Qualities of a CEO – Acquire the right skills Now!
Master the Qualities of a CEO – Enhance Your Skills Today
In order to excel as a CEO, it is crucial to acquire the right skills. The qualities of a successful CEO encompass strong leadership, strategic thinking, effective communication, and adaptability. By honing these skills, aspiring CEOs can pave their path towards success and drive their organizations to new heights. Start developing these essential qualities today to become a formidable CEO.
Qualities of a CEO – Acquire the right skills Now!
Read on and “You” can be the “Next CEO” like:
Google’s Sundar Pichai, Microsoft Bill Gates, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, YouTube’s Susan Wojcicki, PepsiCo’s Indra Nooyi, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Larry Page, Netflix’s Reed Hastings, WordPress’s Matthew Charles Mullenweg, Amazon’s Andy Jassy, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella…
Senior Manager Must Have Skills, You need these Qualities to be a CEO!
Acquire them Now! Hone Your Skills!
Everyone dreams and desires to garner, cultivate and nourish the key qualities, skills, and traits that make a successful senior professional. A CEO role is the dream of all aspiring managers. In this write-up, I draw upon my past experiences as a senior manager, recruiting senior managers, and my association with a prestigious Indian university.
The qualities (In bold below) are based on “Employability Research conducted in India and Abroad” which is open to debate and I have partly agreed and disagreed. Friends, please note that the views expressed are my personal ones. I have also drawn some insightful thoughts from Gallup’s Global Research on CEOs and Senior Manager Qualities that I passionately treasure hunted for in my recruiting career.
2. Sensitivity to society, environment, ethics, and human values:…
“As a leader, it is important not to just see your own success. But focus on the success of others” # Sundar Pichai, CEO, of Google
“As a leader, it is important not to just see your own success. But focus on the success of others”Without this one, the human values and sensitivity, there is no difference between my laptop and you. Have you ever experienced calling someone and ending up feeling as if you have landed in subzero Antarctica?
Yes!!!!!! Yes!!!!! I am referring to the remoteness and coldness that afflict the corporate world.
It is sometimes misread as professionalism and sometimes practiced by some senior managers to instill fear, but this is a universal fallacy. Professionalism as I read it is the art to do things the better way every time in business.
So, it does mean that you make the other person feel worse even in a telecon but rather, it should energize you. The supreme truth is that you cannot lead without the others in your team or understanding the other individuals and offering some empathy if not sympathy all the way to the top.
You might be called “Chainsaw Jack” as one CEO was called for his ruthlessness. Not a title I aspire for.
I laugh when people join a charity or give alms when they I know are cold to their junior or colleague’s personal problems afflicting work and genuine failure to deliver work as it harms his or her targets. So much so for professionalism.
The goal here is to become a “Fully Functional (Humane) Manager” as it pays rich dividends in life and not only in one’s career.
No wonder, a “Gallup” global research voted “A Caring Boss” to the top of the charts as a quality that juniors prefer the most in a Boss.
3. General Management Capabilities:
“If you don’t understand the details of your business, You are going to fail” #Jeff Bezos, Founder, of Amazon
“If you don’t understand the details of your business, You are going to fail”Across domains, sectors, and industries, one fundamental prerequisite for all senior and middle-level openings is the capability to understand business in its entirety.
You may not be able to balance a balance sheet in a year, but you should be able to read PAT and PBT. Better still if you know how to increase your PAT without incurring any more bludgeoning overheads.
You need to know how the various little bit and parts join to form a live and dynamic business.
You are not a dead end but a part of the entirety. Cultivate an active interest in what the others are doing as you already know what to do with your function and that is why you have been anchored to a job in that function and not the next higher role.
The trick is to outgrow one’s responsibilities fast and enlarge them to the next higher plane. Grow your general management abilities fast and try to know the details.
4. Specialization & con-temporariness – Acquire advanced domain competency:
“The more successful you are, the more you need to learn and grow. Your commitment to learning has to be continuous and unrelenting” #John Donahue, CEO, Nike, eBay
“The more successful you are, the more you need to learn and grow. Some professionals are so engrossed with what they know, and that complacency sets in in terms of contemporariness updating.
