CEO Mindset: Driving Innovation and Organizational Change

How to Maintain a Winning CEO Mindset After Many Years as a CEO 

Complacency is a long-serving CEO’s worst enemy. After serving a couple of years as a CEO and having your share of successes, it’s easy to believe you have all the answers and rely on what has been working so far.  Additionally, since the current initiatives came from you, you can become emotionally attached to them and be unwilling to drive change with the same vigor as when you first became CEO. 

In a world where technology is ever-changing, economic crises are common, and competition is tough, complacency can easily kill any business. Thankfully, there are a few proven best practices that can help keep your performance high throughout your tenure as CEO. 

Be Intentional About Continuous Learning and Having the Right Perspective

Few things are as critical to a CEO’s mindset as objectivity. If a business unit is doing poorly and will drag the entire firm down with it, you need to be objective enough to see this early and intervene appropriately. If an employee was right for the role two years ago but is not the best suited in light of the firm’s new strategic direction, you need to be objective and make the necessary adjustments. 

When you’re multiple years into a CEO role, many barriers to objectivity emerge. For example, your employees know what you want and are likely to always tell you what they know you want to hear. It gets to a point where you have to really work hard to get an accurate picture of what’s going on. But you must. Whether it’s taking time to meet lower-level managers (who don’t normally report to you) in candid meetings or making it known that you don’t shoot the messenger when the message is bad, you must be intentional about learning what is going on in your business and in the industry. 

In addition to having sufficient visibility into your business and industry, it’s important to look at things in different ways. Taking the perspective of a professional CEO consultant can help spot things you might have missed and significantly improve the quality of your decisions. Get Started with one of Journey’s top-tier consultants today.

Know Where You Are on the S-Curve and Take the Collaborative Approach to Crafting New Strategy

The S-curve is a model that captures the lifecycle of any strategy. Once the strategy is decided on and begins executing, it will take some time for the initiatives to bear fruit. At some point, the cumulative effect of the implemented initiatives will result in visible and rapid gains. 

Afterwards, it gets to a point where the potential gains of the strategy have largely been realized and the strategy has lived out its usefulness. Once an organization has gone through one S-curve and reaped the benefits, it’s imperative that the CEO identifies this and puts in the work to get the organization to the next S-curve. If not, the organization’s growth will plateau and performance will begin plummeting sooner or later. 

Realizing the organization needs another game-changing strategy is only one part of the equation. The other part involves crafting the next strategy. Here, it can be tempting to determine what needs to be done and dictate it to the organization. 

However, a much more fruitful approach is involving the organization in defining the strategy. People support what they help create and you’ll have a much easier time executing and a higher probability of success with a collaborative strategy. 

Risk-Proof Your Organization 

In today’s business world, a crisis that drastically changes your firm’s fortunes can come from anywhere. It could be an ethical issue, a cyber attack, a market-wide downturn, or a feisty startup. 

It’s not a question of whether you’ll face a crisis, it’s a matter of when you’ll face it and how it will impact your company. 

The best way to manage risk is to prepare for it. When you’re prepared for the storm, it becomes easier to survive it and maybe find a way to take advantage and thrive. 

Hire a risk management consultant and create dedicated meetings to discuss potential risks. Establish a forum for how to analyze and mitigate risk.

The Best CEO Mindset to Drive Innovation 

There is a proven correlation between innovation and profitability. Some of the most innovative companies in the world are also the most profitable. Prioritizing innovation is an important part of a winning CEO mindset. 

Maximizing visibility into a business and its industry is crucial to identifying gaps and opportunities that lead to profitable innovation. Spending some time with frontline workers or interacting with consumers can result in valuable insights and CEOs should build a culture of capitalizing on such learning opportunities. 

Additionally, adopting a stranger’s perspective can be useful. While analyzing their businesses, CEOs should assume it’s their first day on the job and see whether there are things they would do differently. It helps lessen the impact of assumptions and biases and improve the objectivity of the CEO’s perspective, which can illuminate opportunities for innovation. 

Here are a few additional tips that can help CEOs drive innovation in the companies they lead: 

• Build a culture of innovation. Ensure the ecosystem in your organization supports innovation. You can do this by building psychologically-safe teams where divergent opinions are accepted or by setting up mechanisms that foster healthy risk-taking. 
• Give your team more autonomy. Giving your team the leeway to experiment and take risks encourages them to be more proactive in seeking out new ways of doing things, which improves innovation. 
• Encourage cross-functional collaboration. Build a culture of collaboration among different departments. Interaction among people with diverse skill sets and perspectives can help spark innovation. 

The Best CEO Mindset to Successfully Drive Organizational Change 

The world is always changing and successful businesses go through intentional phases of change. 

Whether you’re responding to the advent of game-changing technology or you want to implement the S-curve that will fuel the next phase of your company’s growth, knowing how to manage change well is imperative for any CEO. 

Below are a few practical tips that can help tremendously when driving organizational change. 

Foster Conviction and Buy-In for the Change Across the Organization 

For change to successfully take root, the people in your organization must first understand why they need to change. If you’re championing a culture of design thinking and customer-centricity, its benefits must be clear and the whole organization must see why this new direction is necessary. 

If only the C-suite understands the necessity of the desired direction, you’ll likely run into roadblocks during implementation. 

One of the best ways to foster organization-wide conviction and buy-in for change is to involve the whole organization in determining new directions. It may take additional time and effort, but you’ll get good returns on your investment. 

Be Intentional About Role-Modeling to Promote the Change

People are more likely to do what they see their leaders and peers doing than they are to do what they are told. 

For starters, the CEO and other leaders in the organization should lead the charge in implementing the new behavior. 

Additionally, it’s helpful to activate an influencer network — a group of influential people (other than leaders) across the organization who can model and champion the new behavior. 

Empower People to Act in Accordance With the Desired Change

If you’re championing an organization-wide move to leverage artificial intelligence (AI), and half your employees aren’t sufficiently capable of using AI, your initiative is likely to fail. 

While driving any organizational change, it’s imperative to determine the capabilities needed to achieve the change and ensure your people can do what is required of them. 

Ensure the Environment Appropriately Reinforces the Change

Organizational change really takes root when any relevant structures, processes and systems in the organization support the change. 

For example, if you want employees at your call center to take feedback from the customers they deal with, including a field for customer insights in every call report would go a long way in reinforcing the new behavior. 

Similarly, you could hold regular sessions to discuss interesting insights uncovered during calls. 

If the environment doesn’t support it, the new change will die. 

Keep Score

It’s important to define metrics that will help you track the adoption of the new behavior and its impact on business success. This helps judge the success of initiatives and course-correct if necessary. 

Additionally, tracking performance can keep the team engaged and motivated in the change process, helping increase the chances of success. 

Get top-tier CEO consulting from Journey to benefit from unconventional strategy design, precise planning, and exceptional execution to ensure your business is primed for growth. 

‍

Learn more about Business Growth Consulting.