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Guest: Chris Justice, a coach at CEO Coaching International. Chris is a former CEO with a proven track record of managing business units from $25 million to $700 million across diverse industries, including retail, lodging, automotive, e-commerce, and casino gaming.
Quick Background: Running a business has always been hard. And considering that today’s CEOs need to manage complex generational divides, global competition, rapid technological advances, and a constantly evolving economic landscape, leading isn’t going to get any easier. But if your company has a clear vision, top talent, and dependable systems, there are very few BIG goals or problems that a CEO can’t break down into smaller, more manageable parts.
On today’s show, Chris Justice shares his practical, five-step framework for turning around companies and dealing with complicated business situations.
Keys to Solving Complex Problems from Chris Justice
1. Set your destination.
“The first step is creating a BIG picture that’s crystal clear on the destination that you want to take the company toward,’ Chris says. “It’s the What as well as the Why. Try to give your team an understanding of not only what we’re trying to accomplish but why we’re trying to accomplish those particular initiatives.”
Chris draws an important distinction here between the CEO’s BIG vision of success and the things that the CEO actually wants individual employees to accomplish. Essentially, you don’t want your BIG vision to blind your employees to the action steps that have to be executed along the way. The better you articulate what you want your people to actually accomplish, the more buy-in you’re going to get, and the faster your trip to BIG will be.
For example, when Chris was working with Best Buy, CEO Bob Willett’s vision included very high customer security standards. He told his employees that he “didn’t want Best Buy holding sensitive personal data for more than a nanosecond.” But when IT teams started measuring processes in literal nanoseconds, the CISO had to step in and clarify the intended goal: fast, efficient processing of data. Establishing better clarity helped those teams set more realistic benchmarks for achieving the CEO’s goal.
Chris explains, “It’s the difference between saying, ‘We’re going to go to New York City,’ as opposed to, ‘We’re going to travel from our office to the Empire State Building by Friday at 5.’ The difference in that clarity will certainly make a difference as to where we wind up as an organization.”
2. Establish Huge, Outrageous Targets (HOTs).
Once the CEO has What, How, and Why in order, he or she can start pointing them toward achieving Huge, Outrageous Targets (HOTs).
“Part of that HOT is the ability to take your BIG vision and start to break that down into the bite-sized pieces that we need to accomplish as we’re going into quarterly 13-week sprints,” Chris says. “At Global Payments, we’d establish things like, ‘We need to develop and implement a new IT infrastructure. We need to deploy and launch a new ERP system. We need to rebrand the company. We need to restructure sales.'”
Chris recommends a simple formula for establishing goals, deadlines, and accountability: From X, to Y, by When.
No two HOTs are the same, so it’s possible that your own formula might look more like X to Z, with a critical Y that you have to accomplish along the way. Each piece of your HOT formula needs to connect directly so that your processes are driving measurable, manageable results and your timeline is realistic with just the right touch of urgency.
3. Develop a course of action and contingency plans.
“This is truly where the rubber meets the road,” Chris says. “It’s about getting all of the stakeholders in the company together to really align around what is it exactly that we’re trying to achieve. So, we’re breaking the BIG down into smaller, bite-sized functions to be able to cascade those key results down through the organization so that everybody understands their parts and pieces that all get assembled to deliver that key result at the specific time.”
Chris recommends that CEOs and their executive teams push down execution and responsibility for each task as low as they can possibly go in the organization. Anything that a direct report can handle will only free up their supervisor to tackle a higher-level responsibility. This company-wide vision of delegation will ensure that things get done on the ground floor while, up in the C-suite, the CEO has time to focus on their five essential responsibilities: Vision, Cash, People, Relationships, and Learning.
These “bite-sized” tasks will also, by definition, be things that the company has the ability to control: making sales calls, developing prototypes, training customer service reps on a better script. And as you cover your basics, you’ll likely spot potential disruptions that you can start planning for so that you’re not caught flat-footed when there’s a kink in your supply chain or a major marketing initiative doesn’t connect with an audience.
