What Keep’s A CEO Up At Night?

In March 2012 I surveyed the CEO’s of the companies I have been working with and asked them what are their biggest concerns right now.

They said that #1 is attracting the right people to the business and #2 innovating to drive business forward.

The two issues go hand in hand- we need good people in order to innovate. We need people who are skilled, who can quickly adapt to changing conditions, are creative and can operate within a team at a high functioning level.

Finding and keeping good people is one are that is very difficult to do well. It’s basically a do or die for business whether it is a large multinational organization or a smaller entrepreneurial firm. CEO’s admit that they still hire based on the wrong reasons such as needing to fill the spot, accepting someone without doing full due diligence on their fit and not investing time and energy in onboarding and skill assessment.

The success of keeping good people once you find them lies in the quality of your leaders. Do you have leaders who are flexible, psychologically adept and who can articulate what needs to get down and who inspires execution?

Attracting is quite easy, provide the attractive pay level, make the job sound sexy and promise them they will be happier than ever. Keeping them is difficult when the new talent realizes they have not been on boarded in a way that sets them up for success, that there is no clear expectations for performance and they are not provided with ongoing support and growth.

What started out as a beautiful promise ends up being a deflated bubble. The CEO’s I have talked know this to be true, their focus is on developing their leaders to high capacity so that they can consistently attract and retain top talent while driving innovation and growth.