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by timwiththebo 2743 days ago
This is a great opportunity, I'm excited for your inevitable professional growth from doing this.

To help my own professional growth I have now shadowed 5 CEOs for 1 day each and have found it the highest ROI growth/training exercise I've done.

I have a doc that provides lots of advice, templates etc feel free to use and share: https://goo.gl/BJ8GTT

My general pieces of advice

- every CEO is different, so do this 1-2 times a year to gain a breadth of insights

- take advantage of lunch time and the few mins between meetings so that you can ask follow up questions from your observations

- to add value back to the CEO you're shadowing, summarise your observations of them and their business

- talk to 3-5 employees (all levels) to understand from them what makes their CEO great and what they could improve on

- you'll gain lots of insights into how to run a startup, culture learnings etc so don't limit your learning to just CEO insights

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Timbo

2 comments

What are some of the bullet points you've learned here?

I learned a ton from working for other CEOs, which put me in a great position to see what to emulate and what to ignore.

I'm having a hard time understanding what can really be teased out of watching someone do a day's CEO work for 4-8 hours, so curious what you have personally taken away.

(PS - I am going to give this a try because I do think it can be valuable, but I feel like you'd need to go in with a mindset that you shouldn't just blindly copy others)

How many people can find 5 CEOs to shadow 1-2 times a year?
People who live in silicon valley can probably do it easily. I was there for an interview a few years ago and met 2 CEOs just at the local bar.
To be clear, my recommendation is to shadow 1-2 CEOs a year.