Staying ahead: How the best CEOs continually improve performance
It’s during this middle stretch of your CEO tenure that the concentration and energy you applied to your objectives during your first years on the job are most likely to dissipate and fragment. Intellectually, the danger of such complacency is a simple concept to grasp. No one wants to be the prize fighter who wins the title belt, goes soft, and unceremoniously loses it to a hungrier up-and-comer or to be the band whose single goes platinum, only to become known as a one-hit wonder down the road. We’ve never met a CEO who told us, “Yep, I’m becoming complacent.” But we’ve met plenty who suddenly recognize that complacency has set in when they see a proverbial tortoise ahead of them.
Like everything about the CEO role, the dynamics at play are as much about the institution as they are about you. When traditional competition is fading in the rearview mirror and emerging competitors are gathering their forces, it becomes increasingly difficult to define what winning looks like. Meanwhile, that license you had early on to shake things up has long expired, and your employees have become comfortable working in the new ways you introduced. Unless you’re again the prime mover of change, the organization will become complacent.
So how do CEOs avoid complacency and sustain high performance through the middle years of the role? We don’t pretend to have a magic formula, but from our continued research and experience in the field of CEO excellence, we’re confident the odds are greatly increased by the following:
- enhancing your learning agenda
- taking an outsider’s perspective
- collaboratively defining the next S-curve
- future-proofing the organization
