Last week I ranted a bit about how CEOs shouldn’t listen to the “time-wasting” bad rap that meetings have, but instead should make their meetings powerful, where they leverage the collective wisdom and experience of their top teams. This week I’m enumerating specific techniques to make meetings produce real results.
I came across this article last week in the Wall Street Journal titled, “Where’s the Boss? Trapped in a Meeting” that made it sound like CEOs weren’t productive and spent large amounts of time in meetings, at lunches and traveling, with as little as six hours per week working solo.
After five years as a top-level consultant, here are my top five questions for a CEO. But the path to answering “yes” to all five questions can be a long and winding one.
Nobody wants to start a fight. Yet in many cases “playing nice” is uncalled for and may indeed hurt your business. Ask yourself these twelve questions before you cross the line.
Chaos at the top of an organization is a recipe for disaster. Learn about the three types of unpredictable leader, underlying causes for the behavior, four paths toward resolution and methods of coping if it’s your boss who’s unpredictable.
High maintenance employees sap all the energy from team and upper management. Here are some examples of the breed and suggestions for resolution of the problem.
Loyalty to your employees is admirable, particularly when they’ve served the company well. But what happens when their performance slips? Do you have the toughness to put company loyalty first?
What could ever be wrong with a strong, growing top line? What would be wrong with running a lean company? The answer: Too much work to do and not enough people or resources to execute it well.
There are many ways that organizations can stumble when functional areas aren’t synchronized. Here are some of the problems that may arise and five strategies for mitigation.
Debates are necessary tools, but ultimately decisions must be made. Debates without decisions send your team round and round in circles. Here are the three most common manifestations of this distraction and four strategies for mitigation.
Robert Sher is founding principal of CEO to CEO, a consulting firm of former chief executives that improves the leadership infrastructure of midsized companies seeking to accelerate their performance. He was chief executive of Bentley Publishing Group from 1984 to 2006 and steered the firm to become a leading player in its industry (decorative art publishing).