The Campbell Academy Business Blog (2)

Lets Play Risk - The Chairmans Role

All businesses have a chairman, even if the business only has one person in it, even if you're a self-employed freelancing contractor.

The role of the chairman is to be the custodian of the vision and the culture of the business; the role of the chairman is not to work in the trenches, not to work in the engine room, not to work operationally on the little bits of day to day sh*t.

There is a reason for that.

The reason for that is that if you are on the day-to-day bits, you cannot see the horizon; it's impossible, so the chairman must stay high, 36,000 ft, and not be dragged into the operational side of things.

For people who work mostly operationally, that seems like a privilege, an easy job, and a gift from the gods. They crave to be strategic; they crave to be at the higher level; they think that all you do is sit and not work, lounge around, have a sleep, and drink some whiskey.

It's hard assuming the chairman position, though, for anybody in an organisation because then you're effectively cutting yourself off from the operation, in the same way, that if your job is mostly operational, trying to do the chairman thing really cuts into the time you need to do your work, and there's the struggle and the balance.

Most of us don't work in organisations where we can have a full-time highly paid chairman to just look after the strategic and cultural elements of the work, leaving everything else to everyone else to get the work done, but in any size organisation, you can be the chairman even for an afternoon or for a little while.

The most important job the chairman does is to assess the risks to the business, internal and external and mitigate against those risks.

That's applied to the vision and the philosophy of your business, and then you have a direction, not too risky so that you die, but risky enough so that you can improve and succeed.

It's like a game of chess, and it's difficult but fascinating and wonderful and for my sins (but mostly because I actually like it, as my wife reminded me the other day), I hold chairman's positions in schools, educational boards and other places.

I do this through volunteer work, which is a common thing in British business, to be a non-executive director who is effectively unpaid, but what you learn from those roles and from those jobs, where you have the opportunity to be entirely strategic and not operational at all (I don't work in the school that I'm the chairman of governors of, and I'm not in it very often) is you learn Chairman mentality that you can try to apply back to your own organisation, even for an afternoon a week.

If you have the privilege of having anything to do with your own organisation, even if you're only one person, just try and be the chairman for a little while, schedule it and do it regularly, the advantages are enormous, you just have to try it to see it.