Three times now, I’ve been asked to be the CEO of a company in which I have inherited the former CEO’s email inbox. Three times now I’ve had to manage both my own email inbox and another’s at the same time.
In two of the three cases, the CEOs were underperforming. Their email inboxes have given me insight into as to why.
Attention Management
Attention Management is a concept I prefer over time management or email management. That to which you pay attention gets your emotional, mental and other cycles. So, what follows now are several observations about the underperforming CEOs based on their email inboxes that correlate to their under performance.
They were subscribed to well over 100 email lists
In both cases, the CEOs were getting thirty or more marketing emails each day from services to which they had subscribed. This created clutter and unnecessary noise in their inbox. But noise is hard to ignore. When it comes to subscriptions, what we don’t realize is that every email we receive requires a decision on our part – even if the decision is to do nothing more than leave it in the inbox. You need to take time to assess the email and decide what to do with it. I find this process, however short, to be tiring when executed every day 30, 50 or perhaps 100 times. Therefore, I unsubscribe to marketing emails as often as possible. They create wasted cycles. These underperforming CEOs (apparently) didn’t mind getting all this noise in their inbox.
Most of these subscribed emails were personal in nature
In both cases, the CEOs were subscribed to marketing lists that were personal in nature. Both happened to have been females, so lot’s of shoes, jewelry, massages, hotels, clothing and other personal hygiene and creature-comfort lists seemed to dominate their inbox. But both had subscribed to other lists, such as those offering learning, networking and/or career advancement lists. In some cases, purchases from these vendors could be written off as legit expenses in the company, but the CEO would have been the only individual who benefited from the purchase.
In both cases, the CEOs underperformance was related to their unstated, but well-known reputations that the business was all about them rather than them being about their business. Both routed nearly all decisions in the organization through them, including things as granular as to what to name a form or which customers should be called on a daily basis. These two self-centered CEOs, I observe, had inboxes full of marketing emails that offered to enhance their personal life, often at the expense of the company. The content of these emails was a non-verbal representation that “it” was all about them.
Neither took the time to delete or file emails
This is an important point. In both cases, the CEOs had almost no email management skills in terms of deleting unnecessary emails or filing emails that pertained to ongoing projects, discussions or legal issues. They simply left everything in their inbox and, I assume, relied on the Search function to find old emails.
What many don’t realize is that after a build-up of over 20,000, 30,000 or even 50,000 of emails, you can’t find anything because a keyword search across a wide corpus is often inadequate to producing a good result set. For example, if you search on the term “horn”, are you looking for a horn (trumpet), a horn (car horn) or a horn (the horns on a ram)? Are you looking for a resume’ or resume? Are you looking for a bonnet or a bonnet? If you’re in Microsoft technology, are you looking for a site, a site or a site (they are three distinct functionalities and should not be confused)?
When people don’t delete unneeded emails and/or don’t file them into folders when it is appropriate to do so, they create unnecessary noise and they diminish effective findability in their inbox. As a result, even if these CEOs wanted to give attention to the discussion history of a certain topic, chances are good they were unable to do so because they could not find the relevant emails.
Both were high control but scattered individuals
This lack of email management is really a symptom of a larger issue: both were high-control people who were also scattered in their attention management. Just by looking at the emails they allowed into their world, one could quickly discern that they were paying attention to the wrong things.
Another indication of this “scattered-ness” was their calendars. When you look at their calendars, they were not discriminating about to whom they gave attention. Both were often flying all over the US to events that were of interest to them personally but perhaps not highly helpful to their business. Their attention (and expenses) were weighted toward what was personally interesting to them. The value of these “business trips”, when compared to the raw costs of the trip itself, were questionable. They often confused the two, assuming, for example, that attendance at an awards dinner in Las Vegas was somehow helpful to their business, even though *no one* at the awards dinner would ever purchase their products/services and the award was for her personally, not for her business. One would sometimes fly to New York and stay in high-priced hotels at Times Square for a single one-hour meeting with a potential customer who would never represent anything more than occasional, minor sales opportunity.
Their attention was scattered because they confused their personal success with their business success. In other words, if they were personally successful, their business would be successful too. Nothing more could be further from the truth.
When CEOs start to pay attention to their own interests and comfort above the success of their business, they are headed toward disaster. One CEO won three different personal awards for entrepreneurship and business leadership in the same year when she lost over $2M on her P&L on ~$40M of revenue. Her success went to her head and while she was jet-setting around the US for the next 3 years, being invited to big-name events and flying her husband, family and friends with her, her business would lose well over $10M and her revenue would decline by some 40%.
Both lacked emails that contained critical information they needed to make good decisions
In both cases, the CEOs were not receiving the right information about the key metrics in their business – in part, because those metrics didn’t exist and in part because they didn’t have systems to produce the metrics in the first place. They either didn’t know or didn’t care. Both are inexcusable.
What you pay attention to as a leader dictates what receives care and feeding. Look at your email inbox. What is coming into your inbox? Does it help you run your business better? Do the emails coming into your inbox give you critical information you need to make sound decisions? Or are you paying attention to the latest offerings from a fancy Hotel in Paris? I think I’ve made my point.
Neither CEO Tried to Loop Themselves Out of Discussions or Decisions
I continue to be amazed at how many business leaders tend to involve (insert?) themselves in nearly every dimension of their business. When the business is small, this is necessary. But as the business grows, the CEO/owner needs to step out of many decisions, leaving them to trusted managers who make good decisions. These CEOs were unable to do this.
Growth stagnates as the CEO becomes the bottleneck when the CEO is involved in nearly every facet of the business and has a strong opinion about everything. Successful CEOs know when to insert themselves (rarely) and when to let others “run with” an idea or decision (should be often). But if you look at the Sent Items and see all the opinions and comments on what these two CEOs looped themselves into, you get a glimpse into why their staff never took risks, rarely made decisions and for sure, hid their mistakes as much as possible.
By looking at what a CEO’s inbox contains – how it is organized – what is retained and what isn’t – you can learn much about how a CEO thinks, what that CEO values and what occupies that CEO’s attention.
Bill English
Bill English is a Partner with the Platinum Group and serves as an advisor to small business owners for conflict resolution, leadership assessment and development and culture improvement. Bill is also the Publisher of Bible and Business, his personal blog in which he “thinks out loud” about the integration of Christianity and business ownership. Bill can be reached at 763-458-3722.
