A CEO's Guide to Driving Exceptional Results
Elite performance is often defined as the act of excelling at one’s job or generating monetary success. This is a half-truth.
A company’s future depends on an unending pursuit of what’s next and the ability to reinvent how you get there. There is a clear distinction between a leader who is good at their job and one who exemplifies and inspires elite performance.
Creating high-growth organizations begins with the adoption of an executive lens that moves toward leveraging the unpredictable rather than defending against it. By proactively embedding change and practicing a forward-thinking mindset, CEOs can build and fuel an ecosystem that outperforms the competition and accelerates value creation even in the most disruptive scenarios.
Below, you’ll find a checklist of characteristics we’ve compiled over 20+ years of developing and advising CEOs who are performing at the top of their game. How close are you to becoming an elite CEO? Or are you already there?
Clear Vision and Strategy
- They are crystal clear in their executive identity and integrate processes that drive innovation and inspire the vision across the company.
- The majority of their time is spent driving alignment to the vision, inspiring talent, and empowering executives to lead the business forward as an enterprise team.
- They implement a focused roadmap, rigorously track progress, and refine strategies as they go.
Executive Cadence
- They redefine their role and organizational engagement at regular intervals, keeping their focus on the future.
- They continuously clarify strengths and weaknesses to understand what they do best and when to outsource expertise from people around them.
- They focus on delivering the resources and processes to ease the organization's day-to-day business activities and accelerate performance.
- They schedule blocks of time to plan future initiatives, inspire their organization, encourage innovation, and contribute to industry thought leadership.
- They make a habit of reflecting on the previous week and preparing to achieve maximum impact in the week ahead.
Enterprise-Focused Executive Team
- They ensure day-to-day operations are inspired by their leadership, not dependent on it for making critical decisions.
- They surround themselves with talented people who can collectively execute today’s growth and support the next phase of the business.
- They are keenly focused on delivering the activities that only the CEO can deliver and trust other important challenges to the hands of their executives and high potentials.
- The talent development of their executive team is a cornerstone of their focus. They firmly believe in the correlation between business growth and executive team evolution.
- They encourage their executive team to take ownership as enterprise-level leaders first, and team leaders second, resourcing and solving enterprise challenges as a collaborative unit.
- They resource themselves with coaches and advisors who can help build an enterprise-first culture and embed the tools to bring it to life.
Personal Conditioning
- They view their performance preparedness, daily rituals, and time management as elite athletes do in preparing for competition.
- They set aside time to rest, reflect, repair, and dream.
- They have a regimen to keep themselves steady, de-stressed, healthy, and mindful.
- They embrace activities that keep them thinking, feeling, playing, and learning.
Relationships Beyond Work
- They deeply invest in personal relationships that provide a reprieve from the demands of executive leadership.
- They have open and connected relationships at home, allowing them to remove their armor and secure a sanctuary for reflection, engagement, and joy.
Data Consciousness
- They develop a data-empowered approach across the business with real-time dashboards highlighting key indicators that determine success and challenge.
- They become students of employee engagement and customer satisfaction metrics, as research shows these two items are linked and affect the bottom line.
Elite CEO performance is about the mindsets, processes, focus, and innovative approaches that will spur lasting change and drive value creation.
It entails moving away from a static leadership paradigm into a dynamic CEO growth paradigm, where you respond today to the changing landscapes of tomorrow.
Transcend wants to accelerate your CEO story. We use nine foundational competencies as cornerstones of executive coaching, focusing on both the relational and tactical areas of elite performance to cover every characteristic on the checklist above. If you left any boxes unchecked, we have you covered, turning opportunities into strengths that will transform your approach to work and life while accelerating growth in the company you lead.
Connect with us to begin building your next evolution.
