have people who are too senior to themselves, almost like a mirror of themselves, or they bring somebody on board who is, they just really imply unrealistic expectations on them. So is that, you know, the way to go about hiring people who should our first hires be?

finding people to execute and really help us with the things that drain us.

MrJoe (16:38.232)
definitely and I think what you need to realise is there's lots of ways of doing it, lots of perceived wisdom, received wisdom about how you hire.

Desi (16:45.059)
Mm.

MrJoe (16:46.512)
If you've got that list of what energises you and what drains you, you've immediately got a list of the things you should hire for first. That list is going to be different for everybody. Maybe you're a founder who really loves the product side of it, then don't hire somebody in product too early. That's not going to work because that's the bit you really have got the energy for, hire somebody in finance. If you're a founder who really loves the sales, distribution, marketing, product growth side of it, why are you hiring anybody there if that's your skill set? Hire somebody that complements you somewhere else.

Number one is knowing that it's different. The path is different for every founder and every leader has got a different style. There's no one way of doing it. A lot of what I do with the founders I work with is uncovering their unique style of leadership. And that then gives you an insight as to who you should hire and how you should hire. I mentioned earlier on this difference between a visionary and integrator. The way to think about that is there's really two sets of roles in any business. You think about it like running a train or a railroad. There's the person that lays the tracks, right? They're laying the tracks on a new route.

Some are going somewhere exciting. This is brand new ground they're creating. They're laying the tracks. They're going somewhere brand new. And then you've got somebody equally who's great at running trains, right? They can run trains on time, on budget. They can make sure that everything's working in terms of the train. It's got regular maintenance. It's all those sorts of things. You can need to figure out which one of those two you are. Are you a laying the tracks kind of person? Are you a running the trains kind of person? And you need to hire the other one. Typically most...

founders are laying the tracks on people. They are visionaries. They love the visionary. They love the big stuff. They love the detail. They just don't know that messy middle bit of implementation. The first thing you do is you hire somebody who's great at implementing that stuff, that messy middle area. That could be a COO. That could be a product person. That could be a tech, whatever it is, you need to figure out what that messy middle is in terms of somebody who can take your vision and execute upon that and which part of that you mean. So it's really understanding which of those two types of leaders you are can help you understand who you need to hire.

and going forward in any organization.

MrJoe (18:43.856)
As you mentioned there, one of the warning signs is hiring too many people like you. You don't want a company full of visionaries because you'll get nothing done. You don't want a company full of integrators who just, you know, a greater process and running things when you've got no idea actually what they're building or why they're building it. You need a mixture of both of those two sets of people to really complement each other. So as you said, one of the biggest mistakes is hiring people too much like you. And one of the things is also hiring somebody who doesn't compliment you particularly well in the organization, who's maybe a bit too much like you.

are too different from you and you don't really work together.

Desi (19:17.624)
And then the problem you had is actually getting bigger and bigger and bigger and the same problems stay. You don't solve the problems that you had when you had people who are like yourself.

MrJoe (19:26.756)
Yeah, I mean, I have a friend who works in product management and he always sort of says, gosh, nobody wants to be the first product management hire, but I love being the second one.

Desi (19:36.325)
Yeah.

MrJoe (19:37.092)
I love to be the second first product manager that they hire because the first one generally goes a bit wrong and there's nothing wrong with these things going wrong. Again, if you're a founder, you probably don't have a huge amount of hiring or management experience, right? You've not done that before. Or if you have done, it's under a structure that's come from an organization you've worked with before. You're going to get it a bit wrong. And I think to your point,

you've got to understand pretty early on if this person's right or they're not right and accept the mistakes and move on. So one of the big challenges I also see when the business grows maybe above 50 or 100 people is the opposite is where they keep people too long. So people who've been really integral in that kind of business that's 10 to 20 people, maybe they're extremely great individual contributors who are amazing at product growth or marketing or sales or tech.

And they're then being asked to transition into leadership of a team in that area. And they're not great at the leadership side of it. And often people keep hold of people who've been great for them before and put them into a role that they're not comfortable in and expect them to be really, really good. So at some point you have to look at the leadership at the layer beneath you within an organization and higher for leadership versus higher for skillset. that's a big shift that often a lot of businesses...

miss when they hit kind of 100 people and it takes them six months to a year to overcome that challenge to really get a senior set of leadership who are great leading and building and expanding the organization rather than being experts in their respective fields.

