December 2025 Newsletter
Burning Questions from the C-Suite
From a Right Hand: How Do I Measure My Job?
Kudos to you for asking this question rather than simply waiting for the CEO to tell you what matters and how to measure it. It shows you care about the job and your performance. It also shows that you understand something important about reporting: it’s for you, not for your boss.
I invite you to start thinking of yourself as the first customer of any reporting/measurement you come up with and your CEO as the second customer. Reporting is first for you because reports help you know if you’re doing your job the way you want to do it. They help you meet your goals.
Consider measuring three things as a Right Hand:
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Key Strategic Initiatives (KSIs)
Key Leadership Behaviors (KLBs)
KPIs are pretty common, but I bet you haven’t heard of KSIs and KLBs. As far as I can tell, the term KSI came from a smart Dir of Ops/Right Hand named Brent at Marco Group (Thanks, Brent!). And I think I invented KLBs. The three “Ks” coincide nicely with the three main things most Right Hands do:
Manage daily work so the business meets specific quantifiable goals. Close the right number of sales, build the right number of widgets. Maintain a certain quality or accuracy or speed while doing it. All that can be measured with KPIs. You probably already have lots of KPIs in a dashboard. If you’re running a system like EOS, KPIs are the backbone of your weekly scorecards.
Run major initiatives that span months or years. Those projects overhaul the business. Rolling out new customer portals, re-racking a warehouse, automating certain processes. Even if the start and end dates are not spelled out up front (they should be!), there’s a “done” you are expected to get to someday—and the CEO wants you there sooner rather than later. Right Hands always have several major initiatives on the back burner that we really should be moving forward. And we’re planning to. But sometimes we don’t write those initiatives down, treat them like formal projects, and assess progress regularly. Instead, we fret. If you measure Key Strategic Initiatives as part of your reporting process, these big amorphous things suddenly become tangible. Track KSIs the same way you monitor shorter projects: status (on/off track), next milestone, and target completion date.
Be the Right Hand brain partner, showing up with loyalty, energy, creativity, and humility. Key Leadership Behaviors refer to how and why you’re doing the job. They get at how you apply the core values, philosophies on money and people, paradigms on growth and quality. How good of a trusted Right Hand are you for your CEO? These things are intangible and subjective, but you should still get them out for discussion. To measure KLBs, every three months create a bullet list of all the major actions you and your team took in the previous quarter (include the stuff that didn’t work as planned too). Organize it by categories. Then grade or score yourself in each category and meet to discuss your list and scores with the CEO. This process will force you to assess your own performance on Key Leadership Behaviors and surface any disconnects between you and your boss. It will remind you both that how you do your job is as important as the results you get. I have a Right Hand Report Card process with more detail about measuring KLBs and you can reply to this email and ask if you want it. But you don’t have to use my exact process. The goal is to make assessing and reporting KLBs as ordinary and consistent as assessing and reporting KPIs.
Note to people running EOS: Think of KSIs as containers for rocks. KSIs span multiple quarters or years, while Rocks are smaller projects under the umbrella of a KSI. For example, the KSI might be “Rework company sales infrastructure” while the Q1 Rock might be “Get a new CRM system in place.” The Q2 Rock might be “Hire a new sales manager.” Third quarter could be “Bring on three new sales reps” and fourth quarter could be “Train sales team in the XYZ selling system.” Right Hands running EOS often need a KSI roadmap that is further out than a single Rock—something that stitches the quarterly work together into a cohesive high-impact project. EOS’s one-year picture is for the whole company, not for your job specifically.
Famous Right Hands (Keep The Change, Ya Filthy Animal)
You gotta love it when ego and self-preservation take the wheel in a Right Hand relationship. Take the Home Alone movie’s Wet Bandits as an example.
Harry and Marv are a perfect CEO and Right Hand fail. Harry, the Lead, keeps pushing forward to prove he’s in control, doubling down every time things go wrong. Marv, the Right Hand, goes along with it, not because Harry's ideas are smart, but because backing out would mean admitting defeat or losing status himself. Instead of pulling the plug when it's clearly time to pivot, the two badger and insult each other and argue over who's at fault. Both men prioritize saving themselves rather than the success of their burglary venture. They stay way longer than they should in a situation that is unlikely to ever produce the right results, escalating risk, pain, and damage with every step.
The result is predictable: they hurt themselves, they hurt each other, and boy do they fail at meeting the desired goal. In real CEO/Right Hand duos, the same pattern shows up when neither party is willing to stop, reset, or challenge the direction honestly. When self-preservation and ego outrank judgment, the partnership becomes a trap. It’s a trap that looks like loyalty from the inside, but dysfunction to everyone else.
Also: Are you due for a re-watching of Home Alone? Come on, you know you want to. Here's a clip to take you back 35 years (yes, the first HA movie really was released in 1990!) And more on the Wet Bandits, just for fun.
Right Hand Stories Needed
We need more real-life anecdotes for Heather’s upcoming Getting the Right Hand Right book. You can be anonymous or named, whichever you prefer.
Everybody who contributes a story before January 31st gets a free copy of the book when it comes out in March. To share, grab a 15-minute time on Heather’s calendar.
CEOs and Founders–Horror stories or great successes that came from hiring someone to run all or part of your company? Any big financial or customer losses that resulted? Any amazing wins you wouldn’t have gotten without the RH leader?
Right Hands–Any awful or amazing CEOs/founders you’ve worked for? Times when you were really glad to be the RH? Or when it was truly terrible? What made the difference?
Thank you!!
Recommendation
Feeling a bit frazzled these last few weeks? Maybe we all need SpongeBob SquarePants's Don't be a Jerk song to remind us not to lash out at the other half of our Right Hand pair. Or—heaven forbid—at other people who are far less likely to put up with our bad behavior than that trusted partner is.
News
For association members, registration is now open for the Pre-Conference Workshop Heather and Andrea Steinbrenner are doing for the Prairie Family Business Association annual conference. The workshop is called Right Hand Relationships: Managing the Risk of Leadership Transition. It addresses the challenges Current Generation leaders face trying to move Next Generation leaders forward in family-owned businesses.
Can We Help?
At Practical PhD, we help companies Get the Right Hand Right so they're ready for top leadership transition in 1-3 years:
Find and hire a Right Hand
Onboard a new Right Hand
Teach an aspiring Right Hand the job
Performance-manage a struggling Right Hand
Create a phased leadership succession plan
Click here to talk to us about your Right Hand situation