CEO Skills Three High Leverage Points

Running a growing company is perhaps the most challenging and demanding job on the face of the earth. It requires the energy of two or three normal people, the patience of Job, enough singleness of purpose to make Sisyphus look like he had attention deficit disorder, and a very broad array of skills and abilities. To take your company from launching pad to synchronous orbit, you have to be able to envision the future, understand financial statements, build customer relationships, lead and empower increasingly diverse workforces and much, much more.

Some of these wide-ranging skills have far greater impact on your ability to lead your organization than others. As we move increasingly into an information/knowledge/service-based economy, the skills that seem to give CEOs the most leverage focus on managing people rather than the “hard asset” side of the business. Of course, you still have to know how to read a balance sheet, control inventories and things like that. But as technology continues to level the playing field, the only way left to gain a competitive advantage is with your people. In such a world, your people management skills — at the individual and group levels — will increasingly determine your organization’s long-term success.

A primer on all the various people management skills could easily consume terabytes of hard disk space. To keep this best practices module manageable and to provide immediate take-home value, we decided to focus on three specific skills:

• Time management/personal organization
• Coaching
• Change management

Why did we select these three? Each skill is designed to bring out the very best in people. Time management starts at the personal level (you), coaching relates to managing people at the individual level, and change management looks at the organization as a whole. By developing your skills in these critical areas, you empower your people (and yourself) to bring out the best they have so that your organization reaches its full potential.

Time Management/Personal Organization

Your effectiveness as a CEO begins and ends with the most critical skill of all — your ability to manage yourself. When you manage your time (and therefore yourself) well, says Vistage speaker and personal organization expert Bruce Breier , your effectiveness as a leader and a manager skyrockets. When you don’t, it sinks like a stone.

Breier believes CEOs who don’t manage themselves as well as they could fall prey to one or more of the following:

• Feeling of futility. Often, CEOs feel so overwhelmed by job demands and constant interruptions that they consider personal planning a waste of time.
• Lack of knowledge/expertise. Many CEOs simply don’t know how to plan their days and/or organize their lives.
• The adrenaline factor. Most entrepreneurial CEOs like a certain amount of chaos in their lives. They avoid time management or personal organization regimens that appear too rigid or structured.
• False reliance on technology. “Buying the latest wireless device or other technological gadget does not automatically make you more organized,” says Breier. Without a disciplined process for personal organization, technology only automates your disorganization.

Overcoming these personal organization obstacles requires a disciplined process that addresses four key areas: time, information, projects and people. Breier shares his 30 years’ experience and expertise on this subject in “The Organized Executive”.

Coaching

Picture the following scenario. A highly sought-after senior marketing executive mulls his employment options with two different companies. Each company offers a challenging position with plenty of responsibility and opportunities for growth. Each has a good reputation for providing quality products and treating customers well. And each position offers almost identical pay and perks.

In the second company, however, the CEO makes it clear that as part of the culture she meets with each of her direct reports twice a month to assist with their personal and professional growth — not just to work on their performance as management team members, but to help them develop faster through a feedback and an exchange of ideas. Everything else being equal, which job do you think the marketing executive will take?

This scenario, say Vistage speakers and coaching advocates Agnes Mura and Bob Niederman , represents just one of the many benefits of coaching your people. And as the battle for top talent escalates and companies become increasingly dependent on their employees’ continual growth and development, coaching will become one of those leverage points that sets the great CEOs apart from the merely good ones.

Mura and Niederman share their thoughts on how to coach effectively from the CEO position in “The CEO as Coach” and “The Art of Coaching”.

Change Management

Our third leverage point deals with managing people at the organizational level. In the corporate world, change used to resemble white-water rafting — long periods of calm followed by short bursts of rapids. Within the past generation, however, that trend has reversed itself. Today, short periods of calm (if any) are immediately followed by long periods of turbulent change. In most organizations, unpredictability, uncertainty and surprise have become the norm.

This doesn’t mean, however, that organizations should become passive recipients of change. In fact, say change management experts Joni Daniels and Del Poling , to survive and thrive in today’s “white water” markets, companies must learn to proactively plan for and manage change, which requires skill, guidance and direction from the person at the top. Like the helmsman on a clipper ship in a raging storm, your ability to guide your people through a continual sea of change represents a major leverage point in your quest for organizational success.

Daniels and Poling offer plenty of food for thought on managing change in “Understanding Organizational Change”, “Pulse Points for Organizational Change” and “Managing Resistance to Change”.

We also have the usual list of book recommendations and we have spent hours on our custom longboard surfing the net for articles, links and Web sites related to our three chosen skill sets. We think you will find these informative and useful.

If you have other CEO skill sets that you would like to see covered in future best practice pieces, let us know by responding to the “Rate this Article” feature at the bottom of the page or by sending an e-mail to the Vistage best practices writer Lee Polevoi. We welcome your feedback on this module and your ideas on future best practices modules.