The Janitor and the CEO

A couple of years back, I was invited to come and speak to a group of business women. Most of them were business owners. We're CEOs or we're launching startups at the time. And I can't remember exactly what it was that I talked about, but I know that it was about time management and scheduling and about how that, regardless of how busy you were, that you could accomplish your goals.
And I felt like I had been very encouraging. But after the talk, a lady came up to me and said, I really appreciate what you said here, but I am struggling to execute on this every day. And it's not because I don't have the information. I know how to set up tasks. I know how to schedule things. I'm just not getting those tasks done, and I'm not really sure why.
And at the time, we were standing in front of a dry erase board. So just on the fly, I picked up a dry erase marker and I asked her, What is it that you have to do every day? And she laughed and started explaining that as a startup she was doing quite a few different tasks every day. And so it was hard to determine what role she was going to play from one day to the next.
So I asked her name off for me the roles in a typical company from the top to the bottom. Any role, just throw them out. And by this time, a few more people were coming up and standing around and we had a little group there and people started throwing out the different roles that you would expect in a company.
Everything from CEO, just CEO to CFO to lower down the ladder. People like contractors, secretaries and janitors. And I remember pointing at this list of titles that they had thrown out there and asking a lot of these business women, what roles do you play currently where your business is at? And like you might expect from a lot of start ups and small business owners, they were playing multiple roles on that list.
Sometimes a lot of the roles on that list. And I remember recognizing something that day as I looked at this list of job descriptions on the board and as I talked to this group of highly ambitious entrepreneurs and small business owners, a realization that had never really hit me before, and I had been functioning as though I knew it, but I had never been able to articulate it.
But when I explained it to you, you're going to say, of course it's obvious. And yet I don't think that we always function as if we comprehend this. So allow me to demonstrate. Imagine a company in which you have a CEO. The CEO is on the top floor in the corner office, and she is calling all the shots for the company.
She has the big vision. She takes the responsibility of the overall direction of the organization and the brand. And she spends a lot of time looking out that window at the city and engaging in what I would call high level thinking. But then just down the hall, there is a janitor in. The janitor also has a set of responsibilities and a certain type of skill.
The janitor is often operating on a list of tasks that's been given to him by a superior. In fact, he's often responding to requests in real time. Maybe somebody is calling and saying there's a toilet stopped up or the hinges on this door are creaking. Could you please come and fix this? And while the actions that the janitor is taking are critical to the overall health and function of the company, the janitor does obviously occupy a completely different role than the CEO.
The expectations should be different and the job roles should be different. The hours are going to be different, and of course the pay is going to be different. The janitor doesn't have the freedom to walk into the CEO's office and to question the decisions that the CEO is making in regard to the direction of the company. Nor should he.
It is not his area of expertise. It's not his responsibility. He deals with the maintenance of the facility and the CEO. She deals with what I'll call the big picture, so to speak. But the two are intertwined. And the decision making that the CEO does in the corner office is going to cascade down to the tasks that the janitor is performing.
But high level decision making and low level task management are very different head spaces to be in. And you can imagine that CEOs go home from their job and probably keep thinking about some of these big problems, whereas a janitor can pack up, change clothes, and maybe completely leave the job at the job. So what happens when you are occupying both roles?
Maybe you are engaged in a project or an organization where effectively you're having to fill a high level thinking role and also a low level task execution role. At the same time, what happens a lot of the times is that you you have really good ideas on the high level thinking side of things. But then when it comes to the task execution, you find that you're getting hung up.
And what's happening is you're going to execute the task and then you're second guessing yourself or you're going back into CEO mode. In a moment where you really need to be able to be in janitor mode. And because you can never fully transfer over to janitor mode. The basic tasks aren't getting done. Now you're thinking and you're thinking a lot, and maybe you're thinking too much.
And the key here is to understand when and where you're going to occupy both roles. Ideally, we would want two different people and two different job descriptions, but realistically, that can't always happen. So you need to identify what kind of roles you're going to have to fill. And then you need to find a way to make a distinction between when you were filling each role.
Otherwise, that CEO brain is going to take over your janitor tasks and you'll find yourself sitting down to do a simple thing and then rethinking the whole vision of the company again in that moment. One of the things that really helps me with this process is to make sure that I'm doing these two types of actions in two different physical spaces.
I find that it's really helpful to have a place that I will normally go to do the big vision and high level thinking for the sort of work that I'm doing. And then I'm going to sit in a different place with a different environment to do nothing but task execution. So I really want to teach my brain that I'm occupying one role here and the other role there, and that can be as easy as moving from one room to the next.
So maybe you choose to sit at your dining room table with a cup of coffee to do your high level CEO thinking, and then you move to your desk with your computer in front of you to do that. Janitorial task driven work. That can be a very helpful shift that lets your brain know that we're now in task mode.
I don't want to rethink this because the bottom line is a janitor can't afford to rethink their tasks. They are delivered these tasks from someone else and their job is to check them off. And it really helps that janitor to feel good about doing that when the janitor trusts the people further out the chain of command. So for you, it's going to really help you accomplish your tasks and trust the process when you trust that CEO side of yourself that already made the decision.
So you said at that one table with your cup of coffee and you made a decision about what needs to happen today. Now you sit down at the desk to execute that. You're going to have to trust that CEO version of yourself. You've got to start questioning and second guessing that part of you all the time. You made the decision.
Follow through. Execute the tasks. That's your job as the janitor and occupying these two spaces. It is hard. It's not ideal. And there may come a time where you can staff up or where you can collaborate in such a way that you don't need to do both in the same day. But if you do find yourself in that situation right now, I encourage you to identify those different roles that you're occupying, establish spaces to make sure that you're shifting your thinking between those ro...