I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few months helping CEO’s craft their personalised CEO Strategy. 

At the outset of these engagements, there is often a question about why a CEO needs a Strategy at all.

Here are a few reasons that might be valuable to consider:

• Most CEOs that I come across are so focused on the performance of the business that they subjugate their own needs, development, and personal performance for the greater good. This is noble, but not high-performance in nature.

• CEOs generally don’t have a core performance metric that they hold themselves to. There are outcomes – yes – but outcomes are trackers of performance, not drivers of performance. There is a difference.

• There is great self-management value in having a game plan in one place for the sake of clarity, revisiting, and refining. Absent of this, the process that a CEO adheres to is murky which will invariably lead to equally murky outcomes.

• An executive team needs to know what the CEO is doing in order to support their endeavours. My sense is that most CEOs would struggle to accurately articulate their intentions and associated outcomes to their team.

• There are multiple influencers on a CEO’s performance: clarity of intention; growth; self-management; selection of key initiatives; monitoring of cross-organisational dynamics. These components need to be brought together in one place in order to form a comprehensive picture of the CEO’s mandate.

If craft matters to you, the CEO, then having a CEO Strategy is one example of how craft drives performance. A clear, well-considered CEO Strategy speaks to the level of care and passion that a CEO brings to their position. 

Craft is an extremely effective marker of a CEO’s skill set – the presence or absence of craft is easy to notice and a clear indication of the mindset with which you are approaching your work.