Moving from a functional leader to CEO is a key leadership passage.  It is marked by great opportunity, and a great deal of failure.  The first few weeks are usually celebrated with fanfare, and then the schedule fills rapidly and the pressure mounts.  Yet, all too often, within a few years of their appointment, CEO’s are on their way out.  These days the average tenure is three years.  Hardly enough time to make long lasting and sustainable change.  So, what are the unique career challenges that a talented vice president will face as they move into the CEO seat?  What are the challenges they must overcome to be successful?

Challenge One:  Delivering Consistent Top and Bottom Line Results

The CEO is responsible for longer term sustained value in the business and quarterly performance.  They must learn how to anticipate longer term drivers of competitive advantage, and the long term ramifications of their decisions.  They need to make decisions about the short term tactics with the longer term in mind, and they need to do this for all the functional areas, not just the one where they have the most expertise.

Challenge Two:  Setting Company Direction

Visioning, strategic acumen, and positioning know how are all crucial skills for setting a company direction that will lead to competitive advantage.  A new CEO must decide where to take the company, clarify the assumptions being made about the changing industry or field, and figure out what competitive issues the organization must heed.  This requires a greater balance between external and internal drivers than in a VP role and the ability to translate this knowledge to a vision, competitive advantage, and money making business model.

Challenge Three:  Shaping the Culture

Every company is like a living and breathing organism that is constantly changing and evolving.  It is also a social organization with overt and covert ways of operating.  Part of the CEO’s role is to create a workplace culture and social environment that will energize people at all levels, while at the same time striving for tangible business results.  More so than for VP positions, this involves establishing values, and ways of interacting with one another that is healthy and builds trust, and holding a vision for “how things get done around here” as well as the desired outcomes.

Challenge Four:  Building a High Performing Executive Team

Managing through other executives rather than middle managers is a hallmark of this career transition.  To do it well, the CEO must build a high performing leadership team and a future pipeline of leaders.  This often requires a clear vision for what it means to be a successful leader in the organization, ensuring the right people are in the right roles, and establishing a team culture that encourages authentic debate, trust, and results.

Challenge Five:  Developing Operational Breadth

The CEO needs to understand day-to-day operational realities so they can appreciate the issues facing those responsible for operations, and form a complete picture of the business.  A key part of this leadership passage is thinking about the business holistically, and how it fits together, and the tensions and the cross functional challenges that exist, rather than being a vice president with limited scope and breadth.

Challenge Six:  Getting to Know Customers

Understanding customer needs, having executive level relationships with customers, and knowing the competition can be critical for sustaining competitive advantage and optimizing products, services, and pricing.   Functional managers moving into the CEO role need to balance their time between internal and external relationships, and spend time building trust and credibility with customers, while at the same time managing customer risks.

Challenge Seven:  Building Influence and Credibility

Functional leaders moving into the top job need to develop their credibility as the CEO, even if they have been in the business for a long time.  To do this, it can be beneficial to pick a date for officially transitioning into the new role, both mentally and in terms of responsibility.  To build influence if  helps to be clear about where the organization is headed, so that the CEO can build allies throughout locations, teams, and stakeholder groups.

Sources:

• Manager Excellence Resource Center, Corporate Executive Board.
• From CFO to CEO – Route to the Top.  Spencer Stuart
• The Leadership Pipeline.  Ram Charan et al

By Colin Gautrey – Originally posted on http://www.gautreygroup.com/blog

Time and time again we meet people in our workshops that have spent lots of time and energy building their business case. They have stacked up the numbers and convinced themselves that it works. The numbers speak for themselves — it’s a no-brainer. But somehow they just don’t quite cut it. There is nothing wrong with getting the numbers right, but expecting them to do all the work is often a recipe for problems.

Cecilia Falbe and her colleagues studied this and found that reliance on rational persuasion, at best, achieves compliance rather than commitment. To get commitment, or rather enthusiastic buy-in, you need to combine the numbers with what they called an inspirational appeal. These appeals talk directly to the target’s emotions. They resonate with their values and get them excited. The combination approach according to Falbe, and also in our experience, makes for a highly effective strategy when influencing people.

It seems that numbers are not very exciting. Only when the numbers connect to the emotions do things get interesting.

So, how good are you at combining the two? A mistake many people make quite naturally is to create their inspirational appeal based on what excites them rather than their stakeholder. This is natural, but ineffective because it makes the assumption that other people are excited by the same things, which clearly isn’t true (apart from groups formed by their common interests perhaps).

In reality, it can be surprisingly easy once you know what excites your target. Even the weakest attempt at inspiring someone can get the job done, mainly because sometimes all people need is a little help to connect these together in their minds. Once they see that connection, they will actually inspire themselves — remember, motivation comes from within. So you do not necessarily need to go on acting or public speaking courses; you just need to become a detective to figure out why they should be excited about your numbers.

The most reliable method for finding out is to ask them. Not in a crass way like, “Tell me what excites you.” Instead, set up a meeting to learn more about their issues, problems and concerns so you can provide a better level of service to them. This is likely to work at several levels…

• People are generally pleased to be consulted.
• They are always interested in how to get more for less.
• If they have suspicion that you have value to contribute, they will be more than happy to tell you how.Of course, once you get there and start using a few open questions, watch closely for the signs of excitement. What points do they make with the most conviction? When do their eyes light up? What do they spend the majority of the time talking about? Go in equipped with a set of questions you can use appropriately, like…
• What are you main concerns at the moment?
• What is worth celebrating round here?
• Where do you think we are going wrong as a company?
• What do you think is working well here?
• Why do you think we are succeeding?

  If you’ve managed to set the right context and tone for the meeting, there will be ample opportunity for you to learn more about the individual and what moves them.

  Alternatively, you may want to tap into your network to learn what others know about the individual you are targeting. This is quite a good thing to do in any case, because they may have a different take to your view, or interpret things in different ways. It may even help them to become more successful with that individual too because you are working together to understand a person who is presumably quite a powerful person in the organisation.

  Once you distil all of these inputs down, you can start to draw conclusions about their priorities, and then begin the task of linking these thoughts to your idea with an inspirational appeal backed by numbers.

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Program Summary:

Building internal leadership talent is a growing priority for most organizations given pending retirements and potential growth opportunities. How do you identify and develop your high potential leaders? What do you do if you don’t have enough internal talent? What if the leaders you do have are not ready in time to fill upcoming vacancies? Explore these questions and more at a full-day workshop that integrates the latest research on leadership potential with a framework of Succession 2.0 principles. Discover how to bridge the gap between your current and future top leaders.

Highly recommend reading this article about how happiness is linked to the choices we make.

http://csi.gsb.stanford.edu/are-we-happy-yet-unexpected-links-between-happiness-and-choice?utm_source=apower&utm_medium=email&utm_content=executivereport%2Bmar2012&utm_campaign=gen%2B11-12