“We try to focus on the things that we can truly control and have influence over,” Chris says, “and that’s where we will start developing the detailed plans and then bake in flexibility so that we can also look forward to contingencies and be able to react to them as they occur. It’s definitely a balancing act in terms of how much time you want to spend thinking about things that may not happen. But you definitely should think about the things that are more possible and start thinking through, ‘Okay, if this occurs, what are we going to do?'”
4. Maintain a meeting rhythm.
“After everything is locked and loaded, it’s really time to start briefing the staff because communication is critical,” Chris says. “So many organizations think that just because the CEO said it, it’s going to come true. And yet we all realize continual, regular communication is absolutely crucial to success.”
CEO Coaching International’s Make BIG Happen System includes a flexible meeting rhythm that CEOs can adapt to their company’s specific needs:
Annual Planning Session: The 2025 edition of your State of the Company meeting should already be on your calendar. Have your CEO coach moderate this critical meeting where your company will review last year’s progress and set HOTs for the year ahead.
Quarterly Alignment Session: Meet with your leadership team to analyze what went right this quarter, what went wrong, what challenges need to be addressed, and what goals should be set to keep the company on track for its annual HOT.
Monthly All-Hands Meeting: Your leadership team updates staff on progress towards key goals and shares plans for the month ahead.
Weekly Leadership Meeting: Review progress towards quarterly targets with your department leaders and encourage them to schedule one-on-ones with direct reports.
Daily Huddle: Grab 5-10 minutes with each management team to touch base and set the agenda for the day ahead. Don’t sit if you can avoid it. Take the temperature of the department and move on.
At a previous company that he was leading, Chris tweaked this meeting rhythm to include unique cadences for specific departments as well.
He explains, “We had a steering committee that would meet every week to get an overall update on what’s going on within processes, what issues are we encountering, areas that we, as senior executives, needed to jump into and clear the road so that people can do their jobs. Some of the individual departments would also have a different kind of a cadence all the way down to subgroups who may be meeting daily, for example, during critical IT processes. Those smaller groups would talk about the processes and feed updates so that they can start to align around what’s the information that they need in order to do their jobs, to accelerate execution, and to make sure that folks are completely aligned as we’re solving obstacles and as we are moving forward down the path.”
5. Debrief and adjust.
This cycle of planning, communicating, and executing is going to create large amounts of data. Your digital data will be captured by sales, clicks, AI analysis, and progress towards HOTs. Human data will manifest in whether there’s a positive buzz of camaraderie and productivity in the office, or if you can practically feel wheels and teeth grinding.
The best leaders know that there’s more to processing and analyzing performance than printing numbers and adding another meeting to the calendar, especially when the company is falling short of its goals.
“It really boils down to accountability,” Chris says. “I take extreme ownership when it comes to these kinds of processes and say, ‘I’m going to start the debrief session by talking about my role in us missing the target.’ Maybe I didn’t clearly communicate what we were trying to achieve and when we were trying to achieve it. Maybe I didn’t articulate the Why well enough. And I’m going to take ownership of that and then I’m going to start talking to the team around what are the obstacles that they are incurring, getting their information back as to why aren’t we on target. Then we can start to formulate things that we can do as an organization to get ourselves back on track because we’re working on the things that we have control over. We’re doing it in such a way that we’re encouraging people to be open and communicative. We’re getting the issues all out on the table and we’re allowing people to formulate plans to get us back on track.”
Top Takeaways From Chris Justice
1. Answering How? What? Why? and When? will establish goals, accountability, and buy-in.
2. Plan for what you can control and ask yourself, “What could get in the way?”
3. Clearly communicate via annual planning, a regular meeting rhythm, and thorough debrief sessions.
Links:
Five Tools to Drive Growth in Your Business – Our toolkit includes a HOT Trajectory that CEOs can use to work backwards from BIG and understand what levers you need to pull, who you need to hire, and what else it will take to get there.
How to Define, Measure, and Manage Your Business Goals – Measuring key metrics can be extremely beneficial to a company’s growth and success, and if you measure to manage, you can find areas to improve.
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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