The Higher Up in Your Organization, the Farther Ahead You Should Look for Long-term Success
As you advance in your career, one key principle becomes increasingly important: your time horizon for long-term success must extend further into the future. Success at senior levels depends on actions and decisions made well in advance.
Let me explain what I mean by this.
Changing Focus Over Time
When we start our careers, usually in lower leverage, frontline jobs, we focus on the here and now. We are rewarded for taking immediate action and for our tactical behavior. That might mean ensuring that the product ships out on time. Or that we resolve a customer inquiry promptly. Everything we do is about the short term.
As we move up in our career, maybe getting promoted from a frontline job to a manager or supervisor and then to a department head, the horizon shifts. Managers need to plan weeks or months ahead, considering quarterly goals and team performance.
When you ascend into top leadership, your time horizon must go even further to the next year and beyond.
Why Long-Term Thinking Matters
Because when you’re a senior executive or even the CEO, everything related to your performance is determined by your actions and decisions at least a year ago. Your role is to identify and address the business’s greatest constraints, these issues take time to resolve but have a lasting impact on the organization.
3 Key Long-Term Focus Areas for CEOs
As a CEO or a senior executive, short-term results shouldn’t dominate your focus. Your job should be identifying and fixing your business’s most significant constraints. That is called finding the kink in the hose and opening it up. The challenge is that the decisions you make to deal with those constraints take a long time to take effect.
As I wrote in my book, Great CEOs Are Lazy; there are three key constraint areas that CEOs should direct their focus on for long-term success:
- Business Model
- What to Focus On: Define what you sell, your target customers, sales strategy, and pricing.
- Why It Matters: Adjusting your business model is a slow process, and significant results often take at least a year to materialize.
- Talent
- What to Focus On: Attract, recruit, and retain top talent, especially for senior roles.
- Why It Matters: Hiring the right people takes months, and onboarding them into leadership roles takes 12–18 months before they deliver measurable impact.
- Processes and Systems
- What to Focus On: Optimize operational workflows, IT systems, and standard operating procedures.
- Why It Matters: While process improvements may yield faster results, they still require significant effort and alignment, often taking quarters to roll out effectively.
Extending Your Time Horizon for Long-Term Success
As the leader of your business, you need to extend your time horizon well into the future. The rocks you’re trying to move take a long time to roll into place. But that’s why it can be so tempting to get dragged into more short-term projects where you get much more payoff in instant gratification and see immediate results. Your team can handle day-to-day operations, but only you have the capacity to plan and execute long-term strategies.
To lead your business into a successful future:
- Focus on decisions today that will yield results in years, not months.
- Address critical constraints that impede growth.
- Cultivate the maturity and vision to think beyond the present.
It’s likely there is only one person wired that way: YOU.
That’s why your business’s future growth and long-term success rely on your ability to extend your time horizon beyond today and look much further down the road. If you focus on today’s problems, you are on the wrong time horizon.
