I recently led a webinar strategy and innovation CEO Magazine and over 300 CEOs. Throughout the program, I used poll questions to evaluate their perceptions of three strategy topics and hope to share the results with you.
Question 1: How often do you and your team meet to update your strategy?
The vast majority of CEOs (83.6%) said they meet 0-4 times a year to update their strategy, and nearly half (42.3%) only once or not. Research clearly shows that the number one driver of revenue growth is resource reallocation throughout the year, from underperforming plans to successful plans. If leaders meet from time to time to make these types of decisions, the reallocation of resources that are critical to success won’t happen. I have worked with dozens of companies to implement strategic adjustment meetings to provide their leadership team with a concise and comprehensive forum to review goals, goals, strategies, strategies and metrics. How often does your leadership team meet separately from budget, operations and strategies to discuss strategies?
Question 2: What is the best strategy for your company?
The first challenge cited by the CEO is that “reactive and tactical” is 33.9%. The CEO has great value to managers who don’t react like bumper cars for all their actions. Instead of taking action on every new factor, strategy managers are more likely to say, “Let’s stop and think.” Simple phrases like this trigger people to avoid reactive behavior and consider their choices before acting.
The second strategy identified by the CEO is “discipline to spend time”, accounting for 22.6%. As the speed of the business increases, it is difficult to jump off the activity and pedal the mill and spend a great time thinking about the business. Based on my experience as a strategic consultant for senior leaders, I found that it won’t happen unless the leader is willing to think about both group and individual thinking time on the calendar. The average CEO only spends about 11% of his time thinking about the business. The cultural trap is that if CEOs and other senior leaders don’t invest their time thinking, then no one else will.
The third strategic challenge is “lack of consistency with the strategy” at 18.3%. In companies of all sizes, silos are established to curb the flow of communication and insights at various functional groups and levels. One of the main roles of today’s leaders is to bring people together regularly, discuss business issues and understand how they support each other. A key element of this task is to be aware of others’ priorities and share your priorities to find common ground in strategic consistency.
Question 3: What is the proportion of your company’s managers in strategic thinking?
As many as 81.4% of CEOs show that less than half of managers are excellent in strategic thinking. When you think the number one reason for business failure is bad strategy, having a vast majority of managers without strategy can make your company obsolete. The CEO said their first strategic challenge was “reactive and tactical”, and it was no accident that so many people who reported to them were not strategic thinkers at the time. At strategic thinking workshops around the world, I saw managers improve their strategic thinking skills by over 30% by learning the basics of strategy and how to apply it to their daily work.
The CEO realizes that strategy is a key component of the company’s long-term success. But, as these results suggest, not all CEOs are committed to a disciplined approach, from annual dog and pee displays to daily activities, behaviors and habits. These are CEOs who will insert the word “for” in front of the title as soon as possible instead of late.
