If we are not empowering our CEO’s to manage their own performance then why are we employing them?
The organisations Strategic Plan (rollover) should establish both the short term and long term quantitative performance criteria both financial and non-financial. If these measures are established as envelopes then the Board can empower the CEO to manage their own performance and report performance against these measures at each Board meeting. If the measures are within the envelope then great work, if trending out then what is being done to fix the trend and if outside the envelope “where is the board paper to escalate the issue”.
If the CEO has to wait to be informed of their performance then the performance framework is not adequate and the companies “good governance” may be in question as this framework will incorporate the corporate risk. The CEO must have both short term (annual) and long term measures as this is why we employee a CEO to shape the organisation long term as well as manage and lead it for today.
Maxumise is highly experiences in developing CEO competency profiles, recruiting CEO’s and assessing both the performance and the competence of the CEO’s and executive teams.
We recently assessed a CEO that the Board had appointed just over 12 months before and was not meeting the Boards expectations. When we reviewed the position description that was used to recruit the CEO the competence levels were well below what we expected for that organisation and Board expectations. The HR Sub committee chairperson who developed the position competency profile and facilitated the recruitment was themselves well below the competence of the CEO and clearly demonstrated that they did not understand the requirement’s – we refer to this as the spring effect where a part of the Board compresses the organisation below them because they are acting outside their own level of competence. In this case the CEO employed was not competent but the employment was the Boards responsibility. The competence of the Board is in itself a big issue as firstly it is a collective competence requirement overall and secondly specific competence for the Chairperson and committee chairpersons.
Is your CEO and/or executive team performing at the right level?
Maxumise can assist firstly in determining the right level of competence needed and secondly in putting in place the performance measures and empowerment system that will give the Board the necessary confidence in the CEO. Call Max at Maxumise today