What is a CEO's biggest challenge today?

The important ones are customer acquisition in post-COVID-19 times, emerging technologies and trends, new consumer demands and expectations, and more digital and agile competitors. But according to Gartner, 35% of leaders believe that the biggest challenges in 2021 come from within their organisation.

The lack of internal cohesion to align the business, which prevents management from making better and faster decisions, depriving the company of the necessary tools to face today's ever-changing landscape, jeopardises the future of any organisation.

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The Internal Challenges

Getting everyone on the same page

In many organisations, the mission and vision statements only appear on a section of their website, but it is never truly incorporated into the day-to-day culture. As a result, teams are unsure of the critical value drivers, so they don't connect what they do with why they're doing it.

And when it comes to how their performance is measured, employee KPIs are often developed in silos, so there is limited connectivity with how the business will achieve its objectives or measure how far they are from them. This separation of the vision from measurable goals increases the risk of making decisions based on the wrong information.

Getting the best out of operations

Most companies function with inefficient and ineffective processes that don't align with their actual values or objectives. Many are burdened with legacy processes created early in operations and didn't evolve to leverage the data and technology. Manual data entry is more common than many businesses like to admit, which often results in subjective information and process duplication. These inefficiencies make it challenging for employees to add value outside of administration.

Data

Companies generate masses of data at a given point in time. However, this has traditionally been seen as a by-product of operations, with limited investment in a robust information strategy and data model that serves the business, align with its objectives and is designed around the product offering. Even with the use of technology, many teams still develop manual reports that create challenges for real-time decision making; the information is open to error, inconsistent and is usually out of date by the time it is presented.

So, how to approach this issue?

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The Four Key Components of an Executable Solution

To have a solution that delivers, it must incorporate vision, operations, people and data. It's only when these components are strategically and intentionally combined, a solution that best enables the execution of the CEO's vision is created:

1. Vision - getting everyone on the same page, communicating the goals and objectives, and planning how to achieve them;
2. Operations – designing optimum processes to reflect the vision and objectives, bringing together key stakeholders using technology and data in a meaningful, efficient, and effective way;
3. People - aligning what the people do with the vision and helping them achieve goals by using data to drive their daily activities and future planning;
4. Data - having the data organized around the business model, product and customer. This results in a data-driven culture where decisions are made on objective facts that give the true state of the business.

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A solution for CEOs

A solution that combines vision, people, operations and data, enables CEO's and leaders to execute and achieve their goals through clear communication to all stakeholders.

With the vast amount of information available, working in confusion has become the new norm. Strong alignment between vision, people, operations and data will help address the biggest challenges CEOs face: internal cohesion to foster better and faster decision-making, get their entire team on board with their vision, and drive results.

This is a critical step towards identifying unmet needs, goals, opportunities and challenges of all departments and aspects of a business. Backed by the executive team, it will enable the organisation to meet its objectives. In addition, when you intentionally combine the company's data and analytics into the mix, you get a solution that supports the company's growth and continuous improvement both upstream and downstream.

Now isn't that what every CEO wants?