Novo pen is a pen that I use and I use it a couple of times a day. It has more value for me than all the other pens that I have around me. I pleasantly surprised to read that Lars Sorensen, the CEO of Novo Nordisk, was voted the best performing CEO by Harvard Business Review for the year 2015. That was good to read and to know that Lars Sorensen, among the myriad number of CEOs all across the world and in different companies, had been picked as #1.
But as I looked at that, and thought about CEOs and the roles that they play in organizations, I wanted to do a little bit of research and see the extent of CEOs' impact on companies. It's interesting that the impact that CEOs have on companies ranges from 2% to 22% depending on the industry. This was research that was done and recorded by Todd Warner in Harvard Business Review. It seems like just 10 or 15 years ago, competencies that CEOs had were very important in determining the kind of jobs that they were given and the kind of impact that they had on their companies.
In fact, Carole Matthews in an article that was written in 2001 says, "Among 18 different competencies that were used to assess CEOs, the 5 most critical were:
· The ability to build teamwork where the management team and different functional areas were able to work in concert with each other.
· The ability to think strategically – how you were able to take an organization from here to there.
· The ability to communicate – going further than just talking about the company's core values and vision, but really talking about aligning people and making sure that there's communication throughout the organization.
· The ability to motivate others – the ability to create interpersonal awareness and identify what peoples' wants and needs are.
· The ability to develop others – to be not only a mentor but to be able to optimize people, being willing to bring people along and to grow them with the business.
These were measuring yardsticks that were used in picking up CEOs to find out whether they had these competencies, and whether those competencies could be used to leverage a company towards doing well and making profits.
But today, more than that, researchers are saying that competency by themselves are not 'stand alones'. Those competencies must somehow permeate the culture and the social context of the organization that CEOs are a part of, without which there is very little chance of the CEO making some kind of impact. In other words, the woof and the warp of the organizational fabric must be key, in terms of those competencies. The CEO's competencies must somehow address both, the vertical and the horizontal levels, to be able to bring high impact. Sometimes, we only think in terms of verticals. And yet, the social fabric really has to do with the horizontal stripes that go across. Very much like HR would go across all verticals. But culture is important. Unless you understand the culture of the organization, or the social context of the organization, all the skills that you can bring with you are held in abstraction. They don't necessarily permeate and bring about change.
I was thinking about that. You have competencies on one hand, and then you have routines on the other. What are the things that you do? Where do you spend your time? Routines are something that is so important. "Our best leaders," says Todd Warner, "were defined by the execution of a collection of very discrete day-to-day routines, such as how they planned for meetings, what their focus was on, what kind of social events they attended, how good they were on one-on-one meetings, team meetings, meetings with clients, personal habits, what was planned and what was emergent, who do you collaborate with, when do you execute, how do you listen to, etc, etc." The routines that you use are important because your competencies get floored out through those routines, and then must permeate social context.
Competence and routine come together with, and through relational skills. Then, both of those come together to fit like a wonderful missing piece in a jigsaw, in terms of social context. That's how the fabric of a company gets strong and how CEOs are able to leverage their competencies to further the expectations of the company.
I still love Indra Nooyi's comments (she is Chairman and CEO for PepsiCo for a while now) when somebody asked her, "In all the while that you have been leading, what are the key things that you have understood in terms of leadership?" She was quick to say, "For me, five C's stand out:
· Competency
· Communication
· Confidence
· Consistency
· Compass
If you look at those five C's. You will see that competency is the vertical stripes in a company, vertical blinds one could say. Communication has to go horizontally across so that it forms the woof of the organization while the verticals will form the warp. Confidence takes both, the vertical and the horizontal. Consistency includes the stakeholders who will know that this is consistent. Finally the compass, which allows you to have longevity, the integrity that is involved in the company and makes for the fabric to be strong.
Talking about confidence, Peter Tremayne said, "Pride in office without confidence is as much a sin as competence without confidence." You've got to have confidence in what you do, as well. When you take what she says, and put it into what we've just looked at in terms of how do CEOs do well in a particular organization, we see that they may have good competencies, but those competencies in abstraction are of no use. They need to be implemented through the various routines that they have in their lives. And for that, you need to be able to look at your own life and see what your routines are. Are your competencies getting played out through them? For that, you need to develop relational skills. Then put those two together and allow it to permeate the very culture and the social context of the organization.
When you think about it, it's a difficult concept – to think about all that and wonder how you could do that. It calls for wisdom that is way beyond some of the things that I have studied or read or thought about. I am always glad when I come to a point like that, when I realize that in and of myself and the resources that I have, I can still fall short of what is expected of me. But for me, that is just a comma. I would like for you to think like that too. The comma tells me that I can go on. How do I go on? I rely on the wisdom that the Almighty God can bring to my situation.
Proverbs, which comes out of our Scriptures, says, "In everything you do, put God first, and He will direct you and crown your efforts with success." Ultimately, that's what we want, that our efforts in all that we do, are successful. Let's put God first and allow His wisdom to flow into all that we do, so that we can be leaders who are doing great and wonderful things in the companies that we are a part of.
May I pray with you? Almighty God, give to us wisdom this morning, wisdom to know how to use our competencies, how to look at our routines and change it if necessary, how to understand it in the fabric and the social context and the culture of our organizations, and how to be effective efficient leaders. Give us that wisdom and discernment, Almighty God, for we pray this in Jesus' precious name. Amen.
• Todd Warner, "What Separates High-Performing Leaders from Average Ones," https://hbr.org/2015/11/what-separates-high-performing-leaders-from-average-ones
• Walter Frick, "Are Successful CEO's Just Lucky?" https://hbr.org/2015/11/are-successful-ceos-just-lucky
• Carole Matthews, "Core Competencies of a CEO" http://www.inc.com/articles/2001/10/23549.html
• Indra Nooyi, "The 5 C's of Leadership," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0DMaydBOxk
• Scriptural reference, Proverbs 3:6 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=prov+3%3A6&version=TLB
No comments:
Post a Comment