A Client Story of CEO Effectiveness

I worked for several years with the CEO and leadership team of an outsourced IT company here in the prairies.

As has been the case with every company I’ve worked with, the CEO was tentative about his role, and had nothing down on paper.

I guided him through creating his CEO job scorecard. I suggested he develop his job scorecard first so he could more easily work with his leaders’ to create theirs to align with his.

He used the kinds of results and responsibilities I discussed in my last article on the role of an effective CEO.

He identified both lagging financial metrics, as well leading company metrics, appropriate to his company.

I also guided him to complete his job scorecard by adding the company’s values and associated behaviours, as well as the key competencies needed to perform the role.

Over time, he developed his ability to better understand, forecast and track his financials.

He was yearning for a client loyalty metric and was very focused on working with the team to improve client satisfaction.

Employee engagement was also an obvious metric to gauge how well he and his leaders were working with employees.

Managing strategic partnerships and networking to find future leaders, employees and vendors came naturally to him, being that he enjoyed networking.

Developing a competitive strategy was also well aligned with his strengths as somewhat of a visionary.

Disciplined planning and execution was more challenging for him because of his creative, entrepreneurial mind. But he appreciated the importance of it due to his desire for thinking things through and creating stability and predictability for his team.

As well, I was, as usual, facilitating each of his leadership team’s annual and quarterly planning and monthly check-in meetings, so he didn’t have to worry about running the process, just participating and being the leader.

With some guidance on organizational communication and managing the culture, he took these on and improved, despite these not being his strong-suits.

Team development was his biggest challenge, despite being totally bought into the importance of employee engagement and creating a strong culture.

When we started, he and his leadership team preferred the approach of hiring people with little experience for low rates and having them learn by doing the job. But he was regularly disappointed by their mistakes and performance, and the resulting disappointed customers. And he would get frustrated that they didn't seem to care about the customer or good customer service.

Early on, I introduced him and his leadership team to the notion of A-players - employees who perform very well in their roles and who also fit the culture. I also introduced the processes to confidently find and select A-players, pay them more, but need fewer of them.

His operations leader made several attempts to hire A-player technicians. But they often turned out not to be.

It became apparent that his operations leader also struggled with effective training, coaching and holding people accountable.

The CEO had been very laissez faire and too trusting with this B player leader. But he would also jump into problem solving when there were issues with front line staff.

I challenged him to coach this leader up or out. This meant the CEO providing guidance and coaching to the operations leader to better coach their people to improve their performance.

The CEO found this difficult because he didn't feel he was a good coach. So how could he coach his leader to coach better?

But I provided some guidance to him and his leadership team on coaching, and to the CEO one on one.

After the CEO clarified expectations for his operations leader by creating a clear job scorecard, and coaching him for some time, it became clear his operations leader was likely never going to become an A-player in that role.

​The CEO also decided his own personality was not well suited for coaching B-players up. This belief was reinforced by his operations leader being frustrated with his coaching style. The CEO decided he was better to just hire A-player leaders who he didn't have to coach.

Ultimately, after repeatedly challenging his operations leader to improve their performance, they decided to move on.

​I challenged the CEO to use the Top Grading hiring process we recommend, and his now excellent operations leader scorecard, to source a number of qualified candidates and select an A player.

After selecting an operations leader he thought was an A-player, he discovered soon that, while the leader fit the culture well, and had most of the required competencies, they didn’t have the experience or track record of an “out-of-the-box” A-player operations leader. But the CEO was confident they were a solid B player that could grow to A-level performance with some coaching.

To the CEO’s surprise, he was able to coach this new operations leader. They were open and coachable, which made all the difference in the CEO’s ability to coach them up.

In the end, despite finding team development difficult, with some guidance, encouragement and experience, he learned how to make it happen. And his leadership team and company are now better off because of it.

So, if the first step in becoming a more effective CEO is to create a clear job scorecard, how do you that? We’ll discuss that in our next 5 Minute Growth Tip article.

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If you are a prairie CEO who wants to grow a thriving company, team and life more quickly, more easily and with less stress and headache, please contact me here.