For instance, an engineer can be perfect in the execution of a 20,000 crores power project but when you ask him about the financials or business development pros and cons, you will draw an entire blank. One was not even able to tell me even by gut feeling how much one MW will cost (Solar -roughly 4 crores rupees, Thermal- 7 to 8 crores rupees, etc.) on that particular day.
You need to keep abreast with the recent development in your specialties’ also. General and technical skills are required for every senior profile. To deliver the right combination, you need to understand how these two types of competencies fit into your organization’s competency architecture.
Here I am referring to technical competencies. Technical competencies describe the knowledge, skills, and or abilities required to fulfill job tasks, duties, and responsibilities. Technology-related skills are essential for many senior positions. Therefore, developing technical competence is crucial for you.
Always be a lifelong learner without fail and keep acquiring advanced domain competencies, anticipate and develop technical skills every day.
5. Industry-linked, and ready for first-month first-quarter productivity post- joining: Your Delivery in Time!…
“Always Deliver More than Expected” # Larry Page, Co-founder of Google
“Always Deliver More than Expected” For the experienced, the normal yardstick is that of relevant experience. No organization in the private sector would like to incur a ramp-up cost for any new senior recruit. None will wait for months for you to start delivering. So, your relevant experience is the most relevant in most placements.
Initially, your cultural fit with the organization’s value system, ethos, philosophy, and beliefs will be assessed. Second, you will be evaluated based on your understanding of the sector-industry domain, your professional skills, and your leadership skills. These are vital factors. Furthermore, you will be evaluated according to how much you will contribute in the immediate near future.
If you aspire for a senior role, you need to impress your employer or prospective employer on all of the above criteria.
Plus, be ready to deliver from the first month, the first quarter, culminating in a wonderful yearly performance.
If you have been performing well in your current role, you need to convince prospective employers that you can also excel in a senior role. But do not create expectations as over-expectation and under-delivery will harm you in the future.
In the junior and middle level, shifting gears and changing functions, domains, and industry is a huge task unless the recruiter is in love with you. All the recruitment is like a transplant of one heart with another considering business is live and dynamic. In this case, you have to be industry-linked, and ready for first-day first-hour productivity post-joining the role…
If you’ve been job searching as a fresher in a domain, you always face a chicken and egg situation: no experience, no job, and no job means there will be no experience.
Personally, I differ on this as I believe that a person from another domain expands the total knowledge of an organization and at times can be exponentially productive as he or she might give up the downtrodden path that we hung on to sacredly like the holy grail.
In the first place, we need to welcome freshers as they bring in new energy. Plus, one of the key advantages is they can be easily retained for a while and bring new drive and enthusiasm into a business function.
6. International exposure & Global perspective: Qualities of a CEO
Cross-culture exposure always enhances your insight into the economy, business, markets, and consumers. This is valued as you have worked in a place where you become an outsider.
Yet, you must unravel the finer mechanics of sociological, economic and political systems of that society at the micro and macro level; then, design and deliver, make your business profitable. It is quite a challenge as the language, culture, and socio-economic make-up that we know in India is wiped off the slate clean.
Now, when you understand others, you increasingly understand one better.
Similarly, if you are exposed to a foreign market then you can understand the home economy and market much better as you now have a benchmark to compare. Even consumer insights that you were aware of earlier will become more meaningful.
A stint abroad is necessary for all aspirers of senior roles. And to be a global CEO, you need exposure to continents…
7. Strong analysis & application orientation:
There are three steps of learning – knowing, understanding, and then, the capability to apply and practice what you know and understand…
For example, you might know that brand positioning is important, then you can understand “How to position a brand?“, and finally you execute a brand positioning in New York, Amsterdam, Nairobi, or Mumbai. The last is the most important.
Let me give you another example, you know forgiveness is good; then you understand that by the act of forgiving another, you release yourself of the vengeance and pain, the ultimate skill is to really forgive someone.
So, the application of knowledge is the key to business success and that is a harmonic catalyst that resides only in the best of the best professionals across the globe.
