Trust me on this one: Your C-Suite is not beyond reproach. They still need to adhere to company policies, have levels of achievement/accomplishments, commit to and prove they are growing their leadership skills and most importantly, they need to be good at their job and be outstanding leaders.
Here are 3 signals to look for that indicate you may have some issues to address 'upstairs':
1. Your company's current performance is not meeting forecasts. This concern normally flows straight downhill. Note which departments seem to suffer or fail to meet expectations or timelines most frequently. Instead of swinging towards middle management, look up the chain of command.
Quite often this is where we find
-Lack of clarity to their teams
- Personality clashes between department heads limiting progress
- Inability to create a successful plan
- Blame
2. You hear murmurings of issues, but don't want to risk C-team collegiality.
It's your responsibility to the company and to your employees to ensure safe work environments for your people. There is a direct correlation between hindered sales, missed targets, diminished profitability and employee churn.
3. The 'I've been here forever + Peter Principle players'.
Longevity and tenure alone are not enough at these levels of leadership. Require your leadership team to actively demonstrate how they are still continuously improving their skills to run their arena. Lip service is useless. Provable facts of participation.
Quick test: Ask what metrics are most critical for their teams. If they provide numbers commonly known from 2+ years ago, they are not paying attention to current trends and competitive adjustments in the market. Insist that your leaders are constantly adjusting metrics based on KPIs relative to your business. After this, it is important they can teach others how to achieve these numbers, what data shaped their decisions and open conversation to other data pointing to further changes. In addition, they should have a regularly scheduled exercise of monitoring compensation as it aligns to company objectives.
To close for the moment, in addition to poor business guidance, we are hearing about too many 'bad apples' in leadership.
HR standards are for everyone and the leaders must uphold the highest levels of integrity, not the lowest. Oh the stories I could tell you. Not historical anecdotes, you must ensure your leaders are in check today.
