People Leadership: 3 Things for CEOs to Get Right in 2024
CEOs have a lot on their minds – inflation, recession, political conflict, market turbulence, public health, supply chain, competitors – on and on. But to achieve what they must in the coming year, they’ll need to emphasize people leadership and emotional intelligence.
That’s because, in a change from the previous decade, leading people effectively has risen on the list of C-suite concerns. These workforce-centered issues include attracting and retaining a strong talent base and advancing diversity and inclusiveness at all levels of the organization. These matters once rested comfortably near the bottom of CEOs’ worry lists but have now ascended to the top of what keeps CEOs awake at night.
It's not merely that employees expect more; it’s that over the past two years, they’ve put 45 million-plus resignations where their collective mouths are, and those exit numbers are of such proportion that businesses cannot passively accept them.
Two factors complicate how corporate chiefs lead their people. First, the uncertainties of the current socio-economic environment are basically a scrambled Rubik’s Cube; and second, a CEO’s personal evolution in the “transformative people leadership” category is lagging in many C-suites. After all, most corporate chiefs were recruited and hired in an entirely different environment when they were sought after because of a slate of talents and traits that mattered then – but may be quite different from what is needed now.
Three Areas for CEOs to Focus on Now
When it comes to people leadership guided by emotional intelligence, three things are essential for top-level leadership in this moment. (You can click on any of these to skip ahead.)
These three leadership skills are important because the mission of most CEOs in the present era has changed. No longer is the CEO expected to focus exclusively on shepherding their company from Income Point A to Income Point B for the benefit of shareholders. Instead, the job has expanded to include breaking free of traditional constraints, revolutionizing the workplace, and rethinking how workers are viewed and valued.
This is not just an HR issue. It lands on the CEO’s desk because it is an essential strategic component of preparing for the future.
1. Lead Through Uncertainty
I’ve spent the past two years talking with top leaders about navigating through the fog of uncertainty – something virtually all of them have in common. You can see a sliver of this work reflected in my past Forbes articles, such as 3 Mind Traps That Sabotage Leadership In Turbulent Times and Metrics that Matter in Times of Transition.
Understandably, CEOs look for data first when deciding what course to take. But what do they do when they need to act in the absence of data?
First, CEOs need to understand the difference between certainty and clarity. They may wish for the certainty that data provides, but their people need clarity now.
This is why leaders cannot afford to wait for certainty before providing clear direction to their workforce. We learned this lesson from the onset of the pandemic, when confused companies stalled and their workforces sputtered under a cloud of confusion, while companies with decisive leadership offered clarity, purpose, and direction to their workforce that helped them surge ahead.
Certainty is the definite knowledge of established facts.
Clarity is understanding the direction forward.
In times of uncertainty, when facts are unknown and data is unavailable, leaders must rely on their company’s values for clarity, and they must provide leadership to their teams based on those values.
Here’s a simple example of clarity based on values:
“We may not know what the market will do next, but we have always been committed to serving our customers with utmost care. That’s how we built this business, and that’s how we’ll ensure its future. Therefore, we’ll proactively introduce a series of accommodations to ensure our customers stay whole and remain with us. While we might have to tighten our belts in other places, we will take no shortcuts in customer care.”
This example may not sound like rocket science, but there’s no doubt about the intention, and that’s the point. Leaders must not assume that direction is obvious to everyone else even if it seems so to them. When life is full of televised reports and social media posts that claim the sky is falling, up is down, and left is right, those unsettling voices are loudest. So, providing clarity is a fundamental role of people leadership in chaotic or uncertain times; it helps an organization’s workforce have confidence while performing their jobs even if the sands beneath their feet seem to be shifting. It gives them a sound basis for making the thousands of small decisions that are required of them each day.
Tip: If you’d like some insight into how CEOs find the right advice to get clarity for themselves, listen to my five-minute podcast, How to Find Clarity for Big Decisions.
Another way to reinforce clarity is to emphasize and operate in areas you can control. If your business operates in three markets, and one of them remains rock solid, deploy your resources against that known, sure thing and reduce your exposure in the two other volatile markets. Point your people in that known direction, moving them temporarily rather than laying them off if possible (because you’ll need them to help the organization move quickly when those other markets rebound).
To get the most from the areas you control, maintain pivot-ready agility in times of uncertainty. Agility is more than a technology practice; it’s a mindset and a strategy centered on responsiveness in times of rapidly shifting priorities. The past few years have proven that challenges can come swiftly from all directions. In such times, leaders need to imagine themselves in a raft among the rapids, watching the current, and calling instructions to those in the boat who have oars. Values may define the ultimate destination down river, but leaders need to steer around the rocks as the fog clears and makes them visible.