Desi (21:04.887)
That's such an interesting point that you mentioned where you have your core team, maybe some of the team members, they're almost like your co-founders. They've been with you since the beginning. And then as the business grows, you keep promoting the same people simply on the basis you trust them. You know, they will be by your side, whatever happens. But then they might not be the right person for this particular role. How do you get yourself out of this situation?

ever find yourself in this situation because I can imagine this happens with many people. They keep promoting the person they trust but for one or another reason they actually see they're not right for this role but they don't want to lose them by demoting them.

MrJoe (21:49.872)
Yeah, and it's back to that concept of right person, right seat. So those people are absolutely right person for the organisation, they're just not in the right seat. And you have to negotiate that part of it really and understand what you want to do and have the open and honest, frank conversation. So what often what I find is I'll ask people to score their C-suite team, right? Give me your C-suite team, right? Tell me.

who is a 10 out of 10, like who are eight, nine, 10 out of 10, they're really extraordinary people who are fantastic. 10 with the people who are like, you know, five or below. And that's really easy, because then you know who to keep and who to let go. The challenge you have is the people who are sort of six or seven out of 10, who are okay at what they do. They're not exceptional, they're not awful. They're awful, they'd go. If they're exceptional, right, you'd rave about it.

And the real weakness you find in senior leadership, and this is actually true from businesses that are 200 people up to 200,000 people, is senior leadership, people who are really only six to seven out of 10 in terms of skill set. Maybe they can be coached and improved to be higher, but the reality is there's those six or seven. So they're not awful enough to move them on and they're not amazing enough. They just sit at that kind of average ground and average area.

they are the hardest situations to deal with, especially like you say, if you've grown up with them and you trust these people, there's an emotional element to it as well. You need at some point to decide.

and make that obvious, make that choice. Yeah, this person is a seven out of 10. I've done everything I can to help improve them, but it's time for us to end this relationship. And that person needs to either move on to another role, they're the right person in the organization, find the right seat for them, or they need to move out of the organization and you need to hire somebody who is going to be a nine or a 10 out of 10. And that's easier to do when your business grows because you know what average looks like, and then you can start to understand what great looks like. But yeah, it's a real challenge for most leaders. That business size of about hundreds to about

MrJoe (23:42.562)
500 people of just having kind of above slightly above average leadership but not exceptional leadership.

Desi (23:50.563)
You have to start making the hard choices at some point, right?

MrJoe (23:54.676)
Absolutely, you do right. the big thing that the overall message to this stuff for any CEO is if you want to make a change in the world, you need to make change in yourself. If you want to change the world, you've got to change yourself to keep up with that. And the same has got to be true the organization that you're building. Everything has to change. And that's not just skill set. That's also mindset. If you're not doing both of those two things at the same time, you're not going to change the world. You look at the great leaders that we look at now and you can see how they've grown over time.

to be better and better at what they do. And equally, you can absolutely see when they've hit their maximum, where they have stopped growing and start to become different in the way that that works. know, classic one is Elon Musk, right? He stopped growing in terms of his leadership stuff and he's, you know, he's gone in kind of lots of crazy directions because of that. You see other leaders who started to grow, like Mark Zuckerberg, who absolutely hit a plateau and then realized he had to change and has changed and has kind of come through a resurgence in that. Leaders need to change. If you want to change the world, you've got to change yourself.

Desi (24:54.549)
In your view, what are the defining traits of a successful, happy CEO, if such a thing existed, of course? Is there like a perfect formula? Have you seen any patterns of CEOs who successfully scale themselves alongside their companies?

MrJoe (25:12.484)
definitely I can share some traits with you absolutely. I just mentioned that one about constantly looking to change themselves, realising there's always ways to improve how they work and how they turn up in the world. That's number one really, if you're not willing to change yourself, how can you change the world, right? It's not going to happen. The second one really is...

is letting go of being right. So early on as a founder, you are, have got this amazing vision and, you everybody's telling you you're crazy or your, these VCs are not backing you. You you have to be really clear on your vision and absolutely believe everything that you say. And that can again, hold you back later on in your organisation. So you need to let go of being right or being the smartest person in the room.

