THE SIX HORSEMEN OF EXECUTIVE PERFORMANCE: tHE oCCUPATIONAL HAZARDS OF THE C-SUITE
The six Horsemen of Executive Performance provide a new way of analysing occupational risk for senior leaders. Unlike assessments based on traits or personality, this framework has been built around the demands of the C-Suite. It serves to build awareness and shape mitigations against the predicitable hazards that go together with operating at the very top of business.
The Savoir Group has spent thousands of hours working with senior executives in leading businesses around the globe, This has led us to conclude that there are predictable pressure points, recurring blind spots and unconscious behavioural patterns that undermine even the most talented leaders when left untended. These six horsement are stealth performance thieves. They insidiously corrode effectiveness regardless of talent, sector or size of business.
The purpose of this article is to lay out the framework and suggest initial action steps for the organization, executive team and CEO.
1.Lost in the Echo Chamber
Being lost in an echo chamber means you are operating without sufficient challenge or cognitive diversity. You may invite colleagues to‘tell it like it is’, but hierarchy fans the flames of sycophancy and people feel pressured to agree with you. Leaders need to operate on the basis that they have to search out disconfirming data. Your seniority means it will not naturally reach you. Equally, you should always assume you do not have full feedback about how colleagues experience you as a leader.
In addition to the lack of challenge, the senior eche- lons of an organization can operate like an echo-chamber when the executive team is made up of colleagues with comparable biases, experiences and assumptions. Leadership homogeneity is a serious risk. Look at the number of situations where people scratch their heads after the event and wonder why those well-paid people at the top didn’t see THAT coming. Our brains naturally gravitate to data that reinforces what we already know. An executive team lacking cognitive diversity will suffer from groupthink.
The double whammy here is that you end up not only thinking within established parameters but acting within them too. Under pressure to act the quickest and easiest thing to do is always what you did last time. Over confidence in the status quo and the failure to explore alternate responses can have you agreeing to the same actions over and over again.
Default moves have the allure of speed and decisiveness, but some point, they catch you out. In the meantime, colleagues,investors and competitors will start to anticipate your playbook and therefore know how to play you! Businesses, as well as teams and individuals, also have default responses. Science-based firms may tend to reach for more data; fast-paced businesses gravitate towards the quickest solution; and cost-conscious ones to the cheapest. Recognizing your collective default patterns as an organization can be a powerful way of mitigating them. It allows people to say ‘here we go again’, when a default response raises its head.
Lost in the Echo chamber - TAKE ACTION
Organization - Name your organization’s default reactions when faced with any challenge.
Executive team - Ask your executive team to reflect on their own collective default’s. Invite them to challenge each other when they next see one of their patterns in action.
CEO - Pinpoint those areas where you receive the least challenge. Leadership needs friction. Engineer regular constructive feedback for yourself.
2.BLIND TO THE SYSTEM
Leading a business requires you to have one foot in the future; you need to make sense of the wider system your business operates in and anticipate what might be coming around the corner. Strategy days, and scenario planning have their place. However, many consider it basic leadership readiness to be continually scanning what is coming over the horizon and being ready to make adjustments.
Systems-thinking, complexity theory and polarities all advance the discipline of stepping back to assess your operating environment. CEOs must balance relationships across an increasingly diverse ecosystem of stakeholders, customers, suppliers, competitors and communities along with their differing demands. This requires leaders to see both the current reality of their ecosystem and understand how it is a product of past history, norms, values and culture.
Ron Heifetz called it ‘a balcony moment’ to step back and look down at what is going on beyond your immediate line of sight. This sounds like common sense but it is not common practice. It is tough to switch off from responding to what is immediate, visible and pressing. But taking a bird’s eye view of what is going on across your business helps you see fresh data. For example, you may spot which groups or views are growing in influence, understand shifting alliances or relevant forward trends. Personally, and organizationally, it is your best mitigation against being blindsided.
Being blind to the system is a particularly cunning trap because we tend to compartmentalize issues, rather than joining the dots. Daniel Kahneman said that the cognitive bias known as WYSIATI (What You See Is All There Is) encourages us to make judgments based on information that is immediately available and ignore what isn’t known.
You can’t lead what you can’t see. So, if you do not have a view on your ecosystem then you can’t attempt to influence it; you can only react. And you definitely cannot seize potential opportunities which means competitors or activist investors with a clearer perspective, may soon be knocking at your door.
BLIND TO THE SYSTEM - TAKE ACTION
Organizational - Create processes for scanning how different factions and trends are evolving across your eco-system. Encourage colleagues to look beyond your sector for what is next.
