An evening with other CEO's
A couple of weeks back, I was invited to a dinner at Statholdergaarden, a one-star Michelin restaurant in Oslo, to meet 12 people who had been a CEO or were in a CEO role today. The host, also a CEO but also an owner of his business, having built his own professional services firm with now 450 employees, had two criteria for the dinner invitation:
We were all former McKinsey colleagues from more or less the same period when we worked together. So in a way, it was also a reunion dinner.
You had to be a CEO or had been a CEO, and for a company with a certain size or having built your own business.
In addition to great food, wine, and service, we shared our reflections. Here were some of them:
You will not get anywhere if you don't have your commitment from your top management team and your whole workforce. As a CEO you can say whatever you want. Doesn't help if you don't have the team around you to support and execute with the right buy-in.
In the first couple of years in the CEO role, especially in large organizations, you inherit a lot from your predecessor. You inherit good stuff and bad stuff. And that will also set the tone on how much you are able to change for the good, or reinforce the first couple of years. If you inherit very good momentum, you will have a much better start, and it´s important to understand and act on this in the early phase as CEO.
Spend enough time with your team, your employees, your customers, and your stakeholders when starting up as a CEO. And this is important even if you are internally recruited. You think you know the business, but it´s different when you are in the CEO role. The others will perceive you differently, and you haven't seen all aspects of the business, and there is still a lot to learn and develop. Make sure you are not caught too much up in the daily calendar too early. Have enough flexibility to spend enough time on your key stakeholders.
Know your strengths and weaknesses and be brutally honest about them to yourself. And get your team in place, based on this honest view. Many CEO's for example have gone the ranks internally because of strong operational skills, or they are great at marketing or sales, but perhaps not great at M&A. So in such a situation, get a strong M&A person on to your team quickly. Or the opposite, you are externally recruited, have strong structural experience, and less industry experience, how do you ensure a strong operational skill set in your team? Compose the right team with different backgrounds, skill sets, and personalities. Each individual recruitment also has to match the team composition.
There were many other fantastic points during this dinner, but unfortunately, I didn't take notes. The wine was too good, and we discussed lots of other stuff as well...
