Jokes aside, CEO stood for Chief Entertainment Officer, and the project was our quarterly department team-building activity.
I've found that a lot of situations become teachable moments if you look at them the right way. This time I wanted him to practise stakeholder management, so once he was appointed "CEO" I gave him a deadline and asked him to organise the whole thing from scratch.
It sounds like a small task, but it isn't. He had to collect preferences from the team, make decisions, sort out logistics and keep everyone updated. He also had to handle internal stakeholders, including one of the co-founders, and in my experience they can be even harder to deal with than external ones. That was the whole point.
Doing it myself would have been easier, and probably faster.
But then he would only have seen the finished result. By giving him ownership, he had to deal with the uncomfortable parts: getting buy-in, chasing people for replies, and making a call when nobody agreed on what they wanted.
Those skills aren't unique to team building. They show up in marketing every day, and I think managers sometimes overlook this. Not every development opportunity has to be a formal training programme, a big campaign or a high-stakes project. Smaller, everyday situations are often a safer place to practise. The responsibility is real, the stakeholders are real and the deadline is real, but if something goes wrong, the fallout is easy to manage. That makes them good training grounds.
It worked out well. Everyone enjoyed themselves, the team left in good spirits, and our temporary CEO earned one more notch on his shirt. He also went through the full process himself, from planning to execution.
The best development opportunities are sometimes hiding inside very ordinary tasks.