– What are the challenges and stresses you face as a CEO?
One of the stresses is ensuring the company always meets its strategic objectives and performance expectations of its shareholders. However, a far greater challenge is ensuring you lead in a manner which inspires your most valuable assets, your staff, to wilfully and enthusiastically deliver for the company. It’s important to try and create an exciting work environment with the right incentives to encourage employees to perform at their optimum. As the CEO, you need to establish how to maintain strong relationships and achieve the best results across your entire organisation, not just with your peers.
– What makes an ideal CEO?
Understanding, no matter what industry you are in, your business is built on people, and if your staff are happy, there is a greater chance of profitability and in turn, stakeholders happiness. Through trial and tribulation, if your team is behind you, challenges are easier to solve and your successes are so much sweeter.
– Is there any ideal preparation or learning a prospective or aspirant CEO should focus on?
Always find a mentor – great wisdom can come from an elder who has had more years of experience. Read autobiographies of great CEOs and surround yourself with professionals who can add value to your journey.
– What do you believe is the key to striking the right balance as a leader between being a visionary, an expert in your field, or an all-rounder?
Firstly, being a competent leader is more important than all three. Whilst this may be obvious, one often sees operational and administration experts promoted for achieving great results within a business, but they may not possess leadership characteristics or skills. Then, depending on the industry, I would way up being a visionary and an all-rounder ahead of being an expert in a specific industry. Often CEO’s have to juggle a number of balls and being an all-rounder with a varied skill set enables you to unpack challenges, and prioritise the solution and mitigation strategies. No matter what level you are at within an organisation, if you love what you do and thrive on new challenges, you are likely to succeed.
– What insight can you share about the dynamics of an outsider to a company or an industry becoming CEO of an organisation?
This is not necessarily a bad thing, often an outside perspective can assist in disrupting the norm and provide for out of the box ideas and fresh approaches. In this instance, it is imperative that there is a culture fit and the ability to build trust and respect with fellow executives and key stakeholders quickly. The board’s expectations need to be well defined and one needs to ensure there is a clear understanding of any transition timeframes and performance results. If you are not an industry expert, you need to trust those that are within your team but also have access to the right advisors to provide independent perspectives and risks assessments.
– What advice do you have for young CEOs in terms of coping with the immense pressure and expectations that will be placed on them?
Try to break your challenges down and then systematically seek solutions and trigger actions. Share your pain with mentors and seek advice and try not to become too emotional or make matters personal. Don’t make your challenges bigger than your family and your health – both are indispensable. Have an escape, ideally exercise – it’s a great stress reliever and balancer.
– How important is on-the-ground experience and emotional intelligence?
Very important. Nothing beats experience and if you don’t have enough of it – leverage that of your mentor’s and your peers. How you deal with a crisis will always be more of a measure than how you deal with successes. We grow through challenges and they will come one after the other.
– What gives you the greatest satisfaction as a CEO?
Having a happy and motivated team that maintain the right work/life balance, love their jobs, love our culture and work environment and exceed our expectations. Knowing that when the heat is on, my team won’t run out on me.
By Stephen Watson, MD of Discover Digital
