Goodbye rock star CEO. Hello friend, philosopher, guide.

16 Sep Goodbye rock star CEO. Hello friend, philosopher, guide.

“Leaders who attract followers . . . need to be needed. Leaders who develop leaders . . . want to be succeeded”

~ John C. Maxwell, The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership

Once upon a time, CEOs were judged by how happy they kept the board of directors, how appeased the shareholders appeared and how pristine the company’s reputation looked. Their go-to staple was the traditional command-and-control regimen, which seemed to produce results. But it lasted only for a while. It did create many followers but certainly not leaders. Organizations may have made the numbers, but slowly lost the people who made it happen.

With business and society becoming more interconnected and complex, the list of people groups CEOs now manage encompass employees, customers, suppliers, governments and activists. Each one comes with their own set of expectations. To succeed, the C-suite is called to look beyond the companies they steward, to shape the ecosystems in which they operate. Ecosystems don’t manage themselves. In fact, if left unsupervised they tend to go haywire.

CEO job descriptions in the new normal, are largely guided by the demands of their ecosystems.

Surrounding themselves with, and constantly developing off-the-C-suite teams, is a leader’s number one task. Simply because, an organization’s growth potential is directly related to its people potential.

Organizations don’t increase productivity. People within them do. Technology by itself doesn’t resolve issues. People who manage it do. Systems alone don’t streamline processes. People who creatively follow them do. In the end, it always comes back to people; who grow, develop and become more effective players in raising organizations to level next. Successful leaders have realized that acquiring, mentoring and nurturing good people is key to great leadership.

Within a short span of time, those we call millennials will take over the C-suite. The kind of leaders they will turn out to be will largely depend upon what they’re mentored to be. The tech and next gen manufacturing industries already feature a crop of millennial CEOs and members of the C-suite. In more established industries, they are typically two or three jobs away from the C-suite itself.

So where are these pre-C-suite leaders whom everybody’s looking for?

There’s a crop of on-the-grow leaders who have all the right credentials. They were educated at premium institutions, are armed with work experience from Indian and multinationals and are more globally integrated than their predecessors. The new language of business they speak, is generic to their idiom. Most importantly, they’re highly goal-driven, bubbling with ideas, and impatient to take their organizations to level next. All it takes is knowing where to look.

It takes a leader to know a leader, grow a leader and show a leader.

After nearly a decade of leadership in the C-suite search space, we have endeavored to extend our services to off-the-C-suite leadership search. Welcome to PepperTree People Solutions. A division of TATE LC.