Meet the ‘conscious CEO’, a new breed of leader

Coro­n­avirus has served as a dra­mat­ic inflec­tion point for busi­ness­es world­wide, result­ing in irre­versible eco­nom­ic and soci­etal shifts. From restric­tions on move­ment and the decrease in con­sumer spend­ing that fol­lowed, to an almost overnight shift towards remote work­ing and a mas­sive spike in online shop­ping.

Amid the uncer­tain­ty of the past 12 months, it is chief exec­u­tives (CEOs) who have been at the receiv­ing end of these updrafts, steer­ing busi­ness­es through the uncer­tain­ty of the pan-dem­ic. Agili­ty has been the order of the day for busi­ness lead­ers across the board, the onus being on mak­ing quick deci­sions in the face of chang­ing sit­u­a­tions and using data to forge deep­er con­nec­tions with cus­tomers.

Indeed, recent data from IBM’s Insti­tute for Busi­ness Val­ue shows dex­ter­i­ty is a top pri­or­i­ty, with 56 per cent of CEOs empha­sis­ing the need to “aggres­sive­ly pur­sue” oper­a­tional agili­ty and flex­i­bil­i­ty over the next two to three years. CEOs also cite emerg­ing tech­nol­o­gy as the fac­tor that will most sig­nif­i­cant­ly impact their busi­ness in the next few years. Out­per­form­ing firms are, unsur­pris­ing­ly, most focused on these tech­nolo­gies and the risks and oppor­tu­ni­ties they bring.

High­ly cre­ative and adap­tive CEOs have embraced this as a time of new pos­si­bil­i­ties and fer­tile prospects, says Hugh Evans, CEO of busi­ness design firm FromHere­On, which works with glob­al clients such as BT, ING Bank, Bel­ron, Voda­fone and Toy­ota.

“Mar­kets have been flood­ed with stim­u­lus that, com­bined with the tur­bu­lence of the pan­dem­ic, has been over­whelm­ing. How­ev­er, many cre­ative busi­ness lead­ers have embraced this peri­od as a huge oppor­tu­ni­ty,” says Evans.

Yet, amid the tur­moil caused by COVID, he observes that some CEOs have made a “mas­sive lurch” towards short-term busi­ness plan­ning. Lead­ers are aware of the after­shocks to come —only 27 per cent of For­tune 500 boss­es expect their employ­ees to return to the office full-time and most under­stand it will be 2022 before eco­nom­ic activ­i­ty returns to pre-pan­dem­ic lev­els — but they’re more con­cerned with the here and now.

This atti­tude extends to inter­nal and exter­nal rela­tion­ships, asserts Evans. Many boss­es are under­pre­pared for just how much the val­ues of their staff and cus­tomers will change in the com­ing years. Such short-sight­ed­ness will leave lead­ers unable to see the big­ger pic­ture and cre­ate long-term val­ue from the data at their fin­ger­tips.

The ‘new nor­mal’ we now oper­ate under calls for a new type of leader: the ‘con­scious CEO’. This per­son is a sys­tems thinker, but they don’t see the world in black and white. The con­scious CEO has an overview of how wider changes occur­ring in soci­ety, tech­nol­o­gy and the econ­o­my will impact their busi­ness.

With the world increas­ing­ly mov­ing towards an every­thing-as-a-ser­vice (XaaS) busi­ness mod­el, this new breed of leader sees the world as a set of tech­ni­colour, inter­con­nect­ed net­works and sur­rounds them­selves with the right peo­ple, part­ners and sup­pli­ers to unlock new oppor­tu­ni­ties for their own busi­ness.

What does a conscious CEO look like?

The word ‘con­scious’ has been co-opt­ed by brands in recent years, earn­ing a rep­u­ta­tion as a loaded term typ­i­cal­ly tied to cor­po­rate social respon­si­bil­i­ty (CSR) ini­tia­tives.
How­ev­er, it’s time for CEOs to reclaim it. The con­scious CEO is not dri­ven sole­ly by social impact, but is instead a fig­ure that embod­ies it.

“His­tor­i­cal­ly, CEOs had to have trav­elled a long path and been bat­tle-scarred and hard­ened to be effec­tive in their roles. Yet, this old guard came from an envi­ron­ment that was a lot more pre­dictable than today’s,” says Evans. “They’re not dis­tract­ed by tech­nol­o­gy, instead, they under­stand its sig­nif­i­cance and how it will change over time.”

By con­trast, the mod­ern CEO is egal­i­tar­i­an and mer­i­to­crat­ic by nature. “Their focus is ser­vant lead­er­ship so that they can realise the cre­ative capa­bil­i­ty of their indi­vid­ual employ­ees and, by exten­sion, their organ­i­sa­tion,” he adds.

