Top CEO Challenges

May 30, 2018

By: Gary Cohen

In reviewing recent surveys of top leaders by The Conference Board, Bain, World Economic Forum the six most significant and top challenges CEOs face that need to be addressed by organizations are:

  1. Attracting, Growing and Retaining trustworthy and capable Leadership
  2. Integrating Social Responsibility into the business model.
  3. Setting a culture of adaptability via decentralized decision making
  4. Effectively making and executing the decisions
  5. Ability to execute the strategy with the right talent processes, system, and tools
  6. Alignment of Company Strategy Throughout Organization

The mindset needed to accomplish leading in such challenging times:

  1. Deliberate Action: Create space while moving fast in order to build clearer thinking and deliberate action.
  2. Innovation Verses Trade-offs: Move from knowing to not knowing, become more curious and look for innovation rather than trade-offs
  3. Ask The Unknown: Ask more and deeper questions, look from different perspectives and see how emergent fields can be disruptive.
  4. Clear Vision, Adaptive Objectives: Lead from your vision and adapt your objectives as needed, the environment is constantly changing.
  5. Probe|Sense|Respond: Constantly challenge your assumptions and ideas – don’t go from idea to roll-out, you are operating in the space of unknown, unknown. Create experiments in which it is safe to fail.
  6. Complex Minded: It is not enough nor sufficient to develop your ability to increase your competencies and skills you must develop yours and your teams form of mind to handle the complex.

By: Gary Cohen

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