That's not what you're there for. That got you to a certain point in your career, but you have to let go of being right. And what I mean by that is understanding there are smarter people than you who've got better ideas, who are more experienced in marketing, in tech, in sales and whatever. And that's not the sign of a good leader is having great ideas and imagination. It's about seeing that in other people and realizing you're not there. So number two is letting go of being right. And then number three related to that is asking questions.

more than giving answers. So if you're in a meeting and you're constantly telling people what to do, or what they should do, or people are asking you for that, that's again a dangerous sign in terms of your organisation not growing because you're becoming a bottleneck and you're the only source of inspiration of what's going on.

So the best leaders, again, ask more questions than they give answers. And those questions are very directed to nudge people in the right direction. So even if they know what the right answer is, they may not give it, but they may ask the right sorts of questions so that that person comes up with that answer themselves. So it's all about asking questions at that stage. And then really the next level as part of that is really defining your, people and how people see you.

MrJoe (27:02.722)
outside of you being in the room. So this is really the culture that you're creating within an organization. So anybody can turn up and be amazing in a meeting or in a situation or in a pitch. The reality of the most...

gifted leaders is they don't have to be in the room for that stuff to happen. Their legacy or the way that they are is that they're almost sat in that room when they're not in that room. So everybody knows how that business operates. They know how to make decisions and choices based around that culture. So almost that CEO is always there, but they don't actually physically have to be there. They've got this almost legacy or ability to project what they want that organization to be. And everybody's extremely crisp and clear on what

they should be doing and how they should be doing it without that leader needing to be there again, because that can be a bottleneck. If your organisation is 10,000 people large, you can't be in every meeting making every decision. You have to be able to project that cultural greatness that comes from you into the whole organisation.

Desi (28:00.715)
and give people this sense of stability and clarity, what is expected from them. Yeah, it's such an important point.

MrJoe (28:07.504)
And what I find with a lot of the leaders who've really, you know, in those large organizations, they probably only say maybe 10 or 15 different things. And these things are extremely tight and crisp in the way that they talk about them. No, this year our North Star is X. This year we are focusing on these three things and only these three things.

You know, our mission in the world is to do this, this, this and this. Whenever you're making a decision, you need to look at these three things, right? These are typically the way that very experienced CEOs turn up and they've really almost got 10 things that they say. You could just have a robot recording this person because again, this has to be very tight, very crisp message for everybody.

So everybody knows what's going on and that's really a very small set of vocabulary that a CEO has and they're essentially saying the same thing again and again and again and that the way that they say it is extremely crisp.

Desi (29:01.411)
Can you share an example of a successful CEO transformation you witnessed maybe from your experience without sharing names and positions of course?

MrJoe (29:12.506)
can. Yes, I've worked with a CEO previously who had taken over from the founder. The founder had built the business up for 10 years. They promoted internally a CEO and number one, it's really difficult to come into a business as a leader when the shadow of the founder is already there. Okay, because again, the founders culture and the way the founder is to set the culture for the business.

And what was interesting is this CEO knew that things had to change, right? That that culture needed to change. They needed to move away from the old thing because the business hadn't stopped growing and stopped succeeding in the old way. And so he looked again at really what do we want the culture to be? What does it need to be like for this business to change? And looked at.

success and redefine what success meant in terms of the organization. Previously, they've been extremely successful because they'd had a great product, right? The product had been product-led growth for a long time. They realized that I'd hit a plateau and they had to shift into sales-led growth, right? They had to get people outreaching and working in terms of what they were doing. Instigated a partnership program. They really re-changed.

Not only the culture of how they did things and the way the decisions were made, it wasn't a product forced organisation. It was a commercially sales first organisation. had to completely shift how the organisation focused and made choices away from the old way to the new way. And that took time. But what was interesting is they were very intentional about making those moves. They very crisp about the way they made those messages. They were very...

and understood that there was going to be, and there always is with any change in strategy, you go on a J-curve, right? So things get worse before they get better. And he was very clear on that message. Things are gonna get a bit harder before they get better. We're gonna have to go through this period of pain and difficulty before things get better. We're gonna have to move some people around and change some focuses. If you're not on board with this new way of doing it, you're going to have to change.

MrJoe (31:03.664)
They made dramatic changes into the C-suite as well, so people who are extremely culturally tied to the old ways of doing things, they moved those people on.

