Leaders may establish the circumstances for success in today’s workplace in a variety of ways, regardless of what has prompted these changes. Warning: Many of them will demand you to stretch your boundaries.
1. Impactful engagement
After setting a clear route for the company, CEOs must gain buy-in from employees and other stakeholders. Strong performers, we discovered, combine a good understanding of their stakeholders’ interests with a relentless focus on producing business results. They begin by gaining a thorough grasp of their stakeholders’ demands and motivations, and then they motivate and align their employees behind the aim of value creation. CEOs that successfully engaged stakeholders with this results orientation were 75 percent more successful in their roles, according to our research.
2. Have a strong sense of mission
Would it really matter if your company went out of business tomorrow? To whom? And why? Make an impact on the world. We have a strong sense of purpose at PeoplePerHour: Allowing people to realize their ambition of being their own boss and starting their own business.
3. Providing consistent service
As banal as it may appear, the ability to consistently deliver outcomes was perhaps the most compelling of the four fundamental CEO traits. CEO candidates who scored high on reliability were twice as likely to be chosen for the position and 15 times more likely to succeed in it in our sample. Employees trust dependable leaders, and boards and investors value consistency.
4. Encourage openness and honesty
Today, every reaction to anything we say may be shared instantly on social media. This input, whether positive or negative, should be welcomed by leaders because it promotes transparency. It indicates where you and your company should concentrate your efforts. Your personal candor boosts loyalty and alignment as well. Create an open environment for your team to celebrate accomplishments and learn from setbacks together.
5. Make quick and firm decisions
In business, legends abound about CEOs who always appear to know just how to drive their firms to spectacular success. However, we observed that high-performing CEOs are distinguished not by making excellent judgments all of the time, but rather by being more determined. They make judgments sooner, more quickly, and with more confidence. They do it consistently, even in the face of uncertainty, inadequate data, and new areas. People identified as “decisive” were 12 times more likely to be high-performing CEOs in our research.
6. Proactive adaptation
Most CEOs are aware that they must divide their focus between short-, medium-, and long-term goals, but the adaptive CEOs spend up to 50% of their time thinking about the long future. Other CEOs, on the other hand, spent an average of 30% of their time on long-term planning. We feel that a long-term perspective is beneficial since it allows CEOs to see early warning signs. Highly adaptive CEOs often tap into broad information flows: they scour vast networks and disparate data sources for knowledge that may appear unconnected to their firms at first. As a consequence, they detect change sooner and make strategic decisions to capitalize on it.
7. Fuel is your purpose
Nobody wants to work for a firm whose primary purpose is to maximize shareholder wealth. While this may have been true in the past, today’s business involves consumers and workers as well.
Bring coworkers and stakeholders together around a common goal to motivate them to work for your company. Employees want to achieve something amazing for the world and understand how their efforts help.
8. Accept change
Rapid change is a necessary element of business today, and any successful CEO must be able to embrace it and be adaptable and nimble. In an increasingly fast-paced, technology-driven world, every business is in perpetual transformation. You will be left behind if you wait too long.
9. Solve the problem
The ball is in your court. Employees, on the other hand, expect to be active participants in your vision, and the complexity of today’s fast-paced, data-driven environment means you can’t make good choices without their participation. Today’s great leaders must learn to embrace this complexity, even if it means stepping outside of their comfort zone.
Take away
To be clear, no single combination of the four traits is ideal for any CEO role. In each given circumstance, the industry and corporate environment define which behaviors and talents are most significant. A CEO in a quickly changing field, such as technology, will undoubtedly need to excel at anticipating changes, while this tendency may be less important in more stable industries.
