Structure, structure, structure. Every CEO should know their company’s mission and values. Management consultants use the phrase “best practices” often. Chris Bradley, Martin Hirt, and Sven Smit, Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick: People, Probabilities, and Big Moves to Beat the Odds, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2018. Leadership model: Choose authenticity. We also know that biases cannot be unlearned. For more, see Martin Hirt, Kevin Laczkowski, and Mihir Mysore, “Bubbles pop, downturns stop,” McKinsey Quarterly, May 2019. Such an agenda calls for the board to go beyond its traditional fiduciary responsibilities (legal, regulatory, audit, compliance, risk, and performance reporting) and provide input on a broad range of topics, such as strategy, M&A, technology, culture, talent, resilience, and external communications. For the IT cases, I recommend reading the articles of the consulting companies about these topics on their websites (Hundreds of them if you google by key words "agile", "Digital", at McKinsey… Many CEOs have confided to us that they worry about asking the same few overstretched “usual suspects” to take extra assignments because they can’t trust the people who would otherwise perform them. For example, a CEO’s office should carefully plot all aspects of the CEO’s meetings: agenda, attendees, preparation (including “alone time” for the CEO to reflect and get ready), logistics, expected outcomes, and follow-up. The best CEOs put equal rigor and discipline into achieving greatness on both strategy and talent. There’s good reason to do this: headlines that carried the word “crisis” alongside the names of 100 top companies appeared 80 percent more often from 2010 to 2017 than they did in the previous decade. Culture: Go beyond employee engagement. The result of these efforts is a model for CEO excellence, which prescribes mindsets and practices that are especially likely to help CEOs succeed at their particular duties (Exhibit 1). The importance of this can’t be underestimated. Good CEOs ensure that their companies have an effective risk operating model, governance structure, and risk culture. Those six-digit salaries are a major point of attraction for the best and brightest … Ask successful investors what they look for in portfolio companies, and many will tell you they’d rather put money on an average strategy in the hands of great talent than on a great strategy in the hands of average talent. Such a process takes a granular view, makes comparisons using quantitative metrics, prompts when to stop funding and when to continue it, and is backed by the CEO’s personal resolve to continually optimize the company’s allocation of resources. It casts key performance measures such as margin, cash flow, and organizational health in a different light, thereby cutting through the biases and social dynamics that can lead to complacency. In fact, we’ve yet to meet one who does. For more ideas about how to address common cognitive and organizational biases, see the McKinsey Quarterly Bias Busters series. Further, they commit to making the team productive by regularly taking stock of and improving its operating rhythm, meeting protocols, interaction quality, and dynamics. Sixty percent are two levels below, and 20 percent sit farther down. The Trusted Advisor. Always use the same step-by-step approach. Please email us at: McKinsey Insights - Get our latest thinking on your iPhone, iPad, or Android device. 2 The best go one step further and reframe the reference point for success. Nevertheless, CEOs sometimes feel as though they’re immune to bias (after all, they might ask, hasn’t good judgment gotten them where they are?). The CEO is the ultimate decision maker when it comes to setting a company’s vision (where do we want to be in five, ten, or 15 years?). Chris Bradley, Martin Hirt, and Sven Smit, Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick: People, Probabilities, and Big Moves to Beat the Odds, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2018. With that in mind, they prepare a crisis-response playbook that sets out leadership roles, war-room configuration, resilience tests, action plans, and communications approaches. The most successful CEOs quickly establish an office (often including one or two highly skilled executive assistants and a chief of staff) that makes their priorities explicit and helps them spend their scarce time doing work that only CEOs can do. A career within our Operations Practice offers the opportunity to work with the biggest companies in the world, on projects that transform their core business and build resilience for the future. We also offer a self-assessment guide to help CEOs (and CEO watchers, such as boards of directors) determine how closely they adhere to the mindsets and practices that are closely associated with superior CEO performance. This is not only grounding for the CEO, but also motivating for all involved. Most transformations fail. Teamwork: Show resolve. 9. Such biases contribute to many common performance shortfalls, such as the significant cost overruns that affect 90 percent of capital projects. McKinsey’s longtime leader, Marvin Bower, considered the CEO’s job so specialized that he felt executives could prepare for the post only by holding it. 11. 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