Roland B. Smith and Michael
Campbell authored C-SuiteChallenges and the Economic Meltdown: What’s Next for Senior Leaders? and in doing so explored the
challenges that top executives not only face directly, but what their largest
concerns were forward thinking. Even
more interestingly, this article was written post-economic meltdown allowing
for analysis of executives’ challenges and concerns prior to when the economy was
extremely strong versus afterwards to see if executives’ frame of mind has
changed since this turmoil. This
article is particularly important because of this unique perspective that
allows its readers to potentially identify the mindsets of executives when
times are great and when times are not, then to utilize this information in
aiding in developing strategies that fit the cycle of one’s own business.
This article
analyzed the responses of over 150 top executives to multiple questions
stemming from an overall theme: What
are the main challenges top executives face?
This broad question allowed for a virtual endless array of answers, and
was posed prior to and after the recent economic meltdown. Responses were cataloged into 14 challenge
categories with a total of over 600 challenges.
Incredibly enough, of all of these responses, 47% fit into four distinct
categories: business operations and
performance, talent management, strategic issues and leading across multiple
groups. What was even more interesting is
that all of these items were the top four challenges prior to AND after the
economic meltdown and the top two (leading across multiple groups and strategic
issues respectively) were the same in both eras. This clearly implies that regardless of the
macro-economic issues at hand, the core fundamentals of running an organization
from the top executive levels remain the same and the concerns (and
theoretically the potential success) lie in ensuring these challenges are
overcome and/or strategies are continually redevelopment to maintain a competitive advantage
in one’s industry.
For practicing managers, the
primary implications of such data imply not only that the fundamental core of
success is similar in any environment, but also that developing tools for top
executives to train their c-level employees on facing these challenges is
imperative. Smith and Campbell assert
that this is done by analysis of leadership strategy, analysis of complex
challenges and analysis of desire culture merged together to find the
leadership strategy, then using all of this information to build the companies
Leadership Development Strategy. In my
experience, many good companies commit to the first three levels of analysis
and eventually develop a strong leadership strategy, however without the final
commitment of building a development program for top executives; the success
that the company has enjoyed may be lost when top management departs. Leadership development is vital to the
long-term success and growth of every company and there are myriads of ways to
deploy this specific to each industry.
This article contains some
fantastic information on the four items mentioned above as well as the
importance of a leadership development strategy. As a follow up to this article, I think it
would be incredibly helpful to not only see what successful (and still
operating) executives feel are important challenges, but also what unsuccessful
(and potentially non-operating) executives felt were important prior to the
downturn. This may give priceless
insight where to NOT focus when facing challenges and aid in fine-tuning a
fundamental long-term strategy for a successful company.
Work Cited:
C-Suite Challenges and the Economic Meltdown: What's Next for Senior Leaders? Full Text Available By: Smith, Roland B.; Campbell, Michael. People & Strategy. 2010, Vol. 33 Issue 4, p22-30. 9p.
Work Cited:
C-Suite Challenges and the Economic Meltdown: What's Next for Senior Leaders? Full Text Available By: Smith, Roland B.; Campbell, Michael. People & Strategy. 2010, Vol. 33 Issue 4, p22-30. 9p.
Luke Phillippi
