What makes a CEO talented?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I work for a global company.

We have this gentleman at work. If he’s in his thirties at all He’s a young 30.

And this guy has gone in 5 years from being an intern, to being facilities manager. Just two more rungs of the ladder and he will have a VP title next to his name.

5 years and being so young seems absolutely insane to me. Very impressive.

I’m just curious what separates someone like this from your average manager trying to climb the ranks?

I put CEO in the title of this thread because I feel like that’s exactly where this young man is going whether it be for this company or somewhere else.

2

A charming smile, a killer golf game, a cutthroat attitude toward business, and a complete lack of ethical scruples. Just watch out for a secretary on a lawnmower.

“The doctor said he’ll never golf again.”

Stranger

3

Yep. And connections, and relationships with the right people, and a strong educational pedigree, and being in the right place at the right time. It does not mean their any “good” in the role, but it seems some people have the right combination of boxes checked that helps grease the skids.

4

Most CEOs I know have been promoted from either a Sales or Finance VP levels. The sales guy can get along with everyone and the finance guy knows where all the bodies are buried. Some combination of those two would be perfect in my view. Avoid the Engineering VPs like the plague.

5

I’m not saying this guy is using this approach. But I have witnessed a number of “rising stars” in my workplace, and they all used the following approach:

  1. Be an impeccable communicator, dress sharply, and possess excellent interpersonal skills.

  2. Figure out how to impress upper management. The key here is perception: it’s much more important to look like you’re doing a good job than to do a good job.

  3. Never turn down an opportunity to schmooze with upper management. An hour spent hobnobbing or “shoot’n-the-bull” with the VP is much more valuable than an hour spent fixing a problem on a project. And the key here is to be disingenuous: you need to master the fine art of pretending you’re their best friend.

  4. Take credit for other people’s successes, and blame others when you do something wrong.

  5. Have zero ethics, zero morals, and always always always lie if you know you can get away with it.

6

Back in 2017, I read this article about 29 year old Princeton grad David Knopf who was made CFO of Kraft Heinz Co.

At the time, I told jokingly told my “mentee” (consulting jargon for someone who reports to you on the org chart) who was a classmate of this individual at Princeton that he “wasn’t meeting expectation” because his classmate was already a CFO while he was stuck working for me.

FWIW David Knopf was fired as CFO 2 years later.

Did any of them become CEO?

I see plenty of “rising stars” like that. Most of them tend to rise to middle, maybe senior management and stay there.

They also have to be able to navigate office politics. A lot of engineers and more technical or “hands on” types tend to have a similar attitude as you do towards CEOs and “MBA business types” in that we don’t really “do” anything except schmooze and politic. To a certain extent that is true. But much of that schmoozing and politicing is getting agreement and support to get your vision realized.

Not that there aren’t plenty of douchebag CEOs. But on some level a CEO does have to inspire employees, other executives, investors, board members, customers, and other stakeholders that the company is moving in the right direction.

7

For those who have worked for companies with CEOs (big enough to), what fraction of your CEOs inspired employees?

We’ve gone through five. The first was a true inspiration. Died young though. Two others were adequate and two were (one is) not. So not sure about the “have to” …

They have to inspire the board level that hires them. No one else.

8

I have found every CEO of every large corporation I’ve ever worked for to be an empty suit full of buzzwords, meaningless inspirational messages, and unworkable strategies. To a certain extent, that is expected; a conglomerate with multiple different divisions or subsidiaries really isn’t going to have a deep knowledge of the needs and activities of businesses providing different products and services to different industries, but that is why a competent leader selects capable subordinates and lets them speak for their areas of responsibility. Unfortunately, that requires not being a pathological narcissist or a sociopath who is incapable of trusting anyone else because they are afraid they would be stabbed in the back just as readily as they would do to someone else.

What I find bizarre is the culture of reverence in middle management for CEO So-And-So, in hopes that their unheard praise will elevate them when the reality is that SAS is going to bring in his buddies from the last place he ran into the ground to staff the C-suite and VP positions. It is such a tiresome bit of kabuki theatre, especially when they come in with unworkable plans to “synergies our competencies”, or “enable employees to be their own managers”, or rating everyone on how much they contributed to business development whether they are an inside salesperson, finance inspector, programmer, lab technician, engineer, administrative assistant, or janitor while the actual bizdev people with fat expense accounts go to all-afternoon lunches and bring in a bunch of nebulous ‘opportunities’ that they then blame on the performers when they turn out to be total vaporware.

But I’m not bitter.

Stranger

9

Agree with this. My company has a new CEO, no doubt approved by our Board, and no doubt none of us nameless, faceless cubicle-dwelling corporate drones were part of the selection process. The new executive seems quite competent and has a nice pedigree with many boxes checked, but we’ll see how well they do inspiring me.

10

There are inherently two separate questions subtly embedded in the subject-line question, and it seems to me that the responses are blurry as a result, addressing both questions to some degree without separating the two underlying premises.

“Talent as a CEO” could be the skills and abilities to acquire the position. This is being covered above as the politicking and sociopathy and empty sloganeering and other traits we generally think of as negative.

But “talent as a CEO” could also refer to the skills and abilities that allow someone to successfully lead the company. This is also being covered above with the references to getting along with people and occasionally inspiring them.

In my experience, CEOs tend to be strong in one area or the other, but only rarely in both.

Years ago, I was a drone at a Fortune 500. When I started, the CEO was the entrepreneur who had originally started the company. He was the rare example of a CEO who could leverage both skillsets as needed. He knew how to be ruthless when necessary, cutting departments and laying off people when it was clear their function was a dead end in the larger company mission, but he also knew how to communicate a vision so people would connect with it and be motivated to pursue it.

Then he orchestrated the acquisition of the company by a global holding firm and left to found another tech startup. He was replaced as CEO by the CFO of the holding firm, and that guy was a total jackass whose skillset fell entirely into the “political suckup” category. He had no vision beyond “keep making stuff so I can count the money that it brings in, and report it to the board.” He seemed baffled by how the various pieces of the company worked together; he kept making noise about cutting departments and laying off people solely on the basis of their apparent marginal value, but the C-suite people around him (mostly holdovers from the prior CEO) kept talking him out of it because those functions strategically supported and fed a pipeline of ideas and features into the more lucrative departments, and the company would quickly go downhill without them.

Right now I work at a smaller company whose CEO is almost entirely the “inspiring leader of people” type. He has incredible vision, and an incredible capacity for communicating it and getting people to buy in. But he’s also soft-hearted about us, and shies away from sometimes necessary confrontation when the company really does need him to step in and take sides. And he sank a huge amount of money into a visionary product launch because he fell in love with the conceptual premise of it and couldn’t understand that there was no hard value proposition for customers, even though many of us were trying to steer him onto a more sensible, conservative path. His ability to inspire won out, and we’ve spent two years banging our heads against the wall of a predictably unreceptive marketplace.

So when I hear the question, “what makes a CEO talented,” my automatic response is, “talented at what exactly?”

11

I’ve only had two long-term jobs in my life but at both, all of the leadership – and I mean everybody – golfed. A lot of decisions apparently get made on the green. Personally I know absolutely nothing about golf (let alone have any ability to play it!) so that’s why I’m not currently a CEO :slight_smile:

12

I suppose that’s the difference between talented CEOs and shitty ones. Much like the captain of a ship or a pilot, it’s hard to tell who is a good or exceptional one if all they are doing day to day is not crashing a ship that’s largely on autopilot.

Above a certain level, I’ve come to the conclusion most corporate management is a “a tiresome bit of kabuki theatre”.