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.“