CEO & HR - Leadership Pitfalls !

CEO's and HR Leaders are constantly seeking ways to improve their organizational performance through leadership excellence. Often using the “carrot and stick” approach with a mixture of incentives, KPIs and metrics to drive the right behavior and achieve results. 

In my opinion, Organisations need to be mindful of two very important factors when building their leadership teams and culture:

Executive Trust

Does the senior leadership work in a way that shows trust and support for one another or are they focused on “shining” as individuals, often scoring points with the board at the expense of their colleagues? How do they handle development feedback ? The CEO with HR in the capacity of custodians must build a culture of teamwork and trust between the leaders and be mindful of individual operators who don't play ball. The dependency of senior executives both at corporate support and business unit level on each other should remain a key priority of the CEO and HR Leader. This is a significant contributor to organizational performance. Ego's play a big part in this and the CEO should willingly “root out” executives that create individual dependencies and don’t work in the spirit of teamwork. A starting point is to establish the current status quo, organizations should conduct a survey to reveals the facts around trust and support around the leadership team.

Mediocrity

What is the caliber of the existing leadership team ? Are they at the top of their game in terms of knowledge and best practice? Are they working together sharing knowledge and creating an environment of cross-department collaboration ? The entry point into the organization of new Executive is of paramount importance. There continues to be a shortage of skilled leaders who understand and have practiced the "art of leadership". Leaders who can shape a corporate function or a business and enlist support and build trust and win co-operation across traditional department boundaries and create happy workplaces remain a rare breed. Often, in the interests of time, a "plug and play" Executive is hired who ticks the boxes in terms of number of years of industry experience as a result of a bad selection process and poor judgement. The end result can be an inability to move the corporate needle on the bigger projects that require co-operation from teams and people often outside of the direct reporting lines. An experienced HR leader can significantly help to reduce this risk by ensuring a shortlist of the right candidates is presented. CEO and the HR leader need to learn to say "no" to mediocre talent even if it means a longer hiring cycle. The price of mediocrity is directly reflected on revenue and profits but is hardly ever measured.