The chief executive role is a tough one to fill. From 2000 to 2013, about a quarter of the CEO departures in the Fortune 500 were involuntary, according to The Conference Board. Clearly, many leaders and boards are getting something wrong. The question is, what?
In the more than two decades we’ve spent advising boards, investors and chief executives on CEO transitions, we have seen a disconnect between what boards think makes for an ideal CEO and what actually leads to high performance. That disconnect starts with an unrealistic stereotype, according to which, a successful CEO is a charismatic 6-foot-tall white man with a degree from a top university, who is a strategic visionary with the ability to make perfect decisions under pressure.
Yet few of the successful leaders we’ve encountered fit this profile. That realisation led us to embark on a 10-year study, the CEO Genome Project. Its goal is to identify the attributes that differentiate high-performing CEOs. Partnering with economists at the University of Chicago and Copenhagen Business School and analysts at SAS Inc., we tapped into a database created by our leadership advisory firm, ghSmart, containing more than 17 000 assessments of C-suite executives, including 2 000 CEOs. The database has information on each leader’s career history, business results and behavioural patterns. We looked for what distinguished candidates who got hired as CEOs from those who didn’t, and those who excelled in the role from those who underperformed.
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