Model this — clarity, values, and calming confidence — for your organization. Teach your people that the compass for navigation is the set of values your company genuinely incorporates into everything it does.
Tip: For more about uncertainty, you might want to read another blog post, “How CEOs Grapple with Uncertainty.”
2. Self Awareness
As I mentioned earlier, a CEO and their current position may have been a great match three years ago, but things have changed, and CEOs have had to change with them. That’s not a one-company problem; the role has expanded in virtually every company across every industry.
Like managing uncertainty, self-awareness in the C-suite relies on strong emotional intelligence at the top. To paraphrase and expand on an article from Chief Executive:
In 2019, a CEO was expected to lead a company and single-mindedly advance the enterprise. In 2024, they’ll be expected to lead an extended community of influence and consequence, maintain stewardship of an ecosystem that extends beyond the corporation, and connect productivity to a purpose larger than profits.
In 2019, a CEO essentially reported to a board that represented shareholders. In 2024, societal pressure will force the CEO to answer to a collective audience of stakeholders and to put their board to work doing the same. Shareholders become one of multiple stakeholders — no longer the only one that matters when reviewing CEO performance.
In 2019, a CEO was the commander of a regimented workforce located in a prestigious office. There, the CEO resolutely upheld long-standing, rigid company traditions. But in 2024, the CEO will have to revolutionize work and reinvent the workplace – creating an organization that conducts personalized relationships with its employees, and broad flexibility about when and where they work, how diverse they are, how included they become, and what new kind of company culture they form. Leaders will have to re-engineer how they connect, communicate, and collaborate with each other. And CEOs will need to recalculate what impact the company has on the lives of its employees and their families, as well as reconsider the organization’s impact on their various communities. This means the CEO will have to surrender the reigns on some things, like absolutes about where the organization’s people will perform their jobs and some elements of what values define company culture.
In 2019, a CEO could essentially delegate people leadership to institutionalized HR. In 2024, a CEO is expected to radically transform the HR relationship with employees, moving from a one-size-fits-all orientation to personalized employment and career planning with added focus on the individual’s needs (shifting away from the idea that rules that don’t bend somehow create fairness). Like everything else that’s now on CEOs’ plates, this transformation in HR is a cultural shift of enormous dimension.
It is an era where CEOs are expected to bring at least as much emotional intelligence as intellectual ability to the job, and to encourage their leadership team and army of managers to do the same.
That is why it’s an essential moment for CEOs to assess their own strengths and weaknesses and retrain themselves for these new assignments that are so different from their original role.
Obviously, a global shift is too much for any one person to tackle alone, so in addition to self-assessment, CEOs must identifying the aptitudes and strengths of others on the executive team. When considering the results of that evaluation, CEOs must not be afraid to shift responsibilities or reconfigure the leadership team based on personal skills and talents that go beyond technical specializations. In the end, the executive team must lean toward the new rather than the old way of doing things. So, CEOs will have to create spots for new executives or specialists to fill in any gaps in the new orientation of the leadership team. It doesn’t pay to hesitate about this in times when global and societal changes are coming fast.
“Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.”
— John Kennedy
In the end, self-awareness is what lets CEOs assemble the most well-rounded, diverse, capable group they can find, including categories that may previously have seemed uncomfortable at the executive level. CEOs need those fresh eyes and fresh perspectives more than ever before, and should feel encouraged by the 3,000-or-so organizations that are showing more profit after having incorporated greater diversity in their ranks.
That’s because the workplaces we knew from 2019 and earlier are rapidly becoming obsolete. Remembering those days doesn’t provide the insight and innovation that companies and their CEOs require now. Society has moved past that model. That means leaders clinging to a “let’s return to that time” mentality are letting the pull of nostalgia keep their focus on the rear view mirror instead of the open road ahead.
So again, self-awareness is the tool by which CEOs can adjust to meet this challenge. It means top leaders must be voracious readers and constant learners, always looking for more perspective on the evolving workplace. For instance, if servant-style leadership is what an organization needs to reach the next level of its growth, and the current CEO was brought in as a gifted autocrat, then that CEO needs to be surrounded by colleagues with those opposite skills – and learn to adopt those skills within their own repertoire of leadership skills.
Whatever their circumstances, CEOs must use rigorous self-evaluation and set aside a percentage of time for learning and growth, recognizing that upskilling isn’t a concept reserved for front-line workers. Leaders who don't take this step are asking their team and their company to play with a penalty, and will probably shorten their careers in the process.
3. Workforce Value Proposition
When it comes to “how to manage our workforce,” CEOs seem divided into two camps. The first are those who want to re-establish the foundations of the business according to a traditional concept of employment. The second are those who understand the concept of employment is undergoing evolutionary, permanent change and are making room for a new construct.
