I was scouting around for articles on how I could improve my performance as a leader in Polestar and found an excellent article by McKinsey. As many of you run, or aspire to run, businesses I thought I would share it.
Little academic and other research on the CEO’s role illuminates how CEOs think and what they do to excel. For example, recent studies that detail how CEOs spend their time don’t show the difference between a good use of time and a bad one. Academic research also demonstrates that traits such as drive, resilience, and risk tolerance make CEOs more successful. This insight is helpful during a search for a new CEO, but it’s hardly one that sitting CEOs can use to improve their performance. Other research has tended to produce such findings as the observation that leaders are effective in some situations and ineffective in others—interesting, but less than instructive.
McKinsey sets out to show which mindsets and practices are proven to make CEOs most effective. It is the fruit of a long-running effort to study performance data on thousands of CEOs, revisit their first-hand experience helping CEOs enhance leadership approaches, and extract a set of empirical, broadly applicable insights on how excellent CEOs think and act. It offers a self-assessment guide to help CEOs (and CEO watchers, such as boards of directors) determine how closely they adhere to the mindsets and practices that are closely associated with superior CEO performance.
Do have a read: I for one will be trying to instigate some of the suggested changes.
CEOs who insist on rigorously measuring and managing all cultural elements that drive performance more than double the odds that their strategies will be executed. And over the long term, they deliver triple the total return to shareholders that other companies deliver.