Executive team -Bring the ecosystem into exec- utive team discussion to recognize how you can deploy leadership across the system as well as in the organization.
CEO -Remember that you and your role are part of the system. If you don’t understand how you contribute to the dynamic; then thesystem will play you!.
3.RELATIONALLY AT RISK
Given their time again, many CEOs say they would spend more time thinking through their relational game plan before stepping into a new role.
At this point in your career, you will have had many opportunities to develop your people skills. Nonetheless, it is common for executives to be accomplished at one type of relationship and keep repeating this. But at a certain level of seniority the role requires asharp uptick in relational intelligence. You need to build relationships with an expanding range of diverse and often competing stakeholders.
Moreover, you are no longer having relationships primarily based on you. For many people you now represent the organization, its leadership, the hierarchy and the status quo. Expectations will be higher, both personally and professionally. People will have emotional as well as rational expectations of you simply because of your title. Remaining accessible and relatable to scores of people and being able to engage and mobilize them around business priorities is a perennial challenge.
Equally the access and new relationships you enjoy while in a C-suite role are not to be squandered. This means bringing a higher level of intentionality to creating the connective tissue you need, identifying which relationships are essential to be successful in role and how they need to function. For example, how will you establish your working relationship with the Chair or take a leadership stance with senior stakeholders you are used to deferring to? You may need to recast relationships with colleagueswho don’t think you should have got the job in the first place!
At the end of the day the real test is whether, in a tight corner, your colleagues, Board, customers or regulators will give you the benefit of the doubt in fair or foul weather. Do they trust you? Do they rate you? Do they know what you stand for and will they followyou? This is the measure of your relational work.
RELATIONALLY AT RISK - FIRST STEPS
Organizational - Audit your organization’s critical relationships to understand where there is good connective tissue and where there are gaps.
Executive team - Create systems to ensure key organizational relationships are visible and tracked by the executive team
CEO - Establish a gameplan to develop and maintain the relationships you need to be successful in your role. Use a coach to understand your relational blind spots.
4.RUNNING ON EMPTY
To be in an executive role for the long game requires effective sustainment practices that replenish you intellectually, emotionally,socially and spiritually. Working in an extreme pressure role means you spend extended periods of time operating in a state of cognitive overload. Therefore, you must be more diligent about your own sustainment. You need to be sure you are putting more in the tank than the role is taking out of you!
Ongoing physical or emotional exhaustion affects performance and creates a risk of burnout. It is hard to be an effective andinspiring leader if your heart, mind or body are running on empty.
Emotional and physical exhaustion are obvious signs of over extension. More subtle ones are a lack of purpose, meaning or a sense of accomplishment (regardless of what you are achieving). A lack of stretch and learning also takes a toll; it is bad for ambitious leaders to be treading water. We need to be tuned into the tell-tale signs that we are not functioning at our best.
However, well-developed coping strategies, coupled with Olympian levels of resilience mean that we can tune out these warnings. Dangerous levels of pressure can become normalized. You get used to running on fumes and become impervious to the signs that you are dangerously depleted. Learning to manage to dysfunctional levels of pressure can be a double-edged sword.
Therefore, the accepted wisdom to boost your resilience to withstand even more pressure needs to be coupled with cementing highly personalized renewal strategies to replenish and sustain you. There is no blue- print for resilience or renewal but research shows that having a wide variety of practices will be most effective.
RUNNING ON EMPTY
Organizational - Balance a work hard, play hard organizational message with practical mental and physical health resources
Executive team - Establish a quick anonymous quarterly ‘health’ check with your top team and review the findings as part of your regular meetings
CEO - Recognize your own stress signatures and ask a coach or partner to call you on agreed danger signs
5.UNPLUGGED FROM GROWTH
Would you describe yourself as a life-long learner? I rarely meet a CEO who doesn’t have that gearing. But I meet many who have not worked out how to keep growing while holding down a high-pressure role. I see leaders cheerfully insist that colleagues take the time for ongoing development while cramming their own into the margins. A couple of podcasts and a few books on the beach, might keep you current but it won’t pave your way to sharper performance. If you are not growing in-role, then you are leading on borrowed time.
Of course, there is always plenty to learn from the latest funding round, political scuffle, talent issue or Board exchange. But unless insights are ‘banked’ and applied, the evidence shows we generally forget 75% of them within a week. Learning gets trampled in the dust of activity.
