What should CEOs do every day?
Working in the field of psychological assessments, I get to meet a lot of CEOs and other senior people in organisations. (I’ll call them ‘seniors’ but the term is to do with rank, not age.) I like the time that I spend with these high-functioning people and one of the things I am interested in is what they do all day. The responses are always interesting and contradictory, yet complex, intriguing and yet equally perilous.
If I were to give a single piece of advice to a new senior, it would be: “let go”. Here’s what I mean:
- An accountant who becomes a financial director (FD) can’t continue to work as an accountant. If he does, he’s likely to fail at being the FD.
- There is a tremendous psychological barrier in leaving behind the function you’re good at – accounting - and starting on a role you possibly know less about. It would be a mistake to see the FD role turn into merely accounting because it’s so much more. Instead, it’s really about business leadership.
- In truth, letting go of the very thing you’ve been well rewarded for your whole working life isn’t easy. It’s even worse if you consider the investment you made in achieving all the tertiary qualifications, along with working your way up the corporate ladder based on being good at that thing.
In reality, only a few are able to leave the honey trap of super technical specialist to the wild unknowns of business leadership.
What makes these people succeed?
Having technical specialists in business leadership is a key component in helping organisations flourish. The work of Elliott Jaques, Canadian psychoanalyst and organisational psychologist, on Stratified System’s Theory (SST) – or levels of work - revolutionised how organisations think about this aspect of business functioning:
- For Jaques, having the right people in the right roles is essential to organisational success. Nothing new there but Jaques is clear that only a few are mentally well equipped to play the roles at a senior level.
- While being clever enough is essential to performing ones job well, this isn’t what it’s about. It’s the type of cleverness that he refers to. It’s not the cleverness of crunching numbers - like an actuary or solving problems like an engineer - but rather how open your mind is.
He says that decisions in the organisation made today affect the organisation only much later in the future:
- In lower roles in the organisation, decisions made impact the organisation in a very short space of time and are reactive. An example is a PA who responds to the boss’ requirements in the period required.
- Compare this to, for example, a senior who decides to sell services via the web rather than through physical stores. It may take three years to know if this decision will be successful. The work the senior is doing will have an impact on the organisation further into the future.
Seniors who spend time on reactive tasks are wasting their time
Jaques is clear that those seniors, who are in roles where the tasks should take an extended period, but spend their time performing tasks that don’t take a long time, are not performing their jobs well. In this situation, the individual would start looking at themselves as a technical specialist - dealing with operations in the present - rather than a business leader dealing with strategy for the future. To be effective, Jacques says that individuals in senior roles need to spend 70% of their time on strategy and 30% of their time on the operational tasks that they need to do.
So what should seniors, GMs, EXCO members and CEOs be doing every day?
Well not sitting around peering into the blue sky and dreaming. They need to do the real work of keeping the organisation on track, for example:
- Help to define the organisational future several years down the line,
- Look at the external drivers that can derail strategy and act on these,
- Help define and uphold the organisational values,
- Work with other leaders in the organisation and develop the future of the business,
- Shape stakeholders’ efforts at all levels,
- Address customers and win their confidence about future projects,
- Watch the markets and competitors closely,
- Use communication channels in the organisation to keep others informed about future endeavours, and
- Ensure that human capital is aligned to future needs.
These are big uncomfortable tasks and university doesn’t prepare you to do them. When seniors experience the discomfort of not doing ‘real work’, they are probably on the right track. When they look back on a day and see themselves having done a bunch of tasks that university trained them for, they had best redefine their role in the organisation.