8. Strategic Decision Making at the Right Time: Research Driven?… Qualities of a CEO
“All of my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, guts… not analysis” emphasizes Jeff Bezos, Founder, of Amazon
“All of my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, guts… not analysis”Please do not read this as academic research. An academic Ph.D. can help you teach, not train nor for that matter run a business or a business function. Here, research represents the desire and initiative to supplement one’s knowledge with facts, and figures; using them analytically helps in the decision-making process effectively and efficiently.
But it is not good for any business to conduct one-year research to land in a new market, and that is the limit of idiosyncrasy. The next step is insanity and not a competitive business.
Remarkably interesting research was conducted on who attains the CEO position among 1) Research Oriented Managers with strong academic backgrounds, 2) Average Managers with average academic achievements, and 3) Mediocre Managers.
Among these, the Research Wala never made it to the top. The mediocre also failed to score. Surprisingly, the average always came out on top based on his ability to decide using limited information.
“Move fast and Break Things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough” opines Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, of Facebook
“Move fast and Break Things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough”Research-oriented categories take much longer to make decisions because they require a great deal more information. It is unavoidable for the mediocre to make the wrong decision or to make no decision at all. An average person would gather all the information fast and then decide based on the limited information he had.
The skill I am referring to is decision-making time taken by you given a set of limited information and time-limit.
9. Entrepreneur’s mindset of innovation and risk-taking: Qualities of a CEO
I doubt this in India though but may be true in the West. Indian business once into take-off mode abhors risk. Try a domain or an industry move. You will only probably get a job in a year, so much so for the risk-taking and entrepreneurial mindset of Indian Business.
But, as an employee, you can be innovative like an entrepreneur but with too much risk-taking I doubt if allowed. You might end up being shown the door at times. Trust me, I have first-hand experience.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Alok Baruah is a Senior Level experienced Marketing Communications- Human Resources- Academic Professional with wide, rich, and diverse experiences in Management, Entrepreneurship & Academics as CEO, Account Director, Director -Planning, and Professor. Blogging is his passion and first love. Currently, he owns Campion A1.
ABOUT CAMPION A1:
- To fill Online Admission form : Click here for Form
- To read our Google Reviews: Click Here for Reviews
1. Superior communication, personality and professional life skills:.
“You cannot over-invest in written and oral communication skills” 
# Indra Nooyi, CEO, PepsiCo
Most of us invariably believe we are OK in communication skills. Some of us are so ego-maniacally proud of our abilities to communicate. Then there are those who consider themselves the number one expert in communication. All these are myopias fatal in action in terms of your career.
My dear friend, please get out of that illusion fast and you will see the ground reality. Because someone is always one up on you.
Spoken words are read before they are spoken, and also between, beyond, and inside words.
My past work demands interaction with senior professionals thru the mail, in person, or via telecon. But do I need to tell you that their communication by mail or telecon reminds me of school children scrawling on the walls at home or talking to a goon sometimes? I normally laugh and treat these goons respectfully with the word “Sir” laced into a sentence two times religiously.
It is a shocker at times to realize that the other person is so selfishly thoughtless in his communication.
You need to fine-tune your communication all the time or it will fall flat like the MW stations in India. Communication is the key to a career that really takes off but do not please hallucinate that it represents a person who speaks all the time. Beware of such a person and keep off. It will harm your career more than your laziness.
The variants of English I hear are something like this in India – Bengali English, Punjabi English, A Bihari English, Tamilian English (Kalculation), Keralite English (English in Malayalee…ha…reminds me of my school teachers in Don Bosco), An Assamese Englis (with a missing sh), etc…
In the international arena, it is much more varied, prime British accent -the arrogant public-school Wala, casual and cool howdy-American types, the serious German accent… you name it, you can have it. My first-hand experience with international accents made me interested in judging a person’s nationality based on their accent.
The target is to hone it to a nicety and minimize accent and make it “premium business class”. This one is a challenge like dropping one’s surname.
2. Sensitivity to society, environment, ethics, and human values:…
“As a leader, it is important not to just see your own success. But focus on the success of others” # Sundar Pichai, CEO, of Google
Without this one, the human values and sensitivity, there is no difference between my laptop and you. Have you ever experienced calling someone and ending up feeling as if you have landed in subzero Antarctica?
