What’s Keeping CEOs Up at Night?

When it comes to the major worries of CEOs, in a post-pandemic business landscape, words like “profitability”, “competitiveness”, and “innovation” often come to mind. However, CEO peer group consultants have found that CEOs are worrying more about a different set of categories.

According to a recent PriceWaterhouse Cooper survey, 28% of CEOs surveyed now feel more threatened by misinformation than ever before, with another 67% focused on how to overcome the constant threat of cyberattacks.

In addition, here are the top three other more pressing concerns from the survey:

• Company culture that meets growth goals. As the leader of the organization, CEOs are responsible for shaping and driving company culture. With over 76% of CEOs believing that the US will enter a huge economic upswing over the next 5 years, many feel unprepared to manage the rapid need in hiring. Couple that with concerns about how to build a supporting and retention-focused company culture, and many CEOs are left wondering if they can recruit, hire, and train the right staff to help them reach their new levels of growth.

• Navigating new (and unpredictable) risks. 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. This leaves little time for CEOs to perform market research and create sustainable succession plans, should the inevitable occur. Coming off of the global pandemic that exposed a lot of business structures to collapse, CEOs will need to find time to focus both on implementing current business strategies as well as anticipating new ones should they need to pivot unexpectedly.

• Knowing how to develop the right 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 now acknowledge 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 survey brings important attention to the current personal, social, global, and leadership challenges faced by the 21st-century CEO. Though the global crisis served to exacerbate and, in some cases, introduce new challenges, it’s important for CEOs to continue to find creative ways to innovate within their companies so they can close the gap on many of these solvable challenges.

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