Four Foundational Behaviours | The CEO Genome
Neha Singh
SaaS Sales and Customer Success Strategist | Building Bridge to Leadership | Podcast Host
In the last edition, I talked about myths surrounding what makes a CEO.
Now that we know there is nothing stopping us from becoming and succeeding as a CEO except ourselves, let’s delve into the traits we need to master.
Elena Lytkina Botelho and Kimberly Powell in their book, “The CEO Next Door” have shared 4 traits that they call “CEO Genome Behaviours”. These behaviours are what lead to winning the top job and succeed at it.
Trait 1 : Decisiveness
Picture this. You are the newly minted CEO of a crumbling organisation. What you do next can either breathe life into the company or bring it to its knees (along with your career). What would be your frame of mind when deciding on your strategy? If you sweat every decision, given the high stakes, you have lost the battle already.?
What should you do instead? Read the full blog here.
Trait 2 : Engage for impact
Successful CEOs engage with others for impact rather than likeability (or affinity). They understand the discomfort that comes with tough decisions but ultimately take those decisions to make the teams and business succeed. Both extremes – Too nice and not nice enough lead to disappointing results and can get a CEO fired.
?Read the full blog for more details.
Trait 3: Relentless Reliability
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“CEOs who are known for being reliable are 15X more likely to be high performing, and their odds of getting hired are double those of everyone else.” –?The CEO Next Door?
Find out why reliability is so important and yet so difficult to achieve here.
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"Under pressure you don't rise to the occasion, you fall to the level of your training." - US Navy's Top Gun Fighter Pilot Academy
Trait 4: Adapt Boldly
In my last role, I worked for a company that has been the cornerstone of digital media insights as their head of customer success.
Between 2011 and 2018, the digital media industry changed leaps and bounds. In 2011, we were in so much demand that I found it tough to fit in training and meeting requests from clients in our calendars. But in 2018, there were so many sources of intelligence that my team was struggling to get meetings with the right stakeholders on client side.?
I now had to switch from efficiently managing high demand for client servicing to generating demand for servicing among relevant stakeholders. This was uncharted territory. I didn’t have a playbook for it.?
My experiments to involve relevant stakeholders in meetings and trainings through personal mailers failed, finely designed marketing mailers failed, webinars failed, conducting events failed.?
In the meantime, support tickets kept increasing since clients weren’t turning up for trainings and upsells became challenging since clients weren’t aware of new products.
I guided my team to continue experimenting. Finally we hit jackpot. A simply crafted e-mail highlighting one tip on how to use the product with a screenshot sent out once a week resulted in training requests pouring in from clients. The mailer teased them enough to know what’s more in store!?
This tactic along with many other pilots became the foundation for adapting the existing playbook from managing demand to creating demand. These experiments were new, time and resource intensive and not always risk averse. But if I had to ensure my organisation made an impact on the client’s business, I had to guide my team to adapt.?
Most issues that are known should be addressed by those below the CEO level, freeing the CEO to focus on navigating the unknown, where playbooks often do not exist.?
Therefore, the muscle to get comfortable with uncertainty and adapt while facing failures is a key behaviour needed for the top job.
You're not going to win every time. You might not even won most of the time. There is a lot of stuff that's not within your control, so how do you bounce back? Do you learn from it? Do you get stronger? - Former CEO of Thomson (Before it got acquired by Reuter's)
In the blog, I present a recommended CEO Career Portfolio shared by Elena Lytkina Botelho and Kimberly Powell in The CEO Next Door,?that can make it easy to get on the slate of final candidates.
You can take a 5-minutes free assessment on?https://ceogenome.com?to know how you fare on the required CEO skills.
?Resources to Explore
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