What CEOs Want - - 8 Essential Management Team Attributes

Have you ever wondered what CEOs really want? What does a CEO expect from his/her organization, its senior team and the individual players? Generally it can be summed up in two words: creative alignment.
CEOs want team members who are creatively aligned and able to:

1. Handle Stress Effectively
Stress can be good. Stress can be bad. It depends on the type of stress. Being able to recover from stress in a fluid and adaptive environment becomes a stand out point for the management team. Stress triggers can negatively impact the creative alignment ability of the team. Being demoralized in any of your failures is not a good omen for success. Learning adaptive behaviours is important.

2. Hone their Risk Radars
This is a tough one. There is always a balancing act when it comes to risk. From the CEO’s perspective, senior management shouldn’t play it safe, nor should they live on the edge. There has to be a balance. The senior team must be keen on introducing new approaches with a tinge of risk. If the senior team are safe players then they provide little if any advantage in an accelerated world.

3. Build Positive Stakeholder Relationships
The entire management team has to realize that they are the business ambassadors internally and externally. All eyes are on them all the time. No CEO can afford to have a management team member that is a nay-sayer, who engages in us-versus-them language or is conflict prone. An engaged and creatively aligned management team knows that adjustments must be made for the good of the organization.

4. Create New Business Models
The senior team needs to get along and be the advisors to the CEO. There is little time for isolationism and individual egos. If the management team is unable to create new business models to move the business to new heights, the CEO and the company will be immensely disappointed in its ineffective movement.

5. Establish Creative Productivity Gains
Every CEO wants their management team to be innovative. The team must bring productivity to the business by way of increased effectiveness and efficiency. You must be proactive and scan the business environment for improvement opportunities. The management team’s ability to foster people and business growth is paramount to its success.

6. Take Business Routines Seriously
A good routine is always good for an organization. Eighty percent of the company’s work can be pre-established while the other twenty percent is always reserved for emergencies, rush jobs and responses. Getting the established processes in place and ensuring that other teams adapt to the routines of the organization is part of what makes things better.

7. March to a Mission
Management teams must creatively align themselves with the needs of the organization. CEOs are constantly asking, “What are the three to five things on the strategic agenda of the organization?” and “What is the management team doing to make it happen?” The CEO has every right to expect the management team to be on mission. The ability to creatively align means to be purposeful.

8. Invest in the Success of Others
Action speaks louder than words. As a management team, the ability to invest in others is an important recipe for success. When it comes right down to it, the most valuable asset of the organization is its people. Today’s organizations cannot afford to lose or have its intellectual capital treated disrespectfully. It is management’s responsibility to ensure they make the right investments in people.

Good CEOs know that if the individual players on the team are creatively aligned they will row in the same direction, at the same speed, with the same consistency. They will also find solutions and adjust to circumstances as needed. From a talent management perspective, that spells success. But you knew this, didn’t you!

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7 Steps to Kick-Start Your Strategic Planning Process

Strategic planning is an exercise in gathering and documenting information about the past, present and future of your business. Strategic planning helps determine where you want to go over the next few years, how you are going to get there and how to recognize when you've arrived.

One of the more common strategic planning approaches is Basic Strategic Planning (BSP). BSP uses a triangle approach and seeks to align strategic agenda items with the tactical reality of the organization.

Starting from the top, BSP includes the following steps:

1. Identify your mission statement. It is amazing how many organizations don't take the time to develop this statement. A mission statement is foundational to all strategic planning work. An effective mission statement describes what the company does, provides insight into client value and captures the essence of your company.

2. Create a vision of the future. A vision statement should look to the future. After all, you can't get to where you want to go unless you know where you want to go. Think ahead to three to five years from now and write your story. What is it that your organization has achieved? Tighten that story into a clear crisp sentence and share it.

3. Develop core values and guiding principles. Core values and guiding principles are foundational to your entire organization. Guiding principles are a set of accepted guidelines formed by the business that capture how your people act, work, make decisions, set priorities and conduct themselves. It is imperative to set and communicate core values and principles or else they will set themselves over time through employee habits.

4. Create long-term goals and smart objectives. Goals are general statements outlining what you want to achieve to meet your mission and vision and address any issues you are facing. For each and every goal it is important to identify strategies to achieve them. Objectives should be SMART; that means specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time bound. It is important that you make a distinction between long-term goals and smart objectives for those goals.

5. Establish an action roadmap with timelines. An action roadmap is a visual representation of your strategic planning items. It includes high-level agenda items, initiatives, champions and key elements. It includes the key areas that your organization will focus on in order to achieve its goals and objectives.

6. Build a communication plan. Communication plans should not be complicated and should be shared within your organization. It is important that time is spent determining the best approach for getting people informed as to what is planned and ensuring that they know impacts of not achieving the objectives. Consider printed plans, maps, high-level visuals, town hall sessions, etc. It is all about communication. Be visual, be creative.

7. Establish an implementation and monitoring plan. This is important to be successful. Organizations and teams fail because they don't assign a top-notch resource to put together an implementation plan. Consider using a highly-skilled program manager or director to translate the strategic plan into tactical reality. Ensure that the rules of engagement are established and build a strong monitoring process that engages people in open dialogue centred around the actions that must be taken to be successful.

Strategic planning is an important part of every organization's success. There are key elements that must go into strategic planning; if you do not have all the elements to start with, then you must start with the basic strategic planning process (BSP). Everything that you do as an organization will come from your strategic plan. This includes enhanced sales, improved business processes, inventory controls, or market advancement. The list of options is huge. We don't plan to fail, we just fail to plan.

What do you do to make sure your company has a road map and stays to the plan? It would be great to know. Contact me and we can discuss for 30 minutes what you need to do to ensure things are moving forward. info@braveworld.ca 



By Richard Lannon