Yes!!!!!! Yes!!!!! I am referring to the remoteness and coldness that afflict the corporate world.
It is sometimes misread as professionalism and sometimes practiced by some senior managers to instill fear, but this is a universal fallacy. Professionalism as I read it is the art to do things the better way every time in business.
So, it does mean that you make the other person feel worse even in a telecon but rather, it should energize you. The supreme truth is that you cannot lead without the others in your team or understanding the other individuals and offering some empathy if not sympathy all the way to the top.
You might be called “Chainsaw Jack” as one CEO was called for his ruthlessness. Not a title I aspire for.
I laugh when people join a charity or give alms when they I know are cold to their junior or colleague’s personal problems afflicting work and genuine failure to deliver work as it harms his or her targets. So much so for professionalism.
The goal here is to become a “Fully Functional (Humane) Manager” as it pays rich dividends in life and not only in one’s career.
No wonder, a “Gallup” global research voted “A Caring Boss” to the top of the charts as a quality that juniors prefer the most in a Boss.
3. General Management Capabilities:
“If you don’t understand the details of your business, You are going to fail” #Jeff Bezos, Founder, of Amazon
Across domains, sectors, and industries, one fundamental prerequisite for all senior and middle-level openings is the capability to understand business in its entirety.
You may not be able to balance a balance sheet in a year, but you should be able to read PAT and PBT. Better still if you know how to increase your PAT without incurring any more bludgeoning overheads.
You need to know how the various little bit and parts join to form a live and dynamic business.
You are not a dead end but a part of the entirety. Cultivate an active interest in what the others are doing as you already know what to do with your function and that is why you have been anchored to a job in that function and not the next higher role.
The trick is to outgrow one’s responsibilities fast and enlarge them to the next higher plane. Grow your general management abilities fast and try to know the details.
4. Specialization & con-temporariness – Acquire advanced domain competency:
“The more successful you are, the more you need to learn and grow. Your commitment to learning has to be continuous and unrelenting” #John Donahue, CEO, Nike, eBay
Some professionals are so engrossed with what they know, and that complacency sets in in terms of contemporariness updating.
For instance, an engineer can be perfect in the execution of a 20,000 crores power project but when you ask him about the financials or business development pros and cons, you will draw an entire blank. One was not even able to tell me even by gut feeling how much one MW will cost (Solar -roughly 4 crores rupees, Thermal- 7 to 8 crores rupees, etc.) on that particular day.
You need to keep abreast with the recent development in your specialties’ also. General and technical skills are required for every senior profile. To deliver the right combination, you need to understand how these two types of competencies fit into your organization’s competency architecture.
Here I am referring to technical competencies. Technical competencies describe the knowledge, skills, and or abilities required to fulfill job tasks, duties, and responsibilities. Technology-related skills are essential for many senior positions. Therefore, developing technical competence is crucial for you.
Always be a lifelong learner without fail and keep acquiring advanced domain competencies, anticipate and develop technical skills every day.
5. Industry-linked, and ready for first-month first-quarter productivity post- joining: Your Delivery in Time!…
“Always Deliver More than Expected” # Larry Page, Co-founder of Google
For the experienced, the normal yardstick is that of relevant experience. No organization in the private sector would like to incur a ramp-up cost for any new senior recruit. None will wait for months for you to start delivering. So, your relevant experience is the most relevant in most placements.
Initially, your cultural fit with the organization’s value system, ethos, philosophy, and beliefs will be assessed. Second, you will be evaluated based on your understanding of the sector-industry domain, your professional skills, and your leadership skills. These are vital factors. Furthermore, you will be evaluated according to how much you will contribute in the immediate near future.
If you aspire for a senior role, you need to impress your employer or prospective employer on all of the above criteria.
Plus, be ready to deliver from the first month, the first quarter, culminating in a wonderful yearly performance.
If you have been performing well in your current role, you need to convince prospective employers that you can also excel in a senior role. But do not create expectations as over-expectation and under-delivery will harm you in the future.
