I have been lucky enough to work with many CEOs in my career. Most have been super-smart, engaging leaders who care passionately about their organisations’ success. But it seems that being a Chief Executive is never easy. Leading from the top of an organisation brings two significant challenges.
Broad responsibility
First, CEOs face a daunting breadth of responsibility. Every threat from tariff wars to industrial unrest can land on the Chief Executive’s desk—as can every opportunity from deploying AI to giving an inspirational speech at the summer barbecue. CEOs are pulled in every direction and constantly under pressure to resolve dilemmas. Delegating is easier said than done. Others rarely have the enterprise-wide perspective required to make major decisions. Efforts to empower teams are often met with intensified requests for clarity and reassurance.
Systemic disconnection
Second is the persistent risk of becoming slowly but systemically disconnected from operational realities. CEOs are typically separated from front-line action more than anyone else in an organisation. Middle management layers insulate leaders from day-to-day insights. Formal management information comes in carefully filtered and polished reports. Even leaders who work tirelessly to promote psychological safety lament how hesitant subordinates can be to speak up. The gentlest probing of performance problems can be interpreted as blaming. One CEO told me he was, “the least powerful person in the organisation” because he—more than anyone else—lacked accurate knowledge of what was really going on.
Harnessing collective intelligence
As a result of these challenges, many CEOs describe an exhausting and rather lonely existence—flitting between different stakeholders whilst trying to reconcile their diverse demands, usually without complete information or the trust necessary to obtain it. Fundamental strategic misalignments can arise. Being confident that teams are focusing on the ‘right’ strategic levers becomes extremely difficult. Facing such numerous and varied demands, finding enough time to step back and think deeply is almost impossible. But even if it wasn’t, even the smartest CEOs cannot alone create strategies that are viable and executable. They need to overcome the barriers that can disconnect them from front-line teams to ‘get all the brains in the game’.
Good strategy work demands an intense mix of smart data collection, rigorous analysis, free-thinking imagination, social-political skill, rich dialogue and robust experimentation. It demands collective organisational intelligence and orchestrating—without dominating—this effort must rank amongst the very most important tasks a CEO.
Enabling focused strategy & execution
Successful leadership of the strategy process allows leaders to uncover where to focus attention and resources with the intensity required to outperform competitors. This also requires tough choices about what not to do. Such sacrifices are a hallmark of good strategy and significantly enhance its clarity. Explaining painful decisions to terminate some product development efforts upon his return to Apple, Steve Jobs once said, “focusing is about saying no.” The company was able to execute its sharper strategy and the rest is history. Swedish bank Handelsbanken’s branch managers can make rapid credit decisions locally in part because the bank focuses on customers with strong cash flow, saying no to riskier borrowers. Ryanair can turn its aircraft around in 25 minutes partly by saying no to long-haul flights and frills such as meals and hot towels.
That sources of competitive advantage lie in numerous small choices is important. Strategies are incomplete until execution models are fleshed out and not validated until concrete activities are implemented and outcomes observed. Engaging those who understand operational details in the strategy process boosts success and builds strategic agility—that ability to adapt where planning assumptions are wrong or the environment changes materially.
Impactful leadership
Crafting strategy in such a way that executability is considered from the start holds the potential to minimise the two key challenges CEOs confront. Focused and executable strategy makes dilemmas reconcilable. Strategy founded on assumptions drawn from understanding gritty operational reality avoids it remaining a fluffy wish-list.
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