Mindset of the CEO

What do you think of when you think of a CEO?  Do certain famous names come to mind?  Jack Welch? Meg Whitman?  Richard Branson? Lou Gestner, Sam Palmisano or Ginny Rometty?  Steve Jobs?  Henry Ford?  Warren Buffet?  I'm not going to try to detail out what these people have in common.  I'll just let those images sink in, and ask you to think which, if any of them seem to be perfect role models for the leader of a business.

However different CEOs may be in personality, education and experience, I think we can agree that the great ones stay in our minds as the face of their companies.  They carry the image, the brand, and the story of their organizations.  They set the tone for the culture, and what it means to be a member of their teams.  For any business to experience a healthy future, and rise to its potential, there needs to be someone with the mindset of a leader to stand up and take the lead.

There are many ways to develop into that leader.  It's not our purpose here to catalog all the aspects, and all the sources of help in that quest.  But here are a few points to consider.

It is difficult under any circumstances to bear the responsibility for the vision-setting and decision-making that provide guidance to your business.  This becomes overwhelming if, at the same time, you are mired in the day-to-day firefighting and details.  Setting and guiding the vision open up the opportunities for the future growth and maturity of your business.  Without the CEO mindset, it is all too easy for you to literally become the bottleneck.  If you can't find the time to get away from the press of current events, then the business tends to stay at its current level, or shrink, or shrivel.

A big part of this is micro-managing everything that needs to be done.  And why would you do that?  You can answer that yourself, but if you're honest with yourself I'm sure that lack of trust is at the heart of the answer.  Can you trust the people who are performing, to do things the way you feel they should be done?  Do they know how to interact with customers?  Do they maintain your standards of quality?  Can you trust all aspects of your business to operate smoothly when you take your eyes away?  If not, this is a health issue of the highest priority.

Maybe this is going a little deep, but I thought it might be worth mentioning a study on the value of a (good) mission statement to the longevity of a business.  Of course I translate longevity into health.  You can access the full paper here, but the key finding for me was the following paragraph:  "Inclusion of customers (r=-.12) or employees (r=-.03) in the mission statement, the two stakeholders most likely be addressed, was not related to longevity. In contrast, specifying the business existed to serve the community/society (r = .15) resulted in a significant relationship with company lifespan. Regarding the strategy variables, none of the relationships were significant. This lends further support to the recommendation that specifying financial objectives such as profit does not enhance the desired benefits of mission statements. Values related to longevity included only: (1) the importance of accountability/stewardship (r = .15), and (2) respect for a company's civic or social responsibility (r = .17). Behaviorally, the only content correlated to lifespan was mention that actions were driven by ethical, equitable, or moral principles (r = .13). Interestingly, the correlational results do collectively support de Geus' "living company" orientation toward stewardship...."

What this makes me think is that the mission statement itself is a bit of evidence of the mindset and behavior of your management team.  The apparent importance of concern for serving the community/society, accountability/stewardship, civic or social responsibility, and ethical, equitable, or moral principles, paints a pretty vivid picture, in my mind, of a management team that is unlikely to engage in a cut-throat race to the bottom, but rather is focused on building relationships that foster ongoing health and wellness throughout the organization and the community.

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