Bold CEOs make decisions their employees don’t like

The recent decision by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy to bring all employees back to the office, made headlines globally, with criticism and employee backlash. Amazon is doing this to preserve company culture and innovation and with the notion that they believe there is an essential element of in-person connection and engagement among employees in order to generate creativity and innovative work environment.

Love it or hate it, this is a bold executive decision that many Amazon employees don’t like. I personally don’t believe there is one truth here, and I’m a big believer in flexibility allowing people with families and kids to manage life and work in a way that will work for them as well as for their company. However, in a company of over 500, 000 people, you cannot satisfy and please everyone, in fact you don’t have to, and for a certain time popularity and likability of that CEO will drop.

Likability is a tricky topic for company CEOs. I have seen CEOs of startups and large corporations seek to be likable and popular by their employees. By doing so, they failed in their core job to lead their companies to be visionary, innovative and bold. One of the main responsibilities of CEOs, is constantly to take a step back, zoom out and think if the company got into a stagnant situation - into it comfort zone.

A big part of my work with CEOs, founders and investors is focused on building resilience and exploring comfort zones (personal and organizational). In a business methodology that I developed over the years I believe that people have comfort zones, and organizations have comfort zones as well. “Organizational Comfort Zone” or OCZ, is a state where a company is losing momentum, stops innovating and moves in the pace of the market, rather than faster than competition.

You see this phenomena growing in companies as they scale, but you can also see OCZ in startups when they are going into a mode where they develop a mentality of a SMB rather than a high growth exponential company. They don’t push to move faster, and they generate linear revenue growth. In addition, you won’t see those CEOs drive their teams to develop new products and innovations or expand to new markets and geographies.

The role of the CEO, and sometimes their Board of Directors who support the CEOs is to first identify that a company is going into its “Organizational Comfort Zone” and quickly push the limits to initiate tough conversations that will lead to uncomfortable change, leading to stretch its comfort zone. In many cases, this change will be hard and sometimes fatal for some employees, and even business units which will cause some people to leave the company. However, if the CEO does not push the company to get out of its comfort zone, things will be fatal for the entire business and its shareholders.

This is where the Board of a company is responsible to identify if CEOs are going themselves into their personal comfort zones, something that we saw recently in another amazing brand NIKE, which resulted in the change of the CEO and the appointment of Eliott Hill who came back from retirement.

Expanding your Organizational Comfort Zone (OCZ) as CEO.

Bold and visionary CEOs will constantly push their organizations to expand its comfort zone, and that process is a very uncomfortable process of change. Many Corporate CEOs and Board Members, mistakenly think that this is a process that needs to occur every 4-5 years with a big reorganisational change. The problem with this approach is that this creates a culture where employees are already settle into their Organizational Comfort Zone by the time when problem are fixed. In this case, the actual change requires so much resources, capital and time that it is creating more frustration and inefficiency, which eventually translates into lack of speed, revenues and innovation. My experience is that those complex reorganizations take 3-4 years to implement, and by the time you are done with one another CEO comes along and initiate another reorganizations.

Instead, CEOs must constantly identify more specific Organizational Comfort Zones across their business, and push the uncomfortable limits of policies, tools and ways of working. A good practice for CEOs is to map their “Platform of Change”, where they identify areas where their organization has gone into stagnation, and initiate an uncomfortable change. Typically they would build a workforce to lead the change, first in one team and then scale it. For example, it could be your policy of delivering customer service, and then your sustainability policy and even your hiring targets.

The main idea is for CEOs, not to do all at once in a massive reorganization, but to constantly and repeatedly push their organization and people outside of their comfort zone. I have seen many massive organizational change processes, and usually if you dive deep into the culture, processes, speed of innovation and people behaviour nothing changes, but semantics and slides. However, if you are creating a habit of uncomfortable change across the organization, people can handle it and move it from slides to action, with tangible results.

Being a CEO is a very lonely position. As a founder and CEO of a small startup and as a CEO of a global corporation, you are left with the decisions that impact your teams and employees beyond the workplace. CEOs, who will use the methodology of Organizational Comfort Zone and Platform of Change, have a better chance of preventing large waves of lack of empathy from employees and also loneliness. They will address those challenges before people get very frustrated to change them, and they will create a culture where people understand that change is constantly happening and that it’s viable to do uncomfortable decisions as part of the growth of the company.