Here I am
Week 2 in my first CEO role and what a ride the first week has been! Yesterday I met with the Board Chair to clarify expectations, priorities and deliverables for the first quarter, my EA has filled my diary with appointments with key external stakeholders, the CFO has resigned because he didn’t get the CEO gig and my remaining leadership team are emerging as a combination of Machiavellian and politically savvy individuals. The Machs and the Savvys are both actively sizing up the situation in their own ways and calculating how to raise their image, or lower someone else’s, consolidate their territory or encroach on others. Everyone below them is keeping a low profile. The business is in much poorer shape than I had realised and I have to draw on all of my emotional fortitude to make some unpleasant and unpopular decisions. I reckon I’ve got around two thirds of the organisation with me, much of the remaining third sitting on the fence and a few individuals actively working against me.
Thankfully I have retained my executive coach to help me step out of the fray, take an objective view of the situation and prioritise my efforts. We are meeting fortnightly and in the first session we discussed my top 5 leadership challenges and how I can address them. Here they are:
1. Delivering consistent, predictable top and bottom line results
This will require focus around understanding key drivers of the top and bottom line, when and how to make tradeoffs, being able to see around corners to understand the longer term implications of decisions and adjust my short-term decisions accordingl.
2. Setting the organisation’s direction
I need to put my own stamp on where this place is going, as I’ve inherited a financially strapped organisation with shrinking market share and a growing bunch of disgruntled customers. So I need to be clear about where I intend to take the business and communicate a compelling and exciting vision for our people internally as well as our customers. It will take all of my strategic skills to effectively reposition the business in what is turning out to be a highly competitive and unstable environment.
3. Leveraging existing leadership capability and covering gaps
There are some very loyal and capable leaders in this business who are not performing to expectations, but I ‘m confident they can lift their performance and become highly productive. It is therefore critical for me to energise these people and provide the right environment for them to flourish. I also need to identify mission-critical roles and make the right appointments to these roles. One of the things that kept me awake last night was how do I keep the right people engaged, productive and enthusiastic while also recognising who needs to leave and dealing with them fairly?
4. Maintaining the Edge in Execution
I am known for driving results, sometimes at a fast pace and so I need to continually seek feedback to assess how well I am performing and whether I’m bringing others along with me. As they say, it’s lonely at the top and I need to ensure I am hearing the bad news as well as the good. In my experience, it has become more difficult to receive honest feedback as I move up. I need to identify the most important and reliable sources for me to get the latest information and who I can trust.
This is a key leadership issue for me. I want to demonstrate that seeking and responding to feedback is critical for all of us to ensure we learn, grow and continually improve our performance. If I don’t demonstrate it, no-one else will.
5. Managing the Enterprise in the Broader, Global Context
Managing and influencing external stakeholders including the broader industry and our impact on our society is one of my key goals. This is a big one, and needs attention, but I have more immediate internal challenges on which I need to focus first.
Now it’s back to work – where to start and what to do first? I now I’m at my most creative and productive as soon as I get into the office so I’ve decided to allocate two hours a day from 8:00 AM to 10:000 AM to deal with my most challenging issues without distractions. Then the rest of the day is for others.
Here we go. My EA approaching with my diary… I can hear him striding down the corridor right now with those shiny Boss shoes.
I’ll be back in touch in a month or so to let you know how I’m going.