In this episode, we discuss the Return on equity for CEOs that take care of themselves. It's staggering. What’s more, the increase in employee engagement that results from CEOs who take care of themselves first is truly amazing.

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Hey listeners, CEO coach Liam Chrismer here. Welcome. This is the masterclass edition of the CEO matters podcast. This is where we take a deeper, a more curated dive into a topic or an issue. You need to know more about sometimes an interview, sometimes a conversation. Other times, I simply go deep into the weeds on a CEO matter, but I think is important. So let's get into this episode of CEO matters, the masterclass edition.

Hello, listeners, welcome back. This is CEO coach, Liam Chrismer. Welcome to another edition of CEO matters. Today we're going to talk about the ROI of CEO well being. And we all know what ROI is you put money into something and you expect a return on it. And my question to you that I'd like you to consider is Why doesn't anyone talk about the well being of the CEO of the business owner? Do we simply assume that because they're at the top of the food chain, that somehow they must be okay. Are they assumed to be Ironman or Superman? And, and for some reason, they are impervious to the the imperfections in the flaws that affect everyone else? Or is it that we simply don't care? I posed this question to a lot of people and they get flummoxed, you know, their eyes glaze over. And it's just something that people don't think about. And we need to think more about it. Because the demands the pressures, the challenges that face people, leading not only companies, but organizations of all kinds have never been higher. Stress is high burnout is at an all time high. And I think it's time that we started looking at the CEO as an asset.

If you think about it, the CEO really, if not the most important asset is certainly one of the most important assets of a company that they wouldn't think of not having scheduled maintenance on critical equipment. You know, we get into our cars and we look up in the upper left, the upper left hand corner, there's a sticker there from the last time we had the oil changed. And so we want to make certain that we get our oil changed on our car on a regular basis, we have idiot lights that come on that tell us when we need to change this or service that. But in terms of a dashboard for the CEO, we don't have one. And wellness now is very, very important. It's in vogue CEOs, certainly support wellness programs for their employees. Forward Thinking CEOs are concerned about about everyone, they want their employees healthy, they don't want them stressed out, they don't want them sick or unable to do their jobs. But you know, the reality is that they ignore their own self care. And sometimes it can be catastrophic. Let's take the case of Steve Jobs. Had he gotten the the proper medical care at the time, he shouldn't have gotten it. Perhaps he wouldn't have died had an embryo premature death at 55. Who knows what Apple would have become today who knows what other gifts and innovations and life changing? I think Steve Jobs would have come up with. But if we take the spotlight off someone like Steve Jobs, how many others have had to step down because of inappropriate behavior that maybe had, they'd been better balanced, thinking more clearly, that they would have made different decisions, we see it all the time we see it with CEOs that get caught, or politicians that get caught doing things that they shouldn't be doing, including even some of our US presidents. And I'd submit to you that that part of this has to do with their well being, you can call it Life Balance. You can call it perspective. You can call it whatever you want. But But I think this matter of CEOs taking care of themselves and putting their oxygen mask on first is something that we need to pay attention to. And the ROI I'm going to show you in in a few minutes is really staggering. You think about new equipment, it can either increase output or it can reduce cost. Perhaps making a key acquisition can open up new markets or reduce competition. The list goes on and on and on. And the ROI for these kinds of investments is pretty easy to calculate. You simply you take what you've invested divide By the return and you come up with whatever the percentage is 22% 38% Doesn't matter what it is, as long as it's above the cost of capital, and above the historical return on equity, if you can do that you've got a winner.

But how do we measure the ROI on a CEO that takes better care of themselves, then the hard charging full speed ahead a type who never takes a break, and who operates full out for far too long? It's hard to say. But the common sense would tell us that it's probably pretty high. And the list of CEOs that have died prematurely, is long and notable. Certainly Steve Jobs. One of my favorites, one of my icons would be at the top of this list, succumbing to pancreatic cancer at the age of 55. Let's take Tony Tsai, the founder of Zappos, he died of smoke inhalation in the house fire that we don't know for sure, but, but it seems like he could have gotten out of that house fire. But he went through a bizarre life change. After leaving Zappos, he had an entourage that would follow him around. One of his celebrity friends came and gave a concert. And then later wrote him a letter and said, Tony, I love you to death. But man, you got to get some help. I'm never going to come and and play for you again. And shortly thereafter, he was dead. He created Zappos. He sold it to Amazon. He did incredible things with that company. He did incredible things for the city of Las Vegas, revitalizing neighborhoods that had fallen on hard times. And he was doing the same thing up in Utah, but he didn't take care of himself. Brian Goldner, the CEO of Hasbro died at 58, just two days after he took a medical leave of absence. Do we need more examples? How do we how do we calculate the replacement costs of their families, to their organizations, to their unfinished legacies? This is pretty serious stuff, listeners. And nobody's looking at it. Nobody's looking at it. I was recently invited to the University of Denver, to talk about their executive PhD program at the Daniels College of Business. And there were professors there, there were students from the current program. And I talked to a couple of professors about measuring CEO, wellness and well being. And these two professors kind of looked at me and they said, Well, it can't be done. So what do you mean, it can't be done? Well, it just can't be done. Well, we can put we can we can we can put a person on the moon, Elon Musk can head off to Mars. We can have something the size of what used to be a pack of cigarettes, which is now a phone that we can do almost anything we want on that device, but we can't measure CEO well being. He said, Well, first of all, though, they're there, they're never going to talk to you. And I don't know how you quantify that. And then the bottom line is that he just didn't care. And the truth is that I got enough of it. And I said, Well, you know what, here's the deal. I'm going to figure out how to measure CEO, well being with or without the University of Denver. And the only question is whether or not this university can give me the quantitative skills that I need to pull off my project. Long and short of it is they weren't very impressed.

