A CEO’s job is expansive and requires a litany of skills but is, at its core, the ability to manage and lead a team. It’s important to make a distinction here because great managers can fail as leaders, and similarly, many leaders do not have the skill set to be effective managers.
Leaders and managers are not the same, and are in no way interchangeable: A leader defines the identity of the group, and answers the questions: Who are we, as a company? Who we are becoming? Why is what we are doing important? Why is our work meaningful? While a manager would be concerned with what is being delivered, where it is being delivered, how much is being delivered, and when is it being delivered. Ideally, your CEO should be both a great leader and a great manager. In this article, we will look at a few questions you can ask to test if your CEO can manage a team effectively or not.
What are the abilities that a CEO needs to possess to successfully manage your corporation and inspire your staff to drive performance to its full potential?
The first step in management is inventory, knowing what you have and what you are working with. The first part of managing a team is knowing exactly who is on your team, who is with you, and who has one foot out the door.
Many executives are trying to manage a team which is not committed nor interested in the organization’s goals. Most managers fail to listen, however, great managers listen to the team and grasp what they want to achieve, what it means to them and why. Managing a team means understanding who the team members want to become and knowing where they are heading in life. Great CEOs will run a process to align individual team members on their vision and direction.
This contrasts with autocratic managers who communicate a pre-determined common goal and demand team members to internalize it. Many CEOs try to set a vision and cascade it down the organization, however, this approach will never create an ownership culture. Great CEOs know they need to make the staff excited on a personal level before they can be excited on a professional level. People who are passionate about organizational goals will be engaged and proactive in doing whatever is necessary to achieve said goals.
I often sit with CEOs who brag about how solid and engaged their team is, and unbeknownst to them, several of their C-level executives are interviewing for new jobs in the market. That is why the traditional management style of creating a vision and cascading it down the organization does not work. Effective managers understand that a company has a collective vision that is the summation of the individual visions of its senior team members. Taking time to understand the direction of each of the CEOs’ direct reports is critical to understanding who is on board and who is merely renting a seat at the executive table.
Tactically, this can be observed in the way the CEO is setting their performance management and goal setting infrastructure in the company. Adding a form for personal vision and goals to the corporate goal-setting sheet is an excellent way to start institutionalizing this process into the company’s DNA. CEOs who grasp this concept will work to create systems and processes that are designed to capture the collective vision of the group, as opposed to force-feeding a set of corporate goals down the ladder of command.
A few questions to ask in this area would be:
- Can you give me an example of a time you realized the goals of the organization and the personal goals of one of your direct reports were in conflict? How did you recognize the issue and how did you react?
A CEO who is great at managing a team will work to align personal vision and goals with corporate vision and goals. Another question you could ask would be:
- How do you ensure that you understand the personal goals and vision of your direct reports and then inculcate that into your company-wide goals?
While the process is simple, it’s all too common for companies to hire senior leaders and invest in them only to have them resign to pursue their own personal agenda, which at the forefront was never aligned with the direction of the company. The frustrating part is that this scenario is completely avoidable when a CEO recognizes the importance of aligning personal and professional goals – an axiom that should be the foundation stone of team management.
To provide a simple example: a football coach does not hire Ronaldo and Messier and then explains to them that their vision is to win the world cup. The players come to the team with the vision inherent in their DNA, the coach provides the path to realizing the vision. The CEO has the same job and must avoid hiring players who do not embody the vision of the company on a personal level.
Our assessment for managing a team is based on seven critical assessment areas which unfortunately do not have room for in this article but you can find more on this in our book “CEO Assessment and Selection”, which you can buy on our website and unlock over 450 fail-safe questions that allow you to recruit the right CEO for your organization. Get more free CEO Assessment tips at https://tpgleadership.com/ceo-assessment-selection-book/ .
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