FME CEOs Learn from Experience
Last week, I met with many of the FME CEO’s for a mid-semester meeting. This was just a check in meeting to see how they were all handling life as a CEO in their first year of college. I asked them what the most surprising thing about their experience was so far. Their responses were not what you might expect. Instead of indicating the challenges of selling merchandise in a challenging economy, managing inventory, or building a technology infrastructure, the most common surprise was the challenges of managing employees in the business.
The surprises they shared ranged from the challenges of maintaining employee moral to effectively communicating with all business members. The CEO’s also lamented the fact that not everyone is as excited about the business as they are. One CEO offered that they successfully developed an incentive system for all employees and they are having little (if any) employee moral issues.
The great business lesson for these students is that they learn that leadership is a lot more about creating and managing productive relationships with employees and less about the day to day operations.
There is approximately six more weeks to go in the FME business cycle, we will see how well they put their early lessons into practice.