In today’s extraordinarily dynamic business climate, companies face many fast emerging challenges from an ever more complex and interdependent marketplace. The shelf life of successful strategies, brands and products is constantly diminishing, requiring faster, iterative product development cycles. The destabilizing forces of technology and globalization mean that every disruptive business model is a starting point for someone else to develop the next one. All this challenges a business owner’s ability to plot out a course and stick to it.
To manage in today’s business climate, four qualities are particularly essential for a CEO to lead his or her company into the future—especially CEOs of entrepreneurial middle market companies, which our firm Newport Board Group specializes in serving.
4 Business Leadership Traits
1. Know Yourself
In a period of breakneck innovation, a CEO must be ready to explain to their employees, customers, vendors and other stakeholders why the strategy they have been pursuing now has to change-fast—and do so without embarrassment. This calls for leaders who understand the impact of their strengths and limitations, can manage their emotions and biases and have a clear understanding of the impact they have on other people. A solid sense of purpose and intent, humility and a willingness to admit missteps and mistakes and keep moving forward become ever more important.
2. Be Ready to See Multiple Perspectives
An ever changing market environment requires that CEOs make quick decisions to solve often ill-defined, novel and complex problems. To do so, they must be able to evaluate and synthesize multiple, opposing perspectives. Effective leaders do not shrink from seeking out disparate viewpoints that may threaten their basic assumptions. You want your employees to see you as a strategic, agile thinker who is unafraid to subject your ideas to challenge.
3. Be Ready to Act and Explain
Having considered new points of view and reset your strategy, be ready to communicate why what you were doing and saying in the past has to change. Become expert at explaining even complex market shifts in terms that are easy to understand. Find the best way to communicate that your company’s success depends on responding nimbly and leveraging experimentation and innovation.
4. Build Networks and Relationships
A good way to ensure that you see unexpected changes in market direction is to cultivate a base of relationships with customers, vendors and other market watchers. Some of these relationships might take the form of joint ventures, alliances and other forms of collaboration across organizational lines. Others may be less formal, having dinner once a month with a CEO or investor who knows your market space. Your ability to create partnerships and be part of informal expert networks can be a powerful way to gain insight.
By focusing on these traits, CEOs of entrepreneurial companies will be able to summon the presence and clarity to respond to uncertainty and volatility—to motivate and inspire yourself and others to charge ahead through an increasingly complex and fast paced environment.
About the Author
Keith Richards is a Partner with the Newport Board Group, a national professional services firm of strategic advisors, seated Board Directors and Interim C-Level executives. He is a regular commentator on a variety of business radio programs, keynote speaker and blog author. Keith can be reached at keith.richards@newportboardgroup.com and followed on Twitter at @KRLeadership. Contact or learn more about Keith here.
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