After years of mentoring successful CEOs, a coach shares which important leadership skills are needed to achieve success. You must be good at leading others, so getting people aligned with your goals will help make your company successful.
Luck plays a role in success. But leaders who have successful careers (measured by their ability to get others’ help with creating lasting value — monetary and otherwise) work hard at the business of their company and at developing themselves.
The skills, processes and behaviors required to build stability are different from those necessary to drive change. That’s why CEOs must have both management expertise (taming complexity and building stability) as well as leadership skills (looking at the future and driving change). Sometimes it’s more about leadership, and sometimes it’s more about management.
Stand up for capitalism and well-run business! Support those voices that encourage business as well as environmental and social reform. How a routine business call helped this CEO Coach.
If you put someone in a leadership role who doesn’t have management experience, it's your responsibility to help them! People who want to improve and ask for help are usually the stars of tomorrow.
A recent piece in Harvard Business Review asks, “Is CEO a Two-Person Job?” Once in a great while, the soulmate, mind-meld situation might exist in nature and perhaps a company will be better off for a short time if there are two leaders. With some good thought, the job of CEO can be structured like Goldilocks’ porridge; not too little, not too much.
Significant changes to company strategy (e.g., “Where do we play, and how do we win?”) are frequent in startups but less so in established companies. Why would you radically change a working formula? You shouldn’t! CEO Coach Todd Ordal is always looking out for good examples of what a significant change in strategy looks like.
In the business environment, having no skilled leader or facilitator is a surefire way to waste time and increase your failure rate. Talking about the objective(s), agreeing on responsibilities and rules of engagement, and getting to know one another seem ponderous, but I guarantee that this allows for faster and better results.
