Business Leadership – Practitioner Article: C-Suite Challenges

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.

Luke Phillippi