What puzzles the first group is why large numbers of employees are rejecting the well-ordered regimentation of the old ways. Indeed, millions of Baby Boomers retired unexpectedly early, leaving a shortage of experienced hands in the labor market.
What worries the second group is that colleges have priced out millions of younger Americans who might otherwise seek the degrees required to replace those retiring specialists, managers and executives. That means to stay competitive, employers may have to become educators.
This squeeze from both ends gives Millennials more bargaining clout, and broadly, they’re telling employers they’re not interested in the social contract Corporate America struck with Boomers. They want a different deal on their own terms. So, although a “take it or leave it” negotiation style may have worked for decades with Boomers (who took it), Millennials are figuratively yawning in the face of that manipulation and choosing to ignore it.
Tip: If you have Millennials working for you under “Boomer” terms, they’re likely to feel disengaged from the company and practicing “quiet quitting.” For more on this, see my post, “Workforce Issues Worry CEOs Most.”
“PWC’s US chairman Tim Ryan says three-day or five-day mandates for workers to be in the office are out of touch with a permanent shift in the balance of power between labor and management.”
— CNBC
This new orientation isn’t strictly generational, because research has shown that even Boomers, who are traditionalists, have grown weary of corporate regimentation, lack of a greater purpose, and the commoditization of workers that was prevalent just prior to the pandemic. And that’s why, although early retirement may have surprised many of their employers, millions of workplace-weary Boomers spontaneously realized it was time to throw in the towel and retreat to a more rewarding private life, even if it meant living on a lower income.
Meanwhile, the pandemic taught Millennials that life is short. Many lost relatives and friends to COVID; others found that being home with family every day brought deeper levels of satisfaction and pleasure than commuting to the office. Those who worked from home found their productivity and job enjoyment rose as they completed work autonomously without the noise, interruption, stress, or direct supervision that comes with corporate office life.
They were happier sitting in comfortable chairs and looking at monitors of their own choosing while working near a window they could open for fresh air. They liked sleeping in until ten minutes before the start of their shift, eating lunch at home, and having the freedom to walk the dog or pick up the kids from school on their afternoon break.
Companies were surprised to learn how important working for home was for single people, as previous data hadn’t sufficiently illuminated how many were caring for ailing relatives, struggling with childcare, or running small kitchen-table side businesses in the evenings to supplement their income or satisfy their need to be creative. And for some employees, the work-from-home opportunity presented by the pandemic meant the chance to satisfy personal desires that being in the office had prevented, such as adopting a pet, moving to a smaller, more affordable town, or having a baby.
Collectively these high-impact benefits quickly overtook amenities corporations had cobbled together. Even the simplest pleasures of working from home — like wearing casual clothes and having your cat nearby — had far more value to employees than hanging out in the downtown office and using the communal rec room despite its snack wall, ping-pong table, and half-dozen bean-bag chairs.
The CEOs who lean toward a new cultural bargain at work are more in tune with this movement than those who demand that knowledge workers be physically present in the corporate office. While CEOs are rightly concerned about what might happen to company culture if employees are in a thousand different locations, they are probably wrong to assume that the culture their company had in the past decade is a culture that can sustain it in the upcoming decade and beyond. And the reason for this is quite simple. The society around corporations is no longer the same. The American culture has shifted, and its expectations have changed – in some areas, dramatically.
"To be truly successful, companies need to have a corporate mission that is bigger than making a profit."
— Marc Benhoff, founder and CEO, Salesforce
An excellent example of this is the social unrest around racism in America and Millennials’ demands that corporations become more diverse and inclusive at all levels. Another is growing environmental alarm, for which Millennials want corporations to accept responsibility and take substantial and immediate action. These values are firmly held — and Millennials are willing to walk away from companies that make well-paying job offers but don’t support these values.
Tip: What Millennials want matters because in just over two years, they will make up 75% of the global workforce. More importantly for American corporations, Millennials are the core of who will keep companies competitive, and China has five times more of them than the US.
So, collectively, employees are looking for a workplace value proposition that allows for personalized choices in work logistics, corporate commitment to a purpose larger than profits, and a distinctly human factor in organizing work. Although everyone understands that some jobs legitimately cannot function in a work-from-home construct, in such cases, Millennials are looking for other accommodations and flexibility to offset that, such as support for further education, relief from student loan debt, or help with childcare. Of course, CEOs must balance these benefits with company goals and corporate financial health. But in the minds of employees, a company’s profits and the size of its shareholders’ returns can no longer be seen as more important than the wellbeing of its employees or its responsibility to the society it occupies.
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