The Job of the CEO

If the owner and CEO are indeed different jobs, defining the job of the CEO can be quite challenging.

For me it is ‘achieving the organisation’s objectives’. Note this may not be simply making money. Not all organisations exist to make money. Clearly to do this job, the CEO has to be crystal clear on what the objectives of the organisation are.

Organisations are machines made up of humans, so the CEO’s role is achieving objectives through people.

You have doubtless heard the phrase ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ generally attributed to Peter Drucker. Defining and managing the culture is one of the CEO’s most important levers.

The people we hire and defining and keeping our Core Values alive are the biggest levers in managing the culture. So, we can start to flesh out the job and utmost priorities for the CEO.

In writing this it helps me realise that the greatest gifts of a CEO relate to what we call soft skills and it probably wasn’t soft skills that got the individual into the job in the first place and to quote Tom Peters ‘soft (skills) is hard and hard is soft’. That is why we often struggle to adapt to the top job.

I will leave with a line from Daniel Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence “CEO’s are hired for their intellect and business expertise- and fired for a lack of Emotional Intelligence”

So the questions for this week are;

• As a CEO, how would you rate your people skills on a scale from 0 to 10?
• Why do you rate it at that level?
• Have you got a method of objectively measuring that, 360 assessments / staff surveys / eNPS scores?
• What are you going to do to move the needle by just 1 point?
• What formal education have you had on personality types / communication / psychology / motivation?

If you need any help, reach out

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