They hide people in from the outside, again, because typically what founders do is build people up from the inside. And that's great and get you to a certain point, but they move people in from the outside who have expertise in certain areas to take over at the C-suite. Yeah. And they are bucking the trend in their industry at the moment by over 30 % growth year on year in an industry that's extremely competitive at the moment. And they've done that by really effectively reinventing the organization.

And what was interesting, the way they did it was without going in and saying, I'm going to reinvent things. That's exactly what they've done. But they've done it slowly and very intentionally, knowing exactly where they need to get to rather than trying to do it overnight. Because what you find with many founders is they pivot. And what that means is a dramatic change very quickly. And what comes from a pivot is a bit of whiplash.

Desi (31:57.091)
Yeah.

MrJoe (32:01.196)
And that's fine when the organization's small, but when the organization's larger, that's a lot harder to do. And so it takes a very different set of leadership skills to slowly move an organization around to be something new. And this leader did that and has had incredible success from that.

Desi (32:15.809)
Did they face a lot of pushback internally? Did they face any obstacles internally, lot of pushback from the team?

MrJoe (32:19.45)
What was that sorry?

MrJoe (32:24.794)
they did because the founder was still around and was still sitting on the board so they'd find that members of their C-suite were going behind their back to talk to the founder saying that this isn't right, this isn't working, we need to change this. I was always whispering in the ear of the founder and there was huge amounts of difficulty and change. You know, this is not the way we've done it for the last 10 years, why are we changing this? And especially with difficulties in and around the product world as well because you know, an organisation where the product is...

seen as being king and all decisions are around that and all investment is in that, to shift that away means there's a lot of people who've lost status within the organisation and shifting that focus away from product to the commercial side of the organisation, yeah, put a lot of people, upset a lot of people. But again, the CEO was very focused on why this was happening, why it needed to be done and didn't waver from that. You know, he's got a really strong...

constitution in terms of working through it. obviously when we talk, it's not like that. There's lots of doubts in his mind. And that's why I'm there to do is to be able to be that person that, you know, because again, it's quite a lonely position being a CEO.

you can't almost ask, you know, who can you ask for advice on stuff like, maybe you've got somebody trusted in your C-suite or you've got somebody who's a mentor that's there, but you still need that person to talk to saying, is this right? Am I doing this the right way? How can I make this better? And really what's been interesting is supporting that person on that journey is I've seen great change. And from the outside, you know, absolutely solid and super strong. I've seen the points of doubt and challenge in that person's way of managing.

From the outside they've seemed absolutely solid and very clear on what they're trying to do. So yeah, I've been so lucky to be on part as part of that journey, very, very fortunate.

Desi (34:07.299)
They are very fulfilling it sounds. I suppose for people who come to work with you, it just requires a certain type of person, somebody who is ready to see their own mistakes, to reflect on what they're not doing right, to be ready for a change. Is there a type of person you would never work with?

MrJoe (34:31.792)
I is. So, I mean, there's a lot of coaches out there. I'm not like most coaches. am quite... High flame is maybe the way to talk about it. I'm kind of like pouring rocket fall onto a fire. I am really pushing you forward. And I realised that most coaches aren't quite like that. They're a little bit more gentle than I am. And so the people that I work with are very much aware of their human side. They understand that they need to make some change in themselves, but they want that change to be quite dramatic.

Desi (34:50.573)
Mm.

MrJoe (35:01.584)
and they know it needs to be that way. And so working with me is quite a, it's an exhilarating experience compared to say a typical coach. And that's not for everybody, right? So if you're finding yourself struggling, you're approaching burnout, if you've got difficulty, I'm not the right person for you, right? I'm not that kind of person. I'm the person that's gonna push you through, I'm the person that's gonna support you through your next period of growth as a human being and as an organization. I'm not somebody who can kind of help.

you out of a difficulty right now, right? I'm all about growth and challenge and future. And that's not for everybody. So the people that I work best with are people who are like, you know, they've had great success, but they know they're absolutely capable of way more success. They just know that they've got to get a little bit out of their own way or make some changes within themselves to get there. Those are the people that I absolutely work best with.

Desi (35:56.259)
Your career began in teaching. You were a primary school teacher, if I'm not wrong. Then you transitioned to tech strategy. You've even done user experience. I find this kind of diverse background super interesting. how did you discover that your calling is coaching top execs?