But the fact of the matter is that the CEO is responsible for the whole shebang, everything they read, to run their companies, they are role models for their families, for their employees, for their communities. Their decisions affect everything. And if you value their time, what is the value of the time of a CEO value in terms of revenues, earnings, or what we do today, you know, market cap, what's the market cap of the company? It becomes pretty obvious that we should spend more time talking about thinking about educating CEOs on their own well being and if not for their own sake, than for the sake of the company. We can certainly justify the economics of in some cases of very public, very large companies, these astronomical compensation packages that they have. It's based on performance.

What about the return on their health, their mental fitness, their emotional stability, their life fulfillment, their self care routines, you know, CEOs and business owners or people people too. They have lives. Their emotions go up and down. Sometimes they don't know what to do. But I guarantee you that when you're getting enough sleep, when you're getting proper nutrition, when you're exercising, when you make your own mental fitness and physical fitness and emotional fitness, a priority, your performance goes up. And we can certainly recall instances where we've noticed that someone is physically present. But mentally, there's somewhere else. How many times we've been there ourselves, I know I've been there. Sometimes I think I'm there on a daily on a daily basis. I've recently started participating in something called surrender yoga at Lifetime Fitness. And in some respects, it's pretty easy. You go into the yoga studio, it's dark, and they're they've got this nice, relaxing music on and you lay on a yoga mat. And you stretch in this pose, and you stretch in that pose. And you really don't have to stand on one leg or put your, you know, put your ankle behind your ear or anything like that. But the whole point of it is to get you to focus on your breath, and to begin to relax. And the session runs for about an hour. And I would say and I do this up to three times a week, on most cases, it takes me about 45 minutes, just to get that turbocharger of my brain to wind down that monkey mind to stop thinking about things I need to do that day or should have done or want to do tomorrow, these thoughts. They just keep popping up. And I go to surrender yoga, because I want that monkey mind to calm down. Don't really want to be in a meeting or be with someone, physically, but not be there. But just not be there not be present. There is a researcher, I believe her name is Kelly Monahan for Deloitte. And she has studied what she calls the scarcity mindset. And that is focusing on an unmet need, which creates noise in the brain. And it diminishes our ability to make sharp decisions. You know what, maybe you're hungry. Maybe you're hungry, maybe you're thirsty, maybe you're worried about an argument you had with your spouse. You're not getting along with your kid, whatever it is. But it diminishes that ability to make sharp decisions. prolonged stress exhaustion, often leads to something they call decision fatigue. Now that sets in when we make poor choices when our emotional intelligence drops, and we lose our edge. A long ago, I was told that there's this inverse relationship between emotions, and intelligence. And that is that when our emotions are high, our intelligence is low. And when our intelligence is high, our emotions are low. You get into a fight with your spouse, guess what you say things you wish you hadn't said. Maybe someone comes into your office, they catch you at the wrong time. And you spout off words that you wish you could take back because your emotions were high, your intelligence was low. You go into the car, you go into the car dealership, I would, I would suggest that that's the time when we want to have high intelligence and low emotions. If we have high emotions, there's a good chance we might drive out with a bright red convertible when what we really needed to buy was an SUV. But enough of that.

The fact of the matter is that when we're not on our game, but we're not balanced, we make inappropriate choices. We make comments we make decisions that upon further reflection we we wish we could have backer might have chosen otherwise. You know, there is a there is a trickle down effect of CEO wellbeing that no one talks about. And I credit Monahan at Deloitte because she's the one that really discovered that CEOs that pay attention to their well being also increase employee engagement and get this this is the takeaway from this episode. CEOs that focus on their own well being increase employee engagement by as much as 20%. Come on. That's a staggering number. At a time when act when when when something like this is pre COVID Something like 70% of the American workforce is actively disengaged that that's beyond being on Facebook or being on Tik Tok or whatever your your social media of choices, it's going beyond that it means these people are actively disengaged on their job. If you can improve that by 20%, just by taking care of yourself. That's, that's a pretty good return. And Deloitte recommends something they call Mindset Mondays, simply taking 15 minutes out of the day, to pause, reflect, and reset your mental state. It's about getting your stress under control. Stress is handled in that I think it's the amygdala of the brain. And that's where the fight or flight response comes in. And when we're highly stressed, we don't have that space between the cue that sets us off, and the action that we take. But if we can just reset, get to a new state, get that stress level down, so that when something happens, we have more time to react. And it's not so much what happens to us. It's how we react. So Mindset Mondays are all about just taking 15 minutes, and taking 15 minutes and calming down. And in business, we know the getting across the finish line is what we need to do. And sometimes we run too hard. And going all out, not taking care of ourselves, thinking I'll sleep on the weekend, I only need four hours of sleep. I don't need to get exercise. It's not sustainable. And we ourselves pay the price. And the people that depend on us, our employees, our families. As I said earlier, our communities the entire community in which we live depend on us to be on our game. And we got to pay more attention to well being. And I'm going to leave you with this. And that is that CEOs that take care of themselves, understand that it supports in its safeguards their intellectual capital, and creative energy. It keeps you in the right headspace in the right mindset. And when you set up a culture in your organization that says you know what, we have to take care of ourselves. Before we can take care of our customers before we can innovate before we can pivot and disruptively respond to changing market conditions and opportunities. We have to take care of ourselves. The CEO has got to take care of themselves first. Their listeners is your ROI. Remember, let's lead and live better. Thanks for listening. And if you'd like more information on this topic and other episodes, please head on over to chrismer.com forward slash work with me. That's chrismer.com forward slash work with me. I very much appreciate you listening, and we'll see you next time.