To be a Chief Executive Officer of a Company is a challenge that will test anyone. To be able to inspire, motivate and guide an entire organisation requires personal clarity and strength. The journey to this role starts within the individual and their personal achievements. It then shifts gear to their role as a leader, enabling others to be successful and then steps up again to be able to seed purpose into the organisation that they lead. Many aspire, but few will succeed in this journey.

 

Active Knowledge Question:

Why do you want to be the CEO?

 

The Journey 

The journey to be a Chief Executive Officer is one that many aspire to travel as they see this role as the pinnacle of business success. One can follow a path that will better prepare them for this role, but it is a path that starts with building yourself from the inside, as it is who you are as a person that determines your real worth as a CEO.

There are three stages in developing your personal strength, character and capability to be someone able to lead a business to its greatest potential and compound on this asset. In your life, you need to become an achiever, as a leader, you must be able to enable others to be successful, and in business, you need to be able to build your business’s competitive fitness. 

1. In Life – Achieve

The journey towards being a CEO starts with developing a life of success, what I would describe as enduring success. A life in which you continually grow and build from one success to another. A life in which you develop the Achiever Trait, which will become the DNA of who you are and will define you as a person. A person who can get things done.

And this is not just success in your career but success in many areas of your life. Be careful that you don’t think who you are at work is a different person from who you are outside the office, and that two sets of rules apply. There is only one you.

You will begin to recognise that success is the fuel of life but that it does not come through chance; it is earned through hard work. Wisdom, courage and strength are virtues you apply in all your decisions as you discover where your true talents and passions lie and explore and invest in these.

And along this journey, you will discover that:

• Striving for success is an enabler as it draws your best to the surface and allows you to see what you are really capable of achieving.
• Success comes from within. Only you can make yourself a success through your beliefs, thoughts and actions. Success cannot be given to you by others.
• Success is a renewable resource. You can generate it every moment of every day, and it can bring an abundance to your life you never thought possible.

Once you appreciate and understand the true nature of success, you are then ready to step up as a leader and support others to discover success.

2. In Leadership – Enable

Leadership is never about yourself; it is always about everyone else. Many leaders stumble at this point as they see their ‘promotion’ to a position of leadership as being one of authority and greater rewards. So, whilst leadership carries with it authority, that authority only exists so you can fulfil your responsibility. Leadership is all about responsibility. 

This responsibility is evidenced through the trust and engagement you are able to build with all those who work within and with the business. That trust arises from your commitment to making the business the best it can be and to the welfare of those who work for the business and those who use its products and services. 

The core competitiveness of a business lies in the combined talent and effort of all those who work within and with that business. The role of leaders is to enable every single person to contribute and participate to their full potential. And only through this approach will the real competitive potential of the business be realised.

Leaders must understand the physics of leadership and how to set direction consistent with purpose, align people, processes and resources, and be able to motivate and inspire. These are tools that leaders use to enable others.

3. In Business – Compete

Businesses compete around the value they are able to deliver to their customers in fulfilling their needs. Leaders work to make their businesses competitively fit and continuously compound on this fitness. 

As a CEO, your role steps up to being a leader for all other leaders, including the entity known as the business.  

Within every business there is a competitive engine that sets the floor and ceiling to the success of that business, and as an outcome its profits. There are ten prime interdependent elements within the competitive engine, and their degree of alignment and whether they function in their correct character will either lift or lower the floor or ceiling of success.

As a CEO, you will work the competitive engine of your business to optimise its performance and, through such, maximise its profits and capital value, but far more importantly, maximise the value delivered to its customers and everyone working within and with the business.

Your role is now one of allowing, and ensuring, the business can be the best that it can be.

Motive

Many CEO’s get caught in the profit trap. Their Boards, and their management teams, are concerned with short term profit and share price, as they believe this is what their shareholders are principally concerned with. Of course, their personal rewards structures encourage them to follow this path.

But a focus on profit only weakens the competitiveness of a business and ultimately results in lower profits and diminished capital value. 

Some CEO’s decline to follow this profit-first motive and place the customers first, which is the same as placing the business first. They believe that businesses are made to compete, and therefore their focus becomes one of bringing the full competitive potential of the business to the forefront, and applied every day.

At this point, one realises the importance of motive, not just your motive but the motive you establish for your leadership team and your business. The right motive magnifies and compounds competitive strength. And the wrong motive disperses and neutralises competitive strength. Short-term profit, a motive of profit first, is the wrong motive.

The right motive is to compete, compete against yourself, do better every day, and continually improve; as an achiever, a leader, and any business in which you are a CEO.

Success As A CEO

What is the measure of success of a CEO? Some would say profit, and others share value. Some might say the impact they have on the community they serve through the customer value delivered and the employment opportunities. 

There is, I believe, a symbiotic relationship between a business and the community which it serves. If the business invests in meeting the needs of the community, the community, in turn, will invest in sustaining and growing that business through their active employment and by being customers.

A CEO should focus on building a great business. And if they do this well, then enduring profits and a growing capital value will be the outcome along with many other benefits.

A great business is not reflected by its size but rather its enduring and compounding performance whereby it outcompetes everyone else and sets new standards that they all chase.

Its ability to compete is what depicts it as a great business. It is a business that has won respect throughout the community.

What are some of the external signs that a business has learnt how to compete and is on track to be a great business, it/has:

• Delivers greater customer value every day;
• Continually finds opportunities for growth and innovation;
• Leaders are thriving in and being fulfilled through their role in the business;
• Employees are passionate about and challenged through their work.
• Customers just love them;
• Is growing and compounding its capital value;
• Is throwing off free cash flow;
• Is highly profitable.

Note, the above list is in order from top to bottom. The activities flow in causation from one to the next, with the final financial outcomes only occurring because of everything that went before it.

 

The journey to be a CEO of a great business starts within you and starts and finishes with motive. Only the right motive will create within you the traits that will enable you to be an achiever, an enabler and someone who knows what it means to compete in business. And through such, your full and real potential will be realised. Enjoy the journey.