In the junior and middle level, shifting gears and changing functions, domains, and industry is a huge task unless the recruiter is in love with you. All the recruitment is like a transplant of one heart with another considering business is live and dynamic. In this case, you have to be industry-linked, and ready for first-day first-hour productivity post-joining the role…
If you’ve been job searching as a fresher in a domain, you always face a chicken and egg situation: no experience, no job, and no job means there will be no experience.
Personally, I differ on this as I believe that a person from another domain expands the total knowledge of an organization and at times can be exponentially productive as he or she might give up the downtrodden path that we hung on to sacredly like the holy grail.
In the first place, we need to welcome freshers as they bring in new energy. Plus, one of the key advantages is they can be easily retained for a while and bring new drive and enthusiasm into a business function.
6. International exposure & Global perspective: Qualities of a CEO
Cross-culture exposure always enhances your insight into the economy, business, markets, and consumers. This is valued as you have worked in a place where you become an outsider.
Yet, you must unravel the finer mechanics of sociological, economic and political systems of that society at the micro and macro level; then, design and deliver, make your business profitable. It is quite a challenge as the language, culture, and socio-economic make-up that we know in India is wiped off the slate clean.
Now, when you understand others, you increasingly understand one better.
Similarly, if you are exposed to a foreign market then you can understand the home economy and market much better as you now have a benchmark to compare. Even consumer insights that you were aware of earlier will become more meaningful.
A stint abroad is necessary for all aspirers of senior roles. And to be a global CEO, you need exposure to continents…
7. Strong analysis & application orientation:
There are three steps of learning – knowing, understanding, and then, the capability to apply and practice what you know and understand…
For example, you might know that brand positioning is important, then you can understand “How to position a brand?“, and finally you execute a brand positioning in New York, Amsterdam, Nairobi, or Mumbai. The last is the most important.
Let me give you another example, you know forgiveness is good; then you understand that by the act of forgiving another, you release yourself of the vengeance and pain, the ultimate skill is to really forgive someone.
So, the application of knowledge is the key to business success and that is a harmonic catalyst that resides only in the best of the best professionals across the globe.
8. Strategic Decision Making at the Right Time: Research Driven?… Qualities of a CEO
“All of my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, guts… not analysis” emphasizes Jeff Bezos, Founder, of Amazon
Please do not read this as academic research. An academic Ph.D. can help you teach, not train nor for that matter run a business or a business function. Here, research represents the desire and initiative to supplement one’s knowledge with facts, and figures; using them analytically helps in the decision-making process effectively and efficiently.
But it is not good for any business to conduct one-year research to land in a new market, and that is the limit of idiosyncrasy. The next step is insanity and not a competitive business.
Remarkably interesting research was conducted on who attains the CEO position among 1) Research Oriented Managers with strong academic backgrounds, 2) Average Managers with average academic achievements, and 3) Mediocre Managers.
Among these, the Research Wala never made it to the top. The mediocre also failed to score. Surprisingly, the average always came out on top based on his ability to decide using limited information.
“Move fast and Break Things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough” opines Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, of Facebook
Research-oriented categories take much longer to make decisions because they require a great deal more information. It is unavoidable for the mediocre to make the wrong decision or to make no decision at all. An average person would gather all the information fast and then decide based on the limited information he had.
The skill I am referring to is decision-making time taken by you given a set of limited information and time-limit.
9. Entrepreneur’s mindset of innovation and risk-taking: Qualities of a CEO
I doubt this in India though but may be true in the West. Indian business once into take-off mode abhors risk. Try a domain or an industry move. You will only probably get a job in a year, so much so for the risk-taking and entrepreneurial mindset of Indian Business.
But, as an employee, you can be innovative like an entrepreneur but with too much risk-taking I doubt if allowed. You might end up being shown the door at times. Trust me, I have first-hand experience.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Alok Baruah is a Senior Level experienced Marketing Communications- Human Resources- Academic Professional with wide, rich, and diverse experiences in Management, Entrepreneurship & Academics as CEO, Account Director, Director -Planning, and Professor. Blogging is his passion and first love. Currently, he owns Campion A1.
ABOUT CAMPION A1:
- To fill Online Admission form : Click here for Form
- To read our Google Reviews: Click Here for Reviews
