4 Behaviors of Top CEOs
Harvard study findings: Deciding with speed and conviction; Engaging for impact; Adapting proactively; and Delivering reliably
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A Harvard study found that the most successful CEOs demonstrate 4 specific behaviors that are critical to performance.
For those who aspire to be CEO, if you proactively develop these behaviors, your odds of becoming a high-performance CEO will dramatically increase.
The 4 behaviors of top CEOs are:
Deciding with speed and conviction.
Engaging for impact.
Adapting proactively.
Delivering reliably.
For each behavior, I will write out my thoughts and some associated actions.
To help, I’ve pulled in my friend, Sue Bethanis (Executive Coach, Founder & CEO of Mariposa Leadership), to share her comments. Sue is an expert in working with C-Suite leaders and has coached 400+ tech executives. She was my best coach when I was an Amazon VP. In the intensive class that Sue and I teach (Cracking the C-suite), we go into much greater depth on exactly how to develop the leadership behaviors of a top executive—consider joining us if this matches your career goal.
The 4 behaviors of top CEOs and what you can learn:
1. Deciding with speed and conviction
Insights from Harvard
Leaders who were described as “decisive” were 12x more likely to be high-performing CEOs.
Of leaders who scored poorly on decisiveness, 94% scored poorly because they decided too little, too late. In other words, without speed and conviction.
My Experience
I worked closely with Jeff Bezos when he was CEO of Amazon and directly for Emmett Shear when he was CEO of Twitch. I also worked for several startup CEOs earlier in my career.
Every one of them was not just decisive but also maddeningly hard to dissuade once they had made up their minds.
The good leaders in this group, including Jeff and Emmett, were good at gathering information quickly, thinking about it deeply, and then deciding. Past that, they were OK with taking enormous amounts of risk. They had high conviction that they would be right, but they were unafraid to be wrong (which sometimes they were - i.e. the Fire Phone for Jeff and some acquisitions by Twitch that never paid off).
Personally, I thrived at Amazon by practicing “Bias for Action.” This is the Leadership Principle that states “speed matters in business” and that it is important to make decisions before you have all the data and can know for sure that you are right.
The reason speed matters so much is that we all have competition. Some of that competition will move slowly, wanting to be sure they are right; others will move quickly but will choose poorly and falter. These competitors are self-destructing and are not threats. The problem is that some of your competition will jump into action fast, and whether through luck or good judgment, will pick well. If you wait to be 100% sure, you will fall behind the competitors who act quickly and choose well.
The need to act quickly and choose well is necessary at the company, product, and individual levels, so all leaders must get comfortable choosing quickly.
When it comes to conviction in your choices, the reason you must have a lot of it is that your team will be full of cautious people who are not 100% sure. These people will tell you to slow down, to do more research, and to take less risk. The problem with this, as explained above, is that it leads to failure by delay.
What this means is that you must switch gears on your most trusted advisors. When you are gathering information, you must enlist their help and listen to them closely. But, once you make a decision, you must stop listening and convince them to follow you despite their (and your own) doubts.
An old saying goes, “He who hesitates is lost.”
This includes those who hesitate because they are looking for more information!
Action: If you are not yet CEO, you can still practice being decisive and having conviction at your own level. If you are an individual contributor (IC), you can decide things in your life and your personal work quickly. Once you have decided, push away doubt and second thoughts until you have clear evidence that you should change plans. Read the book Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath for more on how to make good, quick decisions.
Sue’s comments
There is no question that being decisive – as well as declarative and confident in HOW you’re being decisive – is the number one trait to being successful as a CEO. Now, decisiveness isn’t “my way or the highway.” It looks like gathering relevant information from various sources (your own research, direct reports’ research, and the POVs of peers in other companies, if applicable).
You have to explore and know your industry/market like no other, translate that knowledge, and message it in a way others can take it in.
Having courage to take risks is also a hallmark here.
It is better to try and make mistakes than to not try at all.
2. Engaging for impact
Insights from Harvard
CEOs who got stakeholders on board by driving for performance and aligning them around the goal were 75% more successful in the role.
The ability to handle clashing viewpoints also seems to help candidates advance to the CEO’s office.
My Experience
In the end, only impact matters.
Working hard is admirable, but it is ultimately useless if it does not drive a valuable result. Conversely, if you can create enough impact through clever work, you do not necessarily need to also work extremely hard. Cal Newport makes this case well in his book Deep Work.
At Amazon, the Leadership Principle “Have Backbone, Disagree and Commit” is meant to ensure that after arguing for the best plan, everyone bands together and gives 100% to the selected plan.
When I think of engaging for impact, I often think of a coach calling a play in American football. A poor play call can often work if the whole team executes it well. But all plays, good or bad, will fail if a third of the team stands around criticizing the decision. Once the call is made, it is essential to switch to execution.
There were many times at Amazon when I saw teams pull together and overcome “impossible” goals. On my first project, launching what became Amazon Prime Video, I was told that just adding videos to Amazon’s catalog would require a one-year wait (which was longer than our total remaining schedule). My small team and I quickly hacked around this limitation by repurposing the catalog entries for clothing. We used clothing sizes to represent episodes in a TV season, and for years after all videos had a “dress size” to represent where they were in the season.
The point of this story is that we shipped on time and made an impact.
I was promoted in part because of this work.
Actions:
Once you make a decision, focus on the result. Hard work only counts if it gets you to the end goal.
Get others aligned in any way you can. If you lack a leadership principle to refer to, get management support or talk them through the football metaphor. Help them see that standing back and bickering ensures that everyone fails.
Blast through any roadblocks. Remember that getting to the result is the goal. In a few areas, such as user interface design or consumer packaging, elegance may really matter. But, for well over 90% of work, using clever hacks to get a working, sellable product is usually a better choice.
Sue’s comments
I really like what Ethan had to say: “Get others aligned in any way you can.” It’s important to note, alignment has its basis in relationship cultivation. So, getting aligned in a crisis, or over a product roadmap, or toward a long-term vision doesn’t happen easily if you haven’t formed solid relationships beforehand. To do this, you need to know what makes your peers tick.
In order to more deeply understand what makes people tick (e.g., how others make decisions), I really like Robert Cialdini’s seminal HBR article, “Harnessing the Science of Persuasion,” where he illuminates six principles of persuasion: likability, reciprocity, authority, social proof (consensus), consistency, and scarcity.
3. Adapting proactively
Insights from Harvard
CEOs who excel at adapting are 6.7x more likely to succeed.
Adaptable CEOs spent significantly more of their time—as much as 50%—thinking about the long term. Other executives, by contrast, devoted an average of 30% of their time to long-term thinking.
CEOs who considered setbacks to be “failures” had a 50% less chance of thriving.
My Experience
The opposite of adapting proactively is adapting reactively, or when forced to do so by outside circumstances.