Honestly, I just came across this article – Women CEOs Experience Longer Tenures, Faster Growth – as a follow up to my previous post. This study is from a limited sample of Massachusetts-based companies with an average size of $54M/year revenue and 120 employees. Not huge, but sizeable companies nonetheless.

This piece of information from the short article caught my attention:

When asked about their priorities for driving that growth, 80 percent of women CEOs surveyed identified expanding customer relationships ahead of aggressively pursuing new products, new geographic markets, or strategic alliances, the study found.

Another 77 percent said they sought input into the decision-making process through a participatory leadership style.

Nearly 98 percent gave to local charities and nonprofit organizations in their community, while about a third took part in philanthropic events at least once a month, the study found.

Interesting, isn’t it? Notice the women CEO tend to focus on people-oriented topics. This approach paid obvious dividends:

More than half had achieved an annual growth rate of 5 percent or more since 2004 nearly double the state and national average…

Now let’s go back to the article in my previous post. The gist of this article was the short amount of time CEO’s now have to affect profitable results in their new company. The “100 day window” has led CEO’s to a short-sighted approach:

“You now see a lot of CEOs who are not internally focused,” says Khurana. “For them, the people in a company, what the company produces, the services it provides are abstractions.”

Jim Collin’s research from this article stated that internal CEO’s outperformed externally hired CEOs because the internal CEO’s:

“knew which people on staff were good and where best to deploy them.“

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We first posted about CEO turnover in this post. Now BusinessWeek comes along with an article titled The Great CEO Exodus.

CEO’s get a bad rap about their compensation packages, but it is not an easy job. Now consider the pressure being exerted on these leaders:

Not so long ago, a new CEO like McComb would have had six to nine months to get his act together. Not any more. Management experts say the newly minted boss has about 90 to 100 days to start implementing strategy.

It would appear that there is a drastic candidate shortage even at the CEO level:

Gerard R. Roche, senior chairman of leading recruiter Heidrick & Struggles, says it’s getting harder to fill high-level openings as more candidates opt to work at private equity firms or run private companies. “We have to work harder than we used to,” says Roche. “We used to think, ‘tell us your need and we’ll give you half a dozen candidates.’ Now [those candidates] say, ‘I’ve been talking to Blackstone and Kravis and I’m thinking about going private.'”

(As an aside, don’t you love the name of the recruiting firm – Heidrick and Struggles?)

Jim Collins has a fantastic take on the CEO struggle:

In researching his best-seller Good To Great, management guru Jim Collins found that of those companies whose stocks outperformed the competition over the long term, 90% had a homegrown CEO. Why did they do so well? Because they knew which people on staff were good and where best to deploy them.Even so, Collins notes that most of these CEOs didn’t get their program humming until seven years into their tenure, just when the average company boss today is walking out the door. “The best chance for spectacular results comes from insiders who have enough time to lay the foundation that will lead to them,” says Collins. “If we’re systematically lurching for saviors and shorting the amount of time a CEO gets, we’re on a systematic path toward increased mediocrity.”

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It seems we come across this issue frequently so it merits some attention. The scenario is this – a company hires a strong salesperson and they fail within a short amount of time. The first question that is usually raised is why did we hire this person? Obviously, they were not the right fit, they weren’t talented, they were disingenuous in the interview, etc.

But is this really the case? It could be, but there is one crucial piece of the equation that goes unexamined . . . management. This is a touchy subject with a company because you have to confront their perception. Most managers believe they are doing a better than average job. Yet, if a strong salesperson fails in a short amount of time (or even long amount of time), the sales manager has to be brought into the post mortem inspection.

Obviously, no two scenarios are the same. Most companies have far more invested into their sales manager than a new salesperson. But if a pattern emerges and the constant is the sales manager, the topic has to be broached.

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