New Research Reveals What CEOs Actually Struggle With

When you think of three words to describe the CEO role, words like “confidence”, “leader”, and “problem solver” often come to mind. However, a recent study conducted by CEO peer advisors involving 402 CEOs from 11 countries, featured in the Harvard Business Review, sheds light on how the world’s leading executives really feel about their current position.

Despite feeling prepared, in a business strategy sense, 68% of CEOs surveyed acknowledged not having the skills they needed to tackle the various interpersonal and professional development challenges they would face.

Here are the top three findings from the study*:

• Company culture. As the leader of the organization, CEOs are responsible for shaping and driving company culture. A task that over 50% of CEOs surveyed said they were inadequately prepared to handle and one that served to be more difficult than they anticipated. Having a positive company culture is key to the productivity among employees at all levels, making it a must-have skill for today’s CEOs.

• Personal growth. With such a high-profile and strategic role, most of the CEOs time and attention is spent creating business strategy, overseeing operations, and tackling other business challenges. So much so that 48% of CEOs in the survey said that making time for themselves to do self-reflection or to take advantage of professional development opportunities was harder than expected. This lead to many CEOs feeling behind in their respective industries and concerned that this lack of knowledge would serve to be detrimental to their ability to craft winning strategies in the future.
• Developing teams. Leveraging synergies throughout their organization and building winning executive teams are key roles for every CEO. However, 47% of even the most experienced and successful CEOs acknowledged that developing their senior leadership teams served to be surprisingly challenging. This could be due to a number of factors, but points to an immediate need for CEO peer advisory groups and CEO professional development programs as a way to fill this emerging interpersonal and leadership skills gap.

This new study brings important attention to the current personal, social, and leadership challenges faced by the 21st-century CEO. In conclusion, today’s CEOs need to have access to quality professional development options more than ever before. And, with two out of every three business leaders not feeling prepared to assume the CEO position, leveraging proven training opportunities and CEO peer networks now will quickly become mission-critical to their future success.

*Source: https://hbr.org/2018/07/survey-68-of-ceos-admit-they-werent-prepared-for-the-job