There are many different views as to which attributes are essential to be an excellent CEO. Take a moment out from your busy urgent day-to-day business and consider some issues which are important for business leaders, issues which others rarely – or dare not – ask them, and that with the pressure of business, they may not often askthemselves: Awareness, Vision, Imagination, Responsibility, and Action.
Question yourself
- Do I really know what is happening within my organisation, and outside? Can I make sense of it?
- What is the extent and limit of my responsibility? Am I responsible for the common good?
- Is this the right thing to do, and is there an alternative to the corporate governance model I am used to?
- Who will I be in the next decade or two?
Working in organised facilitated groups with your peers and away from your day to day colleagues is a great way to find help from outside. Working with a coach is another way to help you find the inner recourses to help you face the challenges. This is not just about your business, this is about YOU.
You need to
- Expand insight into the challenges responsible business leader and enterprises are likely to face in the future and leave with a point of view
- Stimulate and reinvigorate your identity
- Develop a vision to change your game
Consider these topics and ask yourself what you already know
Awareness
Follow the path from the outside world of the corporation to the inner world of the top executive
- How others view what a top executive’s job is today, or what your job is
- Leadership in uncertain times
- Assessing one’s own top management paradigm
- Managing contention, short-term changes vs long-term transformation: top-level practices
Vision
Visualise tomorrow’s managers, organisations and global economy
- Alternative models of the business-society interface
- The global corporation and its critics: coping with critics from outside and developing a dialogue integrated into strategic logics
- Investing another world vision, another paradigm and imagining its implications
- Corporate governance and its future
Imagination
Be bold and creative but selective
- The role of imagination in strategic thinking
- Size of pie and not only share of pie
- Beyond confrontation: learning from our contradictions, managing “dualities”
- Alternative competitive logics
Responsibility
Redefine what it means to be a CEO (different CEO vs. better CEO)
- Delivering high performance
- Developing organisational capital and executive talent
- Accountability and responsibility – where to start and where to stop?
- The corporation and the common good: implications for corporate leaders
Action
Commit to the discipline to act
- The implementation challenge
- Re-invention and the relevance of ‘practical’ theories for action
- Articulating commitment and engaging with coaches for follow-through
Rather than simply attending a classroom based course, take a series of structured workshops challenging alternative answers through a variety of interactive methods including: roundtable discussions, team work, panel discussions and interpersonal peer exchanges, or for more intensity use 1-1 coaching to increase your executives’ capacity to master the complexity of the CEO’s job in the context of an ever-changing global environment. Ask us for more details