The biggest challenge a CEO faces.

I’ve been running this business for nearly 22 years. Is that possible? Man, I wish I knew then what I know now. We’d be a lot farther ahead.

Through the years, I think my experience has been the same as most business owners. A lot of good people and a larger number of competent people have worked for us. My biggest challenge in growing a healthy, sustainable business has been putting together a team that’s “simpatico.” A team that’s simpatico means assembling a group — particularly those in leadership positions — that plays well off each other. They don’t have to have the same vision, they don’t agree on everything and they aren’t above arguing from time to time to make their point.

Disagreement is fine. As General George Patton said, “if everybody agrees then no one is thinking.” No, being simpatico is more a matter of each person bringing results to the business in their own way. Because they’re contributing to the growth of the company, they’ve earned the respect to be heard.

Studying companies I respect (A&M Records, Apple Computer) and a few local competitors who got it right, I notice that they all had strong players who were simpatico. The skills are complimentary — what one person excels at, other executives didn’t and vice versa.

My biggest challenge has been to build that kind of team. Those times when someone who wasn’t effective at their job, it was a relatively easy decision to move them out. Painful, yes, but necessary. As Bill Bennett put it the other night at the Georgia Chamber’s annual meeting, “getting fired isn’t terminal.”

The bigger challenge is what to do when team members are just OK. They’re not ripping off the company or sleeping on the job. They’re just going through the motions. They’re not simpatico, a critical issue if they’re in leadership roles. This is the biggest challenge a CEO faces and it’s where I’ve struggled the most.

Fact is, those people either have to be moved to another position where they can become great or they have to be moved out. And moving them out sucks.

But you know what? In most of those cases, those people went on to greater success elsewhere. Some just needed a different kind of environment than ours. Yes, a few of them don’t say kind things about me or my company after they left even though we always did the right thing by them. But that can’t slow you down. It’s the price you pay for being the CEO.

The more often I have made the difficult moves to build a team that’s simpatico, the more it’s paid off.