CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest

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Are there company-specific milestones that make transitioning out more or less natural (such as the integration of a major acquisition, the launch of an important new product, or the completion of a long-running project)?

People support what they help create,” says Medtronic’s Bill George. In fact, people are five times more supportive than those who are not involved. Improve Productivity. The most successful companies reduce administrative, sales, and labour costs more deeply than others, and in so doing achieve 25% more productivity improvement than their industry median over a 10-year period.Good, clear communication is a leadership hallmark. Fundamental tools of effective communication include:

Top CEOs shift around large amounts of capital and they do it far more often than average performers. We work with the board and incumbent CEO to establish a rigorous succession planning process; provide playbooks, tools, and insights to enable a successful transition planning and execution phase, and prepare the incumbent CEO for their next ambition. We concluded there is no clear pattern. The key takeaway was that despite their different approaches, every CEO at every stage of their tenure meaningfully tended to all six responsibilities.” But even the most calibrated time-management techniques won’t work without the right mindset: the ability to compartmentalize and focus on the moment. It’s vital to high performance and one of the most challenging aspects of the job from an emotional perspective. As Galderma’s Flemming Ornskov advises, “When you’re there, [be]…there in body and mind.” Differentiate. The best CEOs improve their business models and create pricing advantages in ways that are big enough to change a company’s trajectory.

How should a CEO plan for their first year?

He offers an example. During a pandemic zoom call with seven thousand employees, he paused the call to make a paper airplane for his five-year old son who had just walked into the room. “It took thirty seconds…afterward people reached out and said: ‘Thank you. You just gave us permission to be parents…to spend the time, ’” he said. Being a CEO means being subject to a crushing schedule; everyone has his or her own time management approach: color-coding calendar entries; listing quarterly priorities; safeguarding chunks of free time for last-minute emergencies; intensive delegation to teams. In fact, CEO time management is one of the most-read-about topics in business journalism today.

In the past, leadership was called “management,” with an emphasis on providing technical expertise and direction. The context was the traditional industrial economy command-and-control organization, where leaders focused exclusively on maximizing value for shareholders. In these organizations, leaders had three roles: planners (who develop strategy, then translate that strategy into concrete steps), directors (who assign responsibilities), or controllers (who ensure people do what they’ve been assigned and plans are adhered to). What are the limits of traditional management styles?

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Hence, as can be seen, CEOs need to move away from the day-to-day functioning of the company once the strategy has been formulated and leave it to the leaders to implement them while they engage with the Board and other stakeholders on important issues. Here often CEOs stumble and ignore these two aspects, as a result of which they are bogged down by mundane activities that often feed their egos as they believe they are in control of the organisation. As Nooyi suggests, any sense of loss is typically short lived, as it becomes clear that life can be even more vibrant, interesting, and fulfilling when you are freed of the constraints of the corporate calendar. You can invest more in personal relationships and use your experience to make a difference in many spheres. “A good time to step down,” shares former ICICI Bank CEO K. V. Kamath, “is when you see you can do a lot more exciting things outside than you sense you can do within the organization.”