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Guest: Rod Reynolds, a coach at CEO Coaching International. Rod is a seasoned global executive and three-time CEO who’s led major operations across Canada, the UK, and Asia Pacific. Rod is also a world-class endurance athlete. He has completed over 15 Ironman and Ironman 70.3 events, including two World Championships. He represented Canada at the 2024 World Triathlon Championships. Rod also participates in long distance (up to 100 miles) mountain trail running races.
Quick Background: Every elite organization is powered by talent, especially in the CEO’s chair. But talent alone won’t get your company to BIG. Sustainable growth requires a disciplined approach to performance, accountability, and resilience. Some of the very best leaders sharpen these skills through elite training and a commitment to excellence in and out of the office.
On today’s show, Rod Reynolds explains how CEOs can assemble a high-performance team and how physical discipline can build the resilience executives need to Making BIG Happen.
Keys to Maintaining High Performance From Rod Reynolds
1. Assemble the Right Team the First Time.
”Bringing the right people on board is the most important thing that CEOs should be focusing on,” Rod Reynolds says. “It’s shocking how little focus CEOs put on getting their hiring right. McKinsey says that about 50% of new hires fail, and 18% of those fail in the probation period. The lack of focus on getting the right people at the beginning is amazing.”
Strong resumes and winning interview skills might help you narrow down a group of promising candidates. But it’s also too easy to let credentials and personality gloss over potential problems, like culture fit and what motivates a person to work their best. Today’s CEOs have more thorough tools at their disposal to get important hires right the first time and save the company from expensive mistakes.
“The interview process is a remarkably blunt tool,” Rod says. “And if the process is used on its own, it has a predictability factor of something like 30%. Great hiring processes use multifaceted approaches of higher predictive power elements, such as examining previous work, a selection of testing — cognitive, behavioral, personality. But probably the most important contributor to a successful hire is examining past performance, and the greater you can do that through detailed reference checking, the higher the probability of success. I’m not saying to downgrade the interview, it’s just that it needs to be balanced with AI tools today. It’s amazing how good the questions can be when you want to target a specific behavior or issue related to your job.”
2. Design Accurate Measurement Systems that Incentivize the Right Behavior.
Most CEOs believe in “What gets measured gets done.” Our own Making BIG Happen System emphasizes the importance of tracking, measuring, and managing daily, actionable steps and holding staff accountable for hitting established targets.
But that assumes that the metrics getting measured are aligned with mission, values, and annual goals.
“ I’ve seen it so many times where simplistic measurement systems are put in place,” Rod Reynolds says. ‘If you look at Bank of America, when they got severely disciplined by regulators because the staff had been opening up a number of credit card accounts that were either fraudulent or the customers were unaware of, one takeaway was that measurement system needed to be aligned with the culture. And the culture is set from the top. The incentives have to align with the ethics of the organization and everything has to be very transparent.”
A measurement system like Bank of America’s that rewards employees for hitting quotas — by any means — might seem like a worst-case scenario. But too many companies start with smaller, less harmful versions of these misalignments that lead to BIG problems.
For example, if your sales and comp structures incentivize salespeople to take the path of least resistance towards their annual bonuses, then your company’s growth trajectory is likely to stall.
Or, if a CEO is measuring their CFO’s performance by the company’s stock price, the CFO might make aggressive accounting moves that boost earnings in the short-term but wreak havoc in the long-term.
“A proper cycle of accountability starts with setting clear expectations,” Rod says. “And that’s visible: Who owns the expectations? What does it take to get achievement of them? Do they have the resources enabling them to get to those goals? What is a tracking approach for that? Is it weekly, monthly, annually? And then you start the feedback process through discussion, honest open feedback, actions taken from the feedback in terms of any course corrections, and then recognition at the end, giving positive reinforcement for results and ownership of the issues. That is the fundamental for putting in place a proper measurement system.”
3. Let Top Talent Do What They Do Best.
Wayne Gretzky was the greatest hockey player of all time. But even during his legendary run with the Edmonton Oilers, Gretzky wasn’t very good at body checking opposing players off the puck. Reporters asked coach Glen Sather why he didn’t train Gretzky to play more physically and round out his game.
