Being a CEO is perhaps the most difficult aspect of entrepreneurship. CEOs often require coaching, being groomed on how best to carry out their responsibilities. Here are a few coaching tips for CEOs looking to make a name for themselves.
Reliable delivery
The most obvious quality is perhaps the most important. Being a successful entrepreneur requires understanding the needs of your stakeholders and delivering on them. Being reliable increases your chances of being chosen for the role of CEO and succeeding in it. An important tactic to ensure your reliability is to set realistic goals from the beginning. This way you can ensure that you hit your targets consistently. Being reliable gets you in the good books of boards and employees alike. This is why reliable delivery is our number one coaching tip for CEOs.
Quick decision-making
Surprising though it may sound, it is more important for CEOs to make quick decisions rather than good ones. This is because a decision can be reversed, its downside overturned, but time is of the essence for the modern entrepreneur. It is better to be going in a direction, even if it is the wrong direction, rather than be standing still. According to research, quick decision-making, even where information is incomplete, or confusion abounds, is the key to becoming a high-performing CEO. Build yourself a core team as soon as you can, to help in making those decisions as quickly and accurately as possible.
Teamwork
As CEO, you have to possess leadership qualities. You need to possess planning and organizational skills. A good CEO offers his/her employees continuity, certainty, and the assurance that their futures are secure. So, make sure you reach out to as many people as possible, familiarize yourself first-hand with how things stand at your firm, and state your expectations of your employees clearly and lucidly. A strong leader is one who leads by example, so set that example for those working under you, embodying the work ethic, philosophy and approach that you want to inspire.
Visionary
A strong CEO must be a visionary and be able to communicate his/her vision to the employees. Identify the problems being faced by your organization, particularly if you’re making a loss, and articulate your solutions to those problems. Take your employees on board before constructing your vision, one for the short and one for the long term. Make sure you break your vision down into gettable goals. That way, once you start making good on your short-term goals, you will win your employees’ confidence.
Flexibility
Our final coaching tip for entrepreneurs and CEOs is flexibility. In a constantly, sometimes rapidly, changing world, flexibility is of key importance. Research shows that CEOs who stand out are those who can deal effectively with unplanned and unexpected developments in the world around them. Be prepared to encounter setbacks and be prepared to respond them. Research suggests that CEOs who admit their failures and account for them are more likely to succeed than those who don’t.