Traditional executive programmes are an unrealistic ask for insanely busy leaders and few will thank you for another best practice model. But we know that tailored ‘in role’ development is most effective. Research has also shown that learning needs a social contexti.e. the right space, confidentiality, expertise and people. It does not happen in a vacuum, so do not try and go it alone.
If you are serious about refining your impact in a C-suite role, then you need a performance system and partner. This can simply be a light-touch routine that gives you the chance to review and recharge regularly while on the job.
Executives report that weekly 40-minute exchange to press replay on recent events with a trusted third party, helps them recalibrate their thinking and leadership. These bite-sized pauses in the working week serve to capture insights, apply thislearning and provide a regular feedback loop to support growth in the C-Suite. They also provide a critical breathing space toprocess how the role is impacting the individual. You can design your own ‘inflight refuelling system’ that is targeted at what you need to learn to maintain your edge, impact and relevancy.
Soren Kierkegaard said that ‘Life can only be under- stood backwards; but must be lived forwards’. The same can be said for leadership. Executive refuelling is a nimble way of both fine-tuning your leadership impact today and taking practical steps to future proof your performance for tomorrow.
Everyone has a professional shelf life, but these are not set in stone. Tenure and experience can be a mill- stone or a springboard. I have seen senior executives wield their experience like a clumsy form of entitlement or a leaden weight to colleagues. I have seen other leaders whose teams have felt fortified, empowered and emboldened knowing they had their boss’s considerable experience behind them.
UNPLUGGED FROM GROWTH - TAKE ACTION
Organization - Determine the learning priorities for the business in the next 12-18 months. Articulate how the business needs to change and what it needs to master, in the short to medium term.
Executive team - Agree what your senior leaders need to learn in the short, mid and longer term. Research shows that business transformation always requires learning at the top.
CEO - Create a highly tailored development plan for yourself. Enrol the right people to do this work with you (not for you). Do not go it alone.
6.FUTURE AT RISK
The last horseman out of the gates is the ultimate stealth rider, because it quietly undermines your forward options. For a business to be ‘future ready’ and prepared for the challenges ahead, there needs to be ongoing investment in strategic direction setting, leadership talent andcultivating a business culture that underpins your forward strategy. In an environment where your performance is under public scrutiny, the best of your energy can easily be absorbed by short-term deliverables. The urgent and the immediate can dominate and CEOs may need to intervene to ensure there is adequate focus on forward readiness planning.
At an executive team level, preparing for the future also means investing in robust succession, transition and legacy planning for yourselves. Poorly managed CEO transitions in S&P 1500 companies are reported to cost $1 trillion in lost market value annually according to a 2023 McKinsey study. With so much at stake, this potentially delicate issue needs serious attention. CEO’s can set the tone here by openly anointing a next generation of leaders, creating transparency rather than intrigue around the issue and insisting on highly targeted devel- opment for selected high-potential individuals.
There is naturally a political dimension to manage. This is best addressed by normalizing the succession discussion for all senior leaders and maintaining a broad bench of individuals with potential to play bigger roles, rather than one anointed individual. It is also about managing the ‘how’ as well as the ‘who,’ and ensuring the emotional choreography of executive departures receives due care and clear ownership. Executive Boards are increasingly alert to the risk of company’s being over-de- pendent on select individuals and not having robust succession and transition plans to ensure a drama free bridge for new leadership.
‘Future at Risk’ can also play out more personally in terms of not thinking about your next potential career moves – internally orexternally. Personal legacy can sound a grandiose concept but it is important to anticipate what you need to do now to be able tomove on with satisfaction, or at least equanimity, further down the track. For some ex-CEOs, a common regret is not moving more decisively when they had the power to affect issues close to their heart. So don’t allow yourself to be dusting off your legacy plans in the last six months of a role; you need to be clear about what you want to have achieved while in role and what you hope will endure once you have stepped out. Investing in good endings is good business sense.
FUTURE AT RISK - TAKE ACTION
Organization - Review your organizational vision and strategy alongside your succession plans. Do you have the right people ‘under development’ to deliver it and ensure executive stability?.
Executive team -What percentage of executive team time is spent on immediate versus future ready issues? Does this need to be adjusted?.
CEO -Commit to a quarterly career and legacy conversation with a trusted independent party..
CONCLUSION
Hopefully you can now assess which of these areas currently represent the greatest risk for you and your executive team. The Six Horsemen circle every Board- room, but awareness of them means you can take steps to head them off at the pass.
C-suite roles place an extraordinary physical, psycho- logical and interpersonal demand on leaders who are often lynchpins for their organizations. The Six Horse- man framework enables you to design practices to effec- tively underpin your C-Suite team toguard against these occupational risks.