In the coming decade, millennials will have made the full transition into the C-suite. They will form the new pool for the next generation of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs). But what are organisations seeking in this next generation of CEOs?
The Covid-19 pandemic was a paradigm shift for how the C-suite now thinks about the role of CEO or General Manager (GM), and the kind of person to fill that role. What are those specific traits that make a person CEO-ready?
Resilience
The ability to move through the fog with calmness, even when all the answers are not clear, and make decisions in these kinds of environments. The CEO is no longer expected to have all the answers, and to have certainty, but is expected to chart out firm directions.
The CEO must emerge with clarity with every step they take, the ability to map out the terrain even when information is incomplete, fast-changing and contradictory. In this way, resilience also goes with clarifying purpose across the different levels, in the different times and spaces.
The CEO is engaged in a constant reorientation of all the forces within the company. At a personal level, this also calls for the CEO’s ability to maintain an emotional balance even as things waver, even when the board exerts performance pressure. It is tempering one’s emotions with eyes on the prize.
Coherence and Intuition
Firms have numerous sources of data, there are analysts at different levels, and hot signals keep coming in all the time. It is easy for CEOs to drown in all these patterns that are revealed by the data and end up pulling in different directions.
The next generation of CEOs ought to bring strategic coherence to the firm, having a knack for moving pieces in such a way that they become mutually reinforcing, and that all elements in the firm perform in concert.
Before, firms have been very fragmented or departmentalised. The Engineering departments will make decisions independent of how this could affect logistics or the profit and loss that finance is tracking. The role of the CEO is to achieve integration without hampering movement.
The CEO is now also called forth to have fingertip sensitivity, knowing where to press the buttons, and the ability to recognise the constraint in this sea of data. The CEO must bring with them intuition and out of this, a creative imagination that enables them to open doors where the organisation sees walls.
Differentiated but Unified Leadership Style
Although CEOs share lots of things in common, for example, a commercial outlook, ability to provide strategic oversight and foresight, there’s something that’s always unique to every CEO. Every great CEO finds their unique style. This means that for future CEOs, those still locked up in middle and senior management, this becomes the time to develop that style, that voice, that rhythm. Why? Because in chaotic and turbulent times, everyone reverts to their style. It thus helps to be deliberate in cultivating that style and understanding its blind spots and the unique attributes it brings in the C-suite.
How do you push for results? How do you hold tension? How do you communicate urgency? That means, the next generation of CEOs must start putting themselves in these varied situations, to uncover who they are in all these sets of randomness.
The goal is to have a style that is unified, a CEO that is one with themselves, a beautiful weaving of the CEO’s contradictions that won’t confuse the people you lead. All the forces and interests within the organisation should find unity in the General Manager.
Strategic Agency
The next generation of CEOs requires a bold, resolute, decisive and innovative agency that pours into every employee in the firm. We call this the CEO elevator pitch. What could the CEO tell an employee in the elevator that would shift the needle in the company?
Assuming the CEO met an HR business partner in the elevator, what is the one thing they would tell them that would reflect in that month’s profitand loss results? That means a CEO must have the pulse of every place in the organisation, knowing the two or three big things that need to be dialled up in those places, and how to measure them at the board room level.
Basically, how does the CEO push for results without getting buried in the details? The CEO is not an investigator, is not a CFO, is not someone to teach people to do their jobs.
The next generation of CEOs must be seeking forgiveness, not permission, they champion innovation, they give their people the wings to fly, and they cushion those who have dared to take risks in the company.
The next generation of CEOs do not respect the status quo, they challenge it. When the current pool of future CEOs develops this, then they can emerge better prepared from the GM pipeline. But as is often the case, many enter the pipeline, but few emerge from it. Many are called to be CEOs; few are chosen to be. The few that are chosen will often have these qualities.