This question was put to me over the weekend, and in its simplicity, it really got me thinking. I have been a professional Chief Executive in the Charity, 3rd sector and trade association space for more than 20 years now. It is a job I cherish and enjoy every day, but I don’t always spend enough time reflecting on it. So here, imperfect as it is, is the answer I gave.
To me, although it is one of the most varied and interesting things I think you can do for a living, there are four main areas which are fairly consistent across all CEO roles:
- Creating opportunity
- Managing stakeholders
- Running the shop
- Championing your customers
Creating opportunity
All organisations, it was famously once said, have the same strategy: “to win”. What winning looks like in your industry will differ from what it looks like in mine, but the fundamentals are still the same. You have to have a mental picture of where your customers/industry is heading, you have to have an idea of what would make it better and then you need to bring together the resources to accomplish that idea of ‘better’.
In practical terms as a CEO, this means creating a sense of direction and then marshalling the resources – whether financial, capacity, capability or partnership – to achieve your strategic goal. Some of this will be proactive – you nurture a new financial relationship, launch a new enterprise or develop a new capability to secure new opportunities. A lot of it will be reactive – responding to emerging developments in the wider operating landscape and deciding whether to crash against them, flow around them or get in line with them in order to achieve your wider goal.
This is such a core part of any CEO’s job that it is hard to over-state – it is only by having a goal, caring about whether you achieve it and putting yourself and your organisation out there that you can achieve anything. In this sense, being a CEO is about being alive to opportunity and always trying to put your organisation in the right place to benefit from it – which is a never-ending process.
Managing stakeholders
‘Stakeholders’ is a funny old expression. Fundamentally, everything in life and business is about relationships. This has been much better-expressed by cultures much older than mine, but the simple version is that ‘people buy from people’. People need to know you, trust you, sometimes even like you in order to continue to put opportunities your way.
This means as a CEO you need to invest a *lot* of time both in nurturing new relationships and maintaining existing ones. It means listening a lot, understanding where people are coming from and where your interests align. It means being honest about what you can and can’t do – being a people-pleaser, or over-promising and under-delivering will undermine your ability to take advantage of opportunity faster than almost anything else will.
It doesn’t have to mean learning everyone’s niece’s first name or methodically sending them an e-card on their LinkedIn birthday. It means being pleased to see them, interested in what they are doing and engaged in what they are trying to achieve.
Running the shop
As a CEO, you’ll probably spend less time hands-on ‘running the shop’, so this is probably more accurately described as ‘being accountable for how the shop is run’. There are 4main aspects to this:
- Money
- People
- Risk
- Governance
Getting your internal processes right so that you are managing, spending, acquiring and reporting on the movement of money is 100% critical to the success of any CEO. This extends far beyond the fundamentals like management accounting, record-keeping and fraud prevention and extends to working with your senior managers to improve the financial literacy and fluency of the whole business. Put simply, the better your organisation understands how money flows into and through it, the more likely you are to succeed in the long run.
For ‘people’ – as a CEO you cast a very long shadow (I am a fan of the expression “what you permit, you promote”). In many ways, you personify the cultural norms and behaviours you expect of the organisation – or if you don’t, you need to be absolutely clear on what those expectations are. It’s easier to demand honesty if you are honest. It’s easier to be resilient if everyone feels they can feed in constructively to the development of your plans.
In the world in which we now operate, its not enough to expect people to do work for money (arguably, it never really was). You have to create an environment that people want to work in, where they feel they are doing something useful, where they feel commitments are honoured and where they feel seen and valued. As a CEO, I have always felt the best way to do that is to ‘walk the floor’ – spend time with the people you work with, get to know them and think about how your working style can help rather than hinder them in what they want to achieve.
On risk, it is less about risk appetites or whether your organisation is willing to take risks – in today’s world, leaving the house is fraught with risk. Pretty much every enterprise is swimming in a world of risk. This being the case, I think there are two things that a good CEO can do – help the organisation prevent becoming paralysed by risk on the one hand and on the other encourage it to avoid ‘doing everything for everyone all the time’ as a short-term risk mitigation strategy. Risk is OK. Risk is natural. It is how we navigate it that really matters!