At the AllHands call last Friday, I got asked this question – What is the hardest thing about being a CEO?
A few confessions to make, while I answer this.
By personality, I am a paranoid person. I bite my nails. All the time. I hate losing. I get scared imagining that someone out there might be working harder than me and I am not doing enough.
I worry all the time of whether I am taking the easy path.
I worry that I will be wrong, if I don’t invest in myself.
So I am emotionally very hard on myself. I feel like my heart is always full of emotions. Of things I want to say. Of moments I could cry for. Of just wanting to work so hard that even life bows down.
So the hardest part about being a CEO is to feel the moral responsibility of 540+ people every single day.
I feel responsible for them. For their safety, for their happiness at work, for their career opportunities.
I wake up every single morning with a nagging thought in my head of some incidence yesterday involving the unhappy state of an employee. Something someone wrote. Something someone felt, experienced. Which didn’t make them feel respected or loved.
It’s this journey that is the hardest. It’s this feeling that is the hardest. The easiest thing to build is a company…
The hardest thing to build is an institution where people love to come to work!
[This post by Ankur Warikoo first appeared on LinkedIn and has been reproduced with permission.]
