A chief executive officer must have several important qualities to lead their organization effectively. These essential skills include influencing for impact, managing for results, adapting proactively, and delivering reliably. A CEO who excels at influencing impact plans and executes disciplined communications and influencing strategies to get the team on board. He can help the employees see how their work contributes to the company’s vision.
Strong Leadership Skills
Leaders at all levels must be able to inspire employees and stakeholders to work together to accomplish company goals. CEOs, especially, must be able to lead teams and manage diverse business interests. A strong leadership skillset includes communicating engagingly, being decisive, and demonstrating integrity. It also requires the ability to make decisions that benefit the long-term health of a company and not simply the short-term bottom line. Successful CEOs, for instance, Mark Hirschhorn, understand how their mood, body language, and tone affect the impact of their communications. They can stay calm and focused when deciding or dealing with stressful situations. They can anticipate the impact of their decisions and determine how to adjust course as necessary.
Strong Communication Skills
A CEO must be able to convey a vision that is big enough to inspire and broad enough to include the entire company. He must also describe how each employee’s work is tied to the organization’s success. Successful CEOs can influence their employees and stakeholders through coaching, emotional intelligence, and practical communication skills. They also know how to use these tools to build trust and create a culture of collaboration and innovation. A good CEO is detail-oriented and committed to scrutinizing every aspect of the business. This includes identifying mistakes or errors in progress and resolving them before they can impact the bottom line. This is an essential skill because it allows a CEO to maintain the highest level of quality in the company and protect its reputation.
Critical Thinking
A CEO must be able to think critically through problems and make sound judgments in the face of uncertainty. Critical thinking involves analyzing all available facts, evidence, and observations to form a reasoned judgment. It also includes recognizing the limitations of one’s knowledge and perspectives. This critical thinking process may entail a spiral pattern in which the problem is redefined as obstacles arise that prevent it from being solved as initially formulated. For example, a person may notice that arriving at an appointment on time will be impossible due to traffic conditions and reschedule the meeting later. Thinking critically is a learned skill that requires consistent practice and dedication. Standardized tests have been developed to assess critical thinking abilities and dispositions, and educational intervention has been shown to improve them.
Flexibility
A CEO must balance numerous competing demands, from developing long-term strategic plans to dealing with short-term problems. A successful CEO understands that he must prioritize and delegate tasks based on the importance of achieving objectives and the ability of his team to carry out those tasks. A successful CEO also can shift gears when necessary. He does not take failure personally and embraces setbacks as learning opportunities. A CEO with this quality also knows how to manage his time effectively; he establishes a highly skilled office and limits meetings so that he has ample opportunities to focus on strategic initiatives. A highly adaptable CEO is constantly scanning broad information flows for relevant information, often finding relevance in sources that, at first glance, may seem unrelated to his organization. He also strongly advocates for transparency and does not let rumours run wild.
Reliability
The ability to follow through on commitments is one of the most essential qualities of a successful CEO. This quality is crucial because it ensures that a CEO fulfils his expectations and his goals are met. In statistics and psychometrics, reliability refers to how easily a measure produces consistent results. A measure is considered reliable if it yields similar scores on repeated administrations under the same conditions. Internal reliability is a subtype of reliability that measures the consistency within a test. It can be calculated by “splitting into half” all items that probe the same area of knowledge and then correlating the two total “sets.” This method is often used to assess the reliability of questionnaires and psychometric tests.
