Here is an excerpt from a conversation featured in McKinsey Quarterly, published by McKinsey & Company. To read the complete article, check out others, learn more about the firm, and sign up for email alerts, please click here.
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Even at its irreducible core, the CEO role is a massive in scope:
Setting direction
Aligning the organization
Leading through leaders
Engaging the board
Connecting with stakeholders
Managing personal effectiveness
All six of these responsibilities need to be managed simultaneously, yet tended to with differing emphasis and adjusted based on a company’s changing internal and external context, say Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, and Vikram Malhotra, McKinsey senior partners and authors of the forthcoming book, CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest (Scribner, March 15, 2022).
That there’s so much to do is as liberating as it is daunting: It means that a CEO needn’t excel in every area and instead should focus being a consummate integrator, orchestrator, and connector across all the areas. That’s based on more than 20 years’ worth of data on 7,800 CEOs from 3,500 public companies across 70 countries and 24 industries.
See what the authors have to say about how the best CEOs maintain balance in this final video of a seven-part series on the #CEOExcellenceBook.
“I’m good at a lot of stuff and perhaps I can do one or two things very well, but I’m not necessarily the best at it all. But that’s not important. For a CEO, what’s important is that you can balance everything together. You’re not supposed to manage just one dimension within the framework.”
