Mar 17, 2022 codeadmin

What is CEO Excellence?

Executives at Board of Trade member organizations convene quarterly to discuss current labor market and economic trends and share best practices for strategic decision making. We are excited to welcome Patti Steis, Managing Director at Marsh McLennan, and Bradley Flickinger, Senior Managing Director Mid-Atlantic at CBRE Inc. as the 2022 series co-leads.

Our first Executive Leadership Roundtable in 2022 welcomed Vik Mulhotra, Senior Partner and Chairman of the Americas at McKinsey & Company, and co-author of CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets that Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest to share his insights on the difficulty yet enormous impact of CEOs and their leadership.  

Getting the right CEO is often the largest challenge. The tenure of CEOs is declining. As studies have shown, more than 68% have admitted that they were unprepared for the job and 30% of Fortune 500 CEOs last less than three years. However, CEOs who excel in their roles make a huge impact on their companies. For example, the top 200 highest performing CEOs globally in their tenure have added more than $5 trillion in combined market capitalization to their companies.

While researching the skills and practices that have driven the success of the world’s highest performing CEOs, the authors found that CEOs are the ultimate integrator and follow six key mindsets.

All these mindsets play a key role in a CEO’s effectiveness and success, yet (1) aligning your organization and (2) mobilizing through leaders have proven to be more critical for long term impact. To drive success, top performing CEOs must communicate their intentions and have clarity of their vision (align the organization) in order to place the right people in key leadership roles to advance and execute their vision (mobilizing through leaders).  Once aligned, all the others easily fall into place.

To learn more about the mindsets that help top CEOs such as Janie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase, Reed Hastings of Netflix, and Marillyn Hewson of Lockheed Martin deliver extraordinary impact and achieve CEO Excellence, check out Vik’s new book.

McKinsey & Company is a member of the Greater Washington Board of Trade, and their views and perspectives does not necessarily represent the official position of the Board of Trade or its members.