The Value Added C-Suite

For the C-Suite to become value added, the C-Suite level executives must become value added leaders within the organization. Senior leadership must learn how to recruit, train, nurture, maintain and retain these value added individuals.  For an organization to do more than just survive – to succeed, it must anticipate its customers’ needs and adjust its direction and momentum so that it is providing what the customer needs in a timelier fashion than its competition. Becoming an anticipatory organization guided by visionary leader is essential for growth. 

If you do not have the resources internally to identify and enhance these value added executive qualities, it is worth the investment to reach out to someone who can assist you in the executive leadership enhancement process.  Hopefully, your C-Suite is populated with intelligent, motivated people who are experts in their specific areas of responsibility.  However, today, that is not enough if you want to stand out as a value added organization.

Ask yourself a few questions about your team or even be brave enough to participate in a team leadership assessment. Take a strong look at your organization’s culture.  There are professional assessment tools available to assist in unraveling this cultural puzzle. Research suggests that numerous outcomes have been associated either directly or indirectly with organizational culture. A change in culture cannot guarantee success but there is plenty of empirical data that suggest a positive and collaborative organizational culture can give your company a competitive edge which is derived from innovation and customer service. Other benefits are team cohesiveness, increased and consistent employee performance, plus increased morale and work ethic.  The team is driven toward greater alignment with the company’s vision.

As individual members of the C-Suite, each team member must understand what it means to be a visionary leader. They have to be a part of the vision and be mission driven. Vision in business requires that you clearly see where you want and need to be in the future and anticipate what you must do to get your organization there. Creating and sustaining a vision for an organization calls for discipline, creativity, and not being afraid to get outside the box.  Just reflect for a few minutes on a few of our visionary leaders of the past hundred years:  Walt Disney, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Mother Theresa and Henry Ford.  They were all outside the box, but I did not even have to tell you who they were or what their companies or accomplishments were.  Why? Because their visions became a reality and the way they did/do business positively impacted the world.

Your leaders have to be effective communicators, both verbally and with the written word. Non-verbally, through their actions, both within the organization and in the community, your leaders must demonstrate what it means to live and lead a value driven life. Employees take great pride in knowing that “the boss” is not just respected at work but in their own community, as well.

Value added leaders must understand what it means to be anticipatory, especially as you create your strategic plan or your roadmap to success. According to Daniel Burrus, a technological futurist and expert on the Anticipatory Organization, “To thrive in this new age of hyper-change and growing uncertainty, it is now an imperative to learn a new competency—how to accurately anticipate the future.”

“This may seem impossible, but it’s not. The future is there for you to see when you know where and how to look for it. And when you and your employees master this skill, you’ll be able to create what I call an Anticipatory Organization.  I have developed a way of separating what I call hard trends from soft trends. A hard trend is a projection based on measurable, tangible, and fully predictable facts, events, or objects. It’s something that will happen: a future fact that cannot be changed. In contrast, a soft trend is a projection based on statistics that have the appearance of being tangible, fully predictable facts. It’s something that might happen.”

These are all common sense traits and talents but sometimes we put them aside and do not polish these gems of success. It is easy to get caught in the trap of what is due today and not concentrate on what will make tomorrow a brighter day for you and the organization and the people who support your mission. This is the team that will help you realize your vision. Invest in the development of value added service and the people who can anticipate how to make that happen.

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