MrJoe (36:15.738)
Yeah, for me, it did start with teaching. So like you say, I was an elementary school teacher. I love working with really young kids. I worked with sort of five and six year olds. And I really enjoyed that because what's amazing about five and six year olds is they are like sponges for knowledge. They're constantly changing and reinventing themselves and how they turn up. They are almost what every great leader should be, right? They've got this absolute ability to like, yeah, the world's so exciting. Come on, bring it on. And I loved that experience and that energy that they brought.

It's also how I got my name, Mr. Joe, because I was a teacher, so they always used to call me Mr. Joe. But then, I moved through user experience, which again was all about people. So I focused quite heavily on the research side. So I must have interviewed maybe, what, five, six, seven hundred users over my course of my career. And it was always approaching technology from a human angle. And again, I realized all technology problems are human problems. And tackling all problems from a human angle.

led me into the world of strategy, which again, similarly, all strategic challenges are human challenges at the end of the day, right? You want to launch a new product into a market. You've got to make sure that those humans at the other end of that are ready for it. You've got to make sure the humans that are building that are doing the right thing. It's all human challenges. Because way back when before the teaching, also I have a degree in neuroscience and a master's in human communication. So I've written a book on psychology. Psychology is really what drives me, the human aspect of everything. And the big thing I noticed throughout my career

is the best strategies are very human centric. The best initiatives are very human focused and understand the humans in all aspects of that. And really that led me into, obviously led me into coaching because I'm working with a human, you know, the other end of it. And I kind of joke that I save as many businesses, save as many marriages as I save businesses these days, is that I want the CEOs that I work with to be joyful, to be happy, to be...

loving every minute of what they do, like those six year olds that I used to teach, right? Really excited about getting up to work, really excited about spending time with their kids, really excited about their marriage and their spouse. You know, their life is really positive and flowing in the right direction. And so a lot of what I do is really unlocking the values and what is joy for that person and making sure that everything, every aspect of their life is joyful, right? They're building incredible businesses, but they're loving every second of that.

MrJoe (38:40.11)
And that's definitely been something that's been throughout my career has been a definite factor within that. And that comes down to the enterprise CEOs that I work with, know, who are...

working for publicly, know, working for shareholders, big publicly listed businesses, and they are, have almost a lot, lost touch a little with that human side of who they are. They had these values when they were much younger. And I, lot of what I do now is reconnecting them with those values and still delivering value to the organisation in terms of cash money, which is how they're measured, but looking at everything upstream from what they do to make that more human centric.

Because the belief that I have is that if you're the humans you work with are really happy and joyful and working in the right direction, you're going to make money. Your organization will make money, right? Because you think about...

revenue, revenue is a lagging indicator of success. If you're successful, you will earn money. If you focus too much on earning money, that means your upstream choices are not very, good. So lot of what I do is reconnecting enterprise CEOs with their values, right? To be much more human, to be more joyful, to be more successful, but in a very human way, not in kind of spreadsheets or...

business in human kind of way, which is often a trap that many senior leaders, many CEOs can fall into of larger enterprise organizations.

Desi (40:01.812)
super interesting connecting your leadership style and the decisions you make to the human side of everything. Do people open...

open to you when it comes to their personal life as well because I can't imagine you going through like very dramatic experience at home and then being a successful CEO. suppose part of the journey is to know when you have to slow down to get your home in order and then go back to your office and be the leader you want to be there.

MrJoe (40:32.058)
Yeah, I mean, absolutely, it really is because, part of the way that I work with people is we don't just jump straight into coaching. We have at least one, if not two coaching conversations, which we call mutual fit conversations. So two deep coaching sessions where I don't charge for these, where we both.

decide if for both of us it's a hell yeah, right? It's a hell yeah from me as the coach, it's a hell yeah from you as the client. And a big part of that is we go into all aspects of your life, right? You've got to be really, really open to looking at all the challenges that you're facing and cross everything. Because you're right, you said it exactly right. If you're unhappy at home, in your marriage, you're not going to be able to turn up and be amazing at work. Equally, if you're putting too much effort into work and neglecting those that you love,

there's a level of guilt that that brings and an inevitable reckoning as to where that comes from. part of my journey, I was a founder myself for a startup in 2018 and we raised, we were raising about 1.2 in seed funding and I remember the funding was close and I just...