Sather replied, “The only thing I want to train him for is to score more goals.”
Sather and the Oilers let their superstar do what he did best, and surrounded him with complementary players who did what they did best.
Phil Jackson managed his great Chicago Bulls and LA Lakers teams in the same way, by maximizing his superstars’ gifts, surrounding them with complementary players, and building a system that allowed everyone to win together.
“ I think the same applies to your team,” Rod says. “A common practice of CEOs and managers is to round out their senior management teams. But really your maximum output is probably achieved by helping each person do more of what they do best. If they’re great at sales, help them make more sales. If they run a great factory, help them run the factory.”
CEOs should consider this strategy in the C-suite too. Yes, it’s important for CEOs to be honest about their own weaknesses and hire executives who expand the company’s core competencies. But a CFO or COO who isn’t giving you the time and tools you need to manage those tasks that only the CEO can manage shouldn’t be in your starting lineup.
4. Build Resilience and Persevere.
Twenty years ago, Rod was 47 years old, 30 pounds overweight, disillusioned about his fitness and his stress from working long hours under enormous stress.
One day, a colleague reminded Rod that he had signed up for a sprint triathlon: a three-part running, biking, and swimming competition.
“I couldn’t run a hundred meters,” Rod remembers. “I couldn’t swim a hundred meters. So I went out and ran my first hundred meters. I almost threw up, and I said, I don’t know if I can do this. But I went out the next day and I ran 200 meters. And I just gradually kept going and building daily. Eventually I finished the sprint. I wasn’t last, but I was hooked. I loved the competition and the variation of the sport, so I kept going.”
Rod’s passion for endurance sports has taken him all over the world, including the Ironman World Championships. As he progressed in his fitness, he brought some of the same lessons that helped him achieve athletically to his work as a CEO.
“The CEO is at the top of the organization because he or she excelled at the performance and the expectations of the board of directors,” Rod says. “It’s the same thing with excelling in sport. It’s all about executing fundamentals in a very disciplined format, continuing to drive to a very clear goal, being unfazed by all the obstacles that get in your way, and balancing all of the competing pressures for your time to get there.”
Perhaps the highest level of performance for any athlete or CEO is building the resilience and endurance to keep achieving even when the odds are stacked against you. Michael Jordan couldn’t have won his famous “Flu Game” without years of fanatical practice and training. CEOs also need to put in their proverbial 10,000 hours to build leadership skills that are impervious to tariffs, AI, or a daunting new competitor.
“I’ve had races where the weather has turned brutal, or the body just says, ‘You’ve hit the wall, stop,'” Rod says. “And I just want to shut down, lie down, get off the bike. But what got me through was refusing to panic by adapting and focusing just on taking the next step. There’s an expression used by the Navy SEALs called ‘callousing your mind,’ training your mind to accept pain and suffering. And one way to do that is to be envisaging the success of the pain. There’s a belief that the greater the win, the more pain, the more suffering you can take. It’s the same in business. Adversity is inevitable. But the leaders who stay composed and adaptable under stress are the ones who carry their teams through building grit and resilience in their business.”
Top Takeaways
1. Hire the best people and put them each in a position to do what they do best.
2. Measure the right metrics to establish a powerful culture of accountability.
3. Callous your mind against distractions and short-term pain so that you can take your next BIG step.
About CEO Coaching International
CEO Coaching International works with CEOs and their leadership teams to achieve extraordinary results quarter after quarter, year after year. Known globally for its success in coaching growth-focused entrepreneurs to meaningful exits, the firm has coached more than 1,500+ CEOs and entrepreneurs across 100+ industries and 60 countries. Its coaches—former CEOs, presidents, and executives—have led businesses ranging from startups to over $10 billion, driving double-digit sales and profit growth, many culminating in eight, nine, or ten-figure exits.
Companies that have worked with CEO Coaching International for two years or more have achieved an average revenue CAGR of 25.9%, nearly 3X the U.S. average, and an average EBITDA CAGR of 39.2%, more than 4X the national benchmark.
Discover how coaching can transform your leadership journey at ceocoachinginternational.com.
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