Author: Head Hunters India Pvt Ltd

While the most sought after role is the CEO role in any Corporate for various compelling reasons such as it being exciting, rewarding, and influential & so on, it’s also a role that is probably the most consuming & imposing. What the CEO controls—the company’s most strategic direction —accounts for 45 percent of a company’s performance. Despite the luster of the role, serving as a CEO can be all-consuming, lonely, and stressful.  The high standards and broad expectations of directors, shareholders, customers, and employees create an environment of relentless scrutiny in which one move can dramatically make or derail an accomplished career. While it sounds as simple as “set the strategy,” “shape the culture,” and “get the right team going”, its not just that. Its about the industry contexts & leadership preferences as well. However, some of the common traits such as driving through the rough patch seamlessly, resilience, and risk tolerance make CEOs certainly more rugged & successful!

So this brings us to the important question “What are the mindsets and practices of excellent CEOs?” six elements of the CEO’s job which are like the “holy grail” about the role both practically & theoretically would be – setting the strategy, aligning the organization, leading the team, working with the board, being the face of the company to external stakeholders, and managing one’s own time and energy. While their mindset is to beat the odds & this is throughout their strategic thinking it centers on being bold in the areas that matter most. There are three practices, or habits, of excellent CEOs that we see on this dimension. The first one is reframing what winning means – something like “Think bigger in your space to be the best”. The second piece is around bold moves – have elevated vision & a set of bold moves that matter most. The last piece is quite tactical, relating to the boldness with which you allocate resources. Research shows that most organizations, even if they set a bold vision, only tweak the budgets, plus or minus what they had last year. Excellent CEOs typically take more of a clean-sheet approach.

Some of the top traits of an excellent CEO would be-

Clean slate approach – “If I were to reallocate 10 percent of my budget each year to what we say matters most to our future, what would that look like?”

Tend to maintain enough distance from their team members to be objective, yet enough closeness to gain their trust and loyalty. And that’s not an easy thing to do.

Choose to go beyond employee engagement. They look at things like how the company innovates, role clarity, how externally oriented people behave.

 They tend to think about roles & what roles in the organization create or protect the most value? What really separates the excellent from the good is this mindset that says, “I will put equal rigor and discipline in this realm of the organization as I put on corporate strategy or any more quantitative operational area.”

They tend to be clear on the organizational structure & teams & processes. CEOs are equally specific about where they want to drive speed and agility for they believe that teamwork makes the dream work. 

Some interesting facts about CEOs containing 25 years’ worth of data on 7,800 CEOs from 3,500 public companies across 70 countries and 24 industries

• Just three in five newly appointed CEOs live up to performance expectations in their first 18 months on the job.
• The CEO’s job so specialized that he felt executives could prepare for the post only by holding it
• That fellow CEOs don’t necessarily make reliable guides.
• The reality is, you set the tone and metabolic rate for your tenure in that first year. By the time this CEO, in years two and three, tried to take the organization in a new direction, the organization wasn’t willing to follow.
• Only about 20 percent of the most value-creating roles report to the CEO, about 60 percent are two levels down, and about 10 percent are even lower. And when a new strategy is involved, 10 percent typically don’t yet exist!
• High-performing teams are 1.9 times as successful, from a financial performance standpoint, as others. But it’s hard. More than 50 percent of top team members feel their team is ineffective while fewer than a third of CEOs feel they lead an ineffective team, so there can be a real mismatch there.
• The more senior your get, the more you lose the ability to understand when people are giving you a fake laugh—you know, like when you tell a joke. It’s very easy to start to feel a bit invincible. You tune out the critics. 

Finally, our two thoughts in this context would be!

“Good” is being the leader the organization needs you to be. “Great” leaders tend to move beyond that. They find a way to be authentically themselves while still delivering what the organization needs. Understanding the legacy you want to leave and what you stand for matters here. Choosing authenticity in your leadership model is part of ensuring that. Being an excellent CEOs is as simple as staying hungry & also staying humble by getting out with the rank and file. Having strong inner circles that help you keep their feet on the ground and remind you just that “the CEO role isn’t forever”