I was working extremely long hours. I was getting up at 5am doing the hustle, working all these hours. I had a young daughter at home. My wife was struggling. I remember my wife saying, look, she calls me Joey, Joey, this is not...

This is not the life that I want. I don't see you. And when I do see you, you're miserable because you're working really hard and putting all your effort into this startup and your consultancy business. know, I was talking on stages in front of 2000 people at the Barbican, seeming like I was on top of the world. And the reality was I was really, really unhappy because my, you know, my wife was like, look, she noticed this within me. In fact, my co-founder, Lisa, also noticed it with me. was like, what are you doing? And so I made the hard choice to walk away from that and reset my life because I needed to put my family first at that point. So my career had to...

MrJoe (42:27.342)
be put second. And that was, it felt like a hard choice at the time, but absolutely it was the right choice. And so a big part of what I do with the leaders that I want is there's there's no space that is off limits for us, that you know, you need to be working and living the life that you want to be living, you need to be doing the things that you should be and need to be and have to be doing, as well as running an amazing business, right, you can't

I mean, always say you don't have to, being a startup founder, a brilliant CEO, doesn't have to come at the cost of being a mother or a spouse or anything like that. You can do both of those two things equally as well. You just have to be very intentional about how you do each of them. It doesn't have to be a choice between family life and work life. It doesn't have to be a balance. I call it a blend, right? It's a blend of these things. Because balance suggests something's always out of kilter. A blend is the nicest way to think about it. So.

Long answer, absolutely. You kind of have to be prepared to make changes in your personal life. It's always going to be for the better because you'll be a better leader if you're happier at home and you've got a happier marriage and you've got happier kids, you'll be a happier leader and vice versa as well.

Desi (43:38.207)
Absolutely. You're writing your book on the Modern CEO in public. anybody who hasn't seen, go and check Joe's website mrjoe.uk slash modern CEO. I love the little videos and clips and your thoughts you put out there. What's been the most surprising feedback or insight you've received from your audience so far on kind of the views you share online?

MrJoe (44:05.572)
Yeah, so the modern CEO book and calling it the modern CEO book is definitely a reaction to the old ways of management. for a long time, I've struggled with, and I think a lot of the CEOs that I've worked with have struggled with the received wisdom of how you should run a business. It's all command and control. You're in your office at the top of that tower block and everybody below you is your employee and you tell them what to do, right? There's a lot of outdated ways of running a business. So I wanted to update a lot of that. Almost as a reaction to lot of the...

MBA or Harvard Business Review articles of old.

And so I wanted to do that in the open and everything that I do, all of the content within the book is based upon all of the coaching that I do with the CEO. So all of the snippets that I release. So the way I'm writing the book is it's a series of, in essence, short snippets in helping you to create mindset and skillset shifts in yourself. everything is split into three parts and each part has maybe 10 skillset and mindset shifts for you. And if you go through this program of making these skillset and mindset shifts, you're going to be a better human being. You're going to be a better leader.

As I'm going, I've been sharing all of these mindset and skill set shifts as I've gone through. The biggest feedback that I've had is how even small changes to the way that you turn up based on even just one of these videos or one of these concepts could have a radical shift in the way that your organisation sees you, your leadership style and the results that you get, even just from something quite small. So a good example of one of these is I have a video called

close all open loops. So one of the biggest things and challenges I see of any CEO or any leader is they have too many open loops. And what that means is you have a meeting with somebody and say, yeah, are you going to be doing this thing? And they're like, yeah, I'll go and go do that thing. If you need any help, let me know. And the other person's like, yeah, of course I'll let you know. And that person never gets back to you. So you think, well, do they need help? Have they stalled? Are they doing the job? Are they doing the right thing? That loop has not been closed. And if you spot good leaders, they close all the loops.

Desi (46:01.603)
Right.

MrJoe (46:05.68)
So I'll say something to that person. If you need anything, how about any help from me? I want you to come to me by next Tuesday. In let's put next Tuesday in the diary at nine o'clock. You can come to me with any challenges that you need. That loop is closed until next Tuesday at nine o'clock when they come back and that loop's closed. Simple way of doing it. Open loop's gone. So I'm not worrying or thinking about that open loop as a leader. It's a closed loop. Even something as simple as closing all the loops in your leadership journey can be transformational for everybody around you. Because suddenly everything starts to get done.