The con­scious CEO will set in-train a new way to oper­ate; one that deliv­ers change, ser­vice by ser­vice, through­out the organ­i­sa­tion, and orches­trates cus­tomer, busi­ness and tech­nol­o­gy ser­vices as a live, holis­tic sys­tem that is always on and always rel­e­vant.

Reaching a state of awareness

So, how can CEOs unlock their aware­ness to improve busi­ness out­comes? For Evans, the key to reach­ing con­scious-CEO sta­tus is root­ed in six key design con­cerns: impact, cul­ture, inno­va­tion, peo­ple, scale and part­ner­ships.

As a start­ing point, this new class of leader calls for a mind­set which aspires for their busi­ness to have a pos­i­tive impact. For the con­scious CEO, though, impact is not rel­e­gat­ed to a mis­sion state­ment.

Evans elab­o­rates, “CEOs need to be able to under­stand the con­se­quences of the deci­sions they make. This means hav­ing a clear social agen­da, but also comes down to being able to have mature dis­cus­sions with staff around issues like diver­si­ty and being aware of the issues staff or con­sumers might face.”

This is key for the con­scious CEO. This leader is one who not only under­stands the chang­ing nature of their cur­rent and emerg­ing work­force, but also has a sol­id grip on the indi­vid­ual and col­lec­tive needs of their cus­tomer. On top of this, they’re well versed in the future of work in an increas­ing­ly remote, asyn­chro­nous world.

Evans points to a bank­ing client that FromHere­On is cur­rent­ly help­ing to trans­form from a finan­cial insti­tu­tion into “a human-cen­tred, ser­vice-dri­ven organ­i­sa­tion”, a large part of which has includ­ed exam­in­ing the business’s inter­nal cul­ture. Anoth­er tele­coms client has just under­gone a sim­i­lar remod­el­ling.

“Both of these were, at their core, cul­tur­al trans­for­ma­tions. We observed a shift in these clients from author­i­ta­tive con­trol to a net­worked approach that seeks to meet all stake­hold­er needs,” he says.

Anoth­er con­sid­er­a­tion for agile, aware CEOs should be tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion. The con­scious CEO appre­ci­ates the accel­er­a­tion of dig­i­tal and the doors it can open for their mar­ket and their work­force. There is a need to under­stand how dif­fer­ent types of tech­nol­o­gy, from arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to the inter­net of things, under­pins the val­ue they bring to the table.

In an increas­ing­ly bor­der­less, dig­i­tal world where com­pa­nies are man­ag­ing trans­for­ma­tion across coun­tries and con­ti­nents, they need to be able to “design for com­plex­i­ty and scale too”, says Evans. “This requires a very par­tic­u­lar type of toolk­it and a human-cen­tred approach.”

Unlocking consciousness through connected partnerships

For busi­ness­es to thrive, CEOs must also show that out­per­form­ing com­pa­nies are report­ing a height­ened empha­sis on part­ner­ships. Some 63 per cent of top per­form­ers iden­ti­fy col­lab­o­ra­tions as hav­ing increased in impor­tance over the past year, com­pared with just 31 per cent of under­per­form­ers.

Dri­ving this shift has been the increased adop­tion of cloud com­put­ing ser­vices, which has giv­en rise to the XaaS busi­ness mod­el. It is a sea-change that calls for CEOs to lean on fric­tion­less part­ners that can plug and play instan­ta­neous­ly, as a seam­less exten­sion of their enter­prise.

But these part­ner­ships only work if they’re built on a mind­set of alliance. “CEOs should work with sup­pli­ers, part­ners and con­sul­tants that embed them­selves into their team and func­tion as a sin­gle, flu­id group,” says Evans. “This will lead to greater trust through more frank dis­cus­sions and a will­ing­ness to be open and vul­ner­a­ble, strip­ping back the tra­di­tion­al order.

“Tru­ly con­scious lead­ers will be open to aban­don­ing the mas­ter-serf dynam­ic that has per­me­at­ed exter­nal rela­tion­ships for years.”

This plays into the cul­ture piece of the puz­zle, too: if the per­son in the top seat is open to build­ing part­ner­ships and broad­en­ing their aware­ness, then the whole organ­i­sa­tion will func­tion bet­ter.

Evans says CEOs don’t need to appear to have all the answers as they once did, but they need to know how to ask the right ques­tions.

“They need to be able to rely on a net­work of trust­ed part­ners, such as a busi­ness design firm, to shape their future organ­i­sa­tion. By see­ing the world as a col­lec­tion of poten­tial part­ner­ships inside and out­side the organ­i­sa­tion, con­scious CEOs and their busi­ness­es will remain rel­e­vant and pros­per. This is the end of busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion as we have known it, and will ush­er-in the mod­ern, real-time enter­prise.”

For more infor­ma­tion, please vis­it www.fromhereon.com

Pro­mot­ed by FromHere­On