CEOs and COOs: Find a quick way to balance the operational zoom lenses

In August 2022, we performed a series of qualitative interviews with 30 leaders from selected parts of the internal value chain to understand the challenges that effect the customer experience (CX).

The value chain is the collection of an organisation’s strategic and supportive activities that generate customer value (margin). A value chain study allows us to assess where true value is created and where improvements should be made. A company can gain competitive advantage by performing these activities more effectively than its competitors.

For the CEO/COO interviews, we spoke to those from small to medium sized companies of 5 to 500+ employees. Industries included Technology, Energy, Financial Services, Recruitment, Education, Biotechnology, Transportation, Healthcare, Legal, Professional Services and FMCG.

What does a CEO/COO do?

The CEO or COO manages a company’s overall operations which includes delegating and directing agendas, driving vision and profitability, managing company organizational structure, strategy, and communicating with the board. They must be the all-seeing eye on the entire operation and be able to switch from zoomed in to zoomed out views.

What are the general changes for a CEO role?

During Covid there was a need for CEOs to run stable operations, but CEO recruitment firm Egon Zehnder ran a survey across 972 global CEOs and nearly 80% said they needed to transform themselves as well as their organizations and be more adaptive and self-aware. Trust and transparency have become vital to business success where they promote the company’s purpose, impact, and credentials to be considered as an employer of choice (particularly in the talent crises). That requires more influence-building, team building, people-related skills, not to mention the courage to initiate change on weak signals. At the corporate level, boards are creating a higher demand for traits such as agility, resilience and political judgment with the high performers being highly creative and courageous.

The 3 key current challenges in this group:

1. Scaling up

In the start-up stages (operations less than 50 employees) struggle to “reduce cash burn, maintain operations and deliver customer value”. As the organisation scales up, operational challenges rear up due to a lack of process and systems. In the later business maturity stage leaders struggle to shift from start-up to enterprise-thinking as they start to lose site of the ground-level operational details. Across all company sizes – Talent acquisition and retention are recurring issues, and many CEOs have to double-hat whilst they find that resource. Maintaining that all seeing eye whilst scaling up is easier if CEOs have a good team around them, however they would be able to increase their operational visibility/stability and scale up faster with a temporary experienced solution to plug these gaps and provide independent counsel that helps them decide what the long-term team will look like.

2. Siloes and disenfranchised teams

As the business grows, this leadership group find that siloes start to form and departmental self-interest takes priority creating a disconnect to the central business. On the other hand, some leaders felt that siloes can be healthy, in some instances, as they are good for team focus and belonging. Operational leaders rely on their functional senior leaders to keep their individual teams connected (aligned) to the central hub, but there is also a critical need to create autonomy and empower their senior leaders for approvals and problem solving. Strategies and processes change, but this group recognise that they must get leadership team buy-in/alignment and any changes MUST be fully embedded (and last!). “Activities are pointless unless they last”. To maintain an operational view, CEOs need to strike a balance between leadership and autonomy of their senior leadership team which requires trust and alignment between both parties – This can be complex in historical relationships and an independent expert will have the credibility and neutrality to see both sides, break down barriers and facilitate an appropriate meeting point that’s right for the organisation.

3. Disconnect with the organisation

In the early business stage, this group are hands-on, but they must step back as the business grows, which makes it more difficult to maintain a full view of the business as they found comms barriers and slower feedback/corrections become more frequent. They feel they have less understanding of the smaller internal issues and external market factors. As the company grows, it can be hard for them to project their personality to all teams and it’s critical that they set the culture as “the organisation learns from its leader”. They set up the balance between Strategy and Execution and often struggle to get their exec teams to switch from a short term to a long-term vision. CEOs need to have their finger on the pulse of both the internal and external market to set the right vision for the organisation and align the teams. They need to, intermittently, conduct external insights, regular internal reviews, and brainstorming sessions to identify opportunities or challenges and generate senior leadership team engagement to produce a vision that’s appropriate, relevant and has organisational buy-in.

The trouble is (1) CEOs might receive a skewed internal insight from leaders and (2) There is no capacity to perform this research – They could benefit from additional support to ensure they don’t disrupt internal operations and generate an unbiased point of view.

Summary

The CEO has the privileged position to maintain the exclusive view of the entire business during scaling up and align senior leadership teams. They set the vision, creates stable operations and are the driving force for growth. To run this ship well, the CEO would do well to perform regular internal reviews and external research on competitors and a market discovery to identify NPD opportunities and understand how they can create a strong competitive and brand positioning.

Alternate Opportunities

But respondents declared that this work would be easier to overcome with an external research expert that would ….

• Provide unbiased insights and recommendations based on what’s best for the organisation.
• Act as an ally for growth and simplify their budget, talent and market decision making with recommendations that are backed by insights.
• Provide counsel for the CEO.
• Have the experience and skills to challenge the status quo, bring a fresh perspective and ask the stakeholders the tough questions that knock down rules, behaviours, and barriers to align the organisation’s vision.

If you need some help overcoming some of these challenges, drop us a line or read more about our services here.