DO CEO's REALLY KNOW WHAT THEIR C-SUITE IS THINKING?

In my more than 36 years of working with executive teams, I used a tool that measured the correlation of how well the various executives at the most senior level, the C-suite, correlated with their CEO on the goals that the CEO had for the organization.

In all those years, I was constantly fascinated by how wide the gap was between the executives and their CEO in the priority of those goals.  In many cases it was as much as 100% from the CEO with some of his or her executives.  To be clear if the CEO had as their highest goal to increase sales by 15%, as an example, and all of the other senior managers in the organization had that as the goal but at lower priorities, then the correlations would not be on target and could be as much as 100% away from the CEO.  I have even seen CEO's with goals like the one I mention and the VP of Sales for the same organization whose main goal was to improve the incentive system for the people in his department.  Now the people doing this correlation use the exact same set of goal statements.  So this company would appear to have a fundamental problem.  Either the VP of Sales was not following the goals set by the leader of the organization or the CEO was not clearly communicating his goals to the organization.  And yes, there indeed could be additional reasons, but overall there are problems in this company/organization that are going to harm the overall productivity of the company.

I always did this exercise very early in my engagement with my clients so that we could resolve the goal setting issues and re-establish them if and when required early in the project. 

Now the "Wall Street Journal" on March 28, 2011 published a short piece by Joe Light which in effect supports the same assertion.  The piece is called "Disconnect Found Between CEO's, Top Officers."  The link to the article follows below:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703362904576218940477788886.html?KEYWORDS=Disconnect+Found+Between+CEO%27s+Top+Officers

The article does not deal directly with goals as my situation did, it's results nonetheless support the lack of clarity that occurs in the communication and dialogue at this high level of management.  The article is based on a 2,463 respondent survey done in December by ExecuNet, Inc., a professional network for executives. 

The survey results indicate that:

• "14% of CEO's thought their reports stay because they liked the actual work they do;                whereas only 5% of the C-level executives gave that as a reason."
• "Nearly 13% of Chief Financial Officers, Chief Marketing Officers, and other C-level executives say that having input into company decisions is their top reason to stay with a company...but only 7% of CEO's think that's a central reason their C-level direct reports stick around."

The article and survey continues on with motivation and perception gaps, but whether it is the ExecuNet survey or it is my 35 years of experience, the same thing continues to show up today or yesterday.  There continues to be a major disconnect between the key people that are supposed to be leading the organization.  The result, lower levels of productivity and profitability than There are so many books out today on the subject of Leadership, yet it appears that while people may be reading these book, they are not putting the insights they glean into practice. 

This is typical of what I also saw.  People go to seminars!  They read these books.  They pick up fabulous ideas and are determined to put these great ideas into practice, yet it rarely occurs.  Why you ask?  Because when they get back to the office, the press of business causes these great ideas to became lesser and lesser of a strong priority--so much so that it gets lost under a pile of other to-do's. 

Ah, so how do you fix this?  Check for my next posting. 

Bob