Priorities vs. Time
How to relieve the pressure on people at the top? By rethinking those jobs—and, perhaps, adding strategic staff support.
By Dan Ciampa
Dan Ciampa is an adviser to senior leaders and boards of directors during CEO transitions. His last two books are Right From the Start (with Michael Watkins) and Taking Advice: How Leaders Get Good Counsel and Use It Wisely. His most recent article was “No Sense of Urgency,” the April 2009 Web-exclusive feature.
It’s hardly news that every top job is more complex and challenging than ever before, or that senior executives today face extra-ordinary—and growing—pressures from both outside and inside the organization. You’re reminded every time you scan The Wall Street Journal, every time your Outlook calendar reminds you of an upcoming meeting, every time your BlackBerry buzzes.
The challenges press in from every direction: strategic, tactical, and operational. Globalization has led to complicated supply chains that are easily disrupted as they crisscross unstable borders and depend on suppliers in different cultures half a world away. Achieving promised cost savings depends on making tcbr sure everyone at each organizational level performs well. Federal regulations are in flux; those in foreign markets are often as opaque as they are contradictory. And increasingly, regulators and institutional investors are holding top executives personally accountable for their companies’ actions and developments.
Internally, technology has made it easier for the leader to communicate with employees, but the new transparency has compromised confidentiality and left decisions and processes open to questions and challenges from the mailroom on up the ladder. And unlike generations of predecessors, today’s CEO is expected to be as adept at managing the organization culture as she is at managing the P&L.
Operationally, things aren’t any easier. Traditionally, being the low-cost producer came at the expense of product quality. Or if top-line growth was the objective, a culture stressing involvement and collaboration had to wait. But today, boards demand that executive teams deliver high returns while also producing top-quartile revenue growth, low costs, and fruitful innovation programs—and nurturing the next generation of leaders.
In short, the pressure on people at the top is intense and unrelenting. They are leading during a time of no tradeoffs, no patience, and little if any margin for error. In instituting new strategies, requiring fundamental alterations to the way work is done, CEOs are forced to operate at an accelerated pace even while facing difficult decisions that demand careful deliberation, such as diverting capital from known activities to new ones that are unproven, changing the organization’s structure, and replacing people who have been loyal but are unsuited to the new strategy.
For almost anyone occupying a corner office today, it is common to wonder whether his organization will have the capacity and resilience to meet the challenges and demands he recognizes from his position at the top—and whether he himself will have the prescience to anticipate unforeseen problems, the experience to choose between uncertain paths, or the time to do all that is required. As one CEO put it, “I came up through Finance. I’m a good linear thinker, trained to be a world-class checkers player, and I’m proud of that. But for this transformation we’ve started here, I’ve got to be good at something a lot more complex—and it’s not just chess but three-dimensional chess.”
Meeting the promises of an annual operating plan requires leaders to constantly compensate for ever-changing demands of issues both within and outside of their control; the goalposts are always moving. The good people respond by setting out to sharpen the decision-making, analysis, and communication capacity of the office of the CEO. They also ensure adequate coordination to and within their senior management teams. But for the leader who in addition must implement companywide change efforts to ensure that the organization is prepared to meet the demands of the future, more is needed. No surprise, then, that many executives facing this dual challenge follow a schedule not aligned with their most important leadership priorities. They find themselves unprepared for meetings, surprised by developments that should have been anticipated, forced to make decisions based on mountains of undigested data—and struggling to find time to make it all happen.
Now, no strategy will add hours to the workweek or the ability to work 24/7, and you can’t just offload half
your key decisions to someone else. But the chances of success improve greatly with some rethinking of use of time and priorities—and, perhaps, some particularly strategic staff support.
When It’s All Too Much
In week-to-week work, the tide of responsibility rises steadily but slowly, and you may face problems ahead without even realizing it. But in two situations in particular, the pressure is particularly acute: first, when a new leader is promoted or hired to the top spot for the first time and has inherited a new strategy that calls for change; second, when a veteran leader who has run a successful organization for some time decides that it must change in order to continue to thrive. Consider the experiences of two executives with whom I’ve worked recently.
The New Leader
John had spent his career in a large corporation known for its disciplined decision-making and shrewd strategic moves. Its information and commercialization systems had been forged through the trials of crises from which the company had learned. As a result, John’s generation of managers had thrived in an environment where decisions depended on the quality of data and where people were expected to be prepared for meetings, which always started and ended on time.
Like those of many of the company’s most talented managers, John’s name was on lists of most of the large search firms. When one call was too good to pass up, he became CEO of a smaller competitor. Still in his 40s, he had the chance to run his own show in a company with exciting new products in development.
But John was soon frustrated by two problems that became clear to him only after he’d started. The first was the capacity to deliver all the strategy promised. While the company’s growth potential was as promising as it had been portrayed and the basic outline of the strategy that John had heard described in the interview process was sound, he discovered gaps that had to be filled. Overly optimistic funding formulas had to be rethought to ensure that there was enough capital to pay for what was necessary to grow. Also, the strategy depended on cooperation and information-sharing with suppliers at a level that did not exist.
John was confident he could address these challenges—if only he had enough time. That’s where the second problem came in.
He found himself constantly annoyed by a general lack of discipline: reports poorly written, people regularly late for meetings, and decisions not carried out because of inadequate follow-up after they had been made. Also, the information that came to him was often incomplete or too late for him to take action. As a result, John spent much of his time seeking clarification and reconstructing background rather than choosing among options that his managers had thought through.
At the start of each week, he prepared a list of priorities, but by Friday he had spent little time on any of them. He said he felt like “the COO, the CFO, and occasionally the VP of operations instead of the CEO. I’m just not spending enough time on the big issues, the things that will shape our future. That’s why I came here, but I just never seem to get to them.”
Even worse than being unprepared to deal with these two problems was that they came as a surprise to him. Before day one as CEO, John carefully studied the strategy, operating reports, customer data, and R&D plans. But he skipped the processes and culture—the things that determined how the company he was about to lead actually worked. As he put it, “I knew that this company wasn’t like [my old one], and that one reason I was hired was the discipline [I could instill]. But I didn’t realize how bad it was. I thought I came in prepared, but I should have been more careful about it and asked more questions.”
It hadn’t occurred to John that his new company might lack the decision-making infrastructure, teamwork, and managerial discipline that he took for granted. He understood only after he’d been on the job for a while that behavior and attitudes had to change for the strategy to reach its potential and for him to succeed personally. Finding the capital and shaping supplier partnerships for the new strategy was complicated enough, but now he realized that, in addition, the culture had to change.