Desi (46:35.083)
Right.

MrJoe (46:36.368)
It's a very, very simple hack, but one that's really transformational for the lot of leaders I work with. So one of the first things I do with a lot of the leaders I work with is help them close all the loops, right? Have a strategy for closing all the loops. And that's transformed many of the founder CEOs that I've worked with in the way that they work with their team. Suddenly stuff happens. know, people aren't hiding away from problems or challenges. Yeah, works forward, moves forward. So yeah, in sharing things and putting things out there, I get loads of feedback as to does this work? Doesn't this work? Is this valuable? Isn't this valuable? So by the time the book's out, everything will be...

Desi (46:53.069)
Things are moving.

MrJoe (47:06.101)
polished as it can be and as valuable as it needs to be for the modern CEO.

Desi (47:11.307)
Interesting. You've worked with both startup CEOs and Fortune 100 leaders. Are there any universal truths about leadership that you've discovered that transcend company size, right? Something that's universal for any company leader.

MrJoe (47:29.156)
Yeah, one of the universal things that I work on with all types of leaders is what I call, and it's concept I've used from a gentleman called Michael Neal, which is effortless success. And that's the idea of building success so it feels like it's easy. You're not having to put the energy in, you're not pushing a car uphill all day, you're not pushing the organization forward. And so one of the key concepts I work with all of my leaders is how could this be

effortless, how could this be easier? How could you make your life lighter? And that as a concept is universal across all all leaders, they all need that. Because what you find as a leader is you take on the responsibility. You hear leaders saying things, well, the buck stops with me, ultimately, it's my responsibility. They have all of these words to talk about why all the responsibilities on their shoulders. And if it's metaphorically, responsibilities always on their shoulders, they're going to feel like that, they're going to act like that, they're going to turn up like that.

It doesn't have to be like that. So in just asking the question, how could this feel easier? How could this feel effortless? Helps people think and shift their mindset away from like, this is hard, this requires effort, I've got to keep pushing to, actually this feels really nice. I'm just making little moves and changes here and nudging here and there. there's somethings out over there, I can do that. It suddenly feels easier and lighter. And a big gift that I give to the CEOs that I work with is a feeling of lightness in terms of everything that they do.

Desi (48:53.357)
Amazing. So many practical insights today, Joe. Thank you so much for your time. And before I let you go, just my last question will be, let's look at 2030, for example. What skills or qualities do you believe will become essential for CEOs? Qualities that are commonly discussed today, something new, what is changing?

MrJoe (49:18.682)
Yeah, think CEOs in 2030 will be, if I've done my job properly and if the world has moved in the way it needs to move, they'll be a lot more human in the way that they see things. They'll treat their organisation as a group of incredible, gifted humans rather than a set of resources or some lines in a spreadsheet.

is that they'll really unlock the ability of the humans within that organization to be the best that they can be. They'll have given AI all the boring, dull jobs and not given AI all the exciting ones. And the humans will be giving and doing all the work that they absolutely need to be doing to drive that business forward. And so understanding fundamentally for a business to be successful and to generate billions of dollars, the humans need to be.

happy and joyful and working in the same direction for the same reasons, the same mission and purpose that you have as a leader. If you instill that within your organization, you can do incredible things. If you try to command and control and coerce and align and all of those horrible words that a lot of leaders use these days, there's a huge amount of effort in there and you're going to wear yourself out and you're going to lose to the folks that are doing things in a human way.

Desi (50:26.399)
your eyes guys. Where can people find you on wine job?

MrJoe (50:30.596)
Yeah, the best place to find me is MrJoe.uk is my website. All my stuff's there. I've got lots of videos that I share and content. LinkedIn as well. Just search for Mr Joe Coach.

on LinkedIn and you'll find me. I share everything that's there as well. Equally YouTube, Mr. Joe Coach, again there as well. I share all of my insights there. I actually have a newsletter that's really good that I send out every week, so you don't have to keep up with that. You can find that at mrjo.uk. That's probably the best place to start, to sign up for the newsletter, because you get all of the stuff that I send out and you get that every two weeks.

Desi (51:02.135)
Awesome, thank you so much. I'm gonna stop recording.

MrJoe (51:04.292)
Thank you for your time, Desi.