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Harness CEO feedback to enhance organisational performance.
CEO Effectiveness Surveys Overview
One of the most important functions of a board is to select, appoint, remunerate, develop, encourage, challenge, and performance-manage its CEO. Doing those functions well can make all the difference to an organisation’s success.
Setting a high bar for reviewing the CEO’s performance sets a high tone for measuring and driving performance across the executive team and the entire organisation.
Most CEOs value detailed insights and suggestions provided by a well-designed review of their performance and effectiveness. They typically prefer clear, direct feedback delivered formally and structured. However, many CEOs do not receive regular, comprehensive, and constructive feedback.
Benefits of a CEO Effectiveness Survey
A good CEO effectiveness review will help measure the extent to which your CEO is meeting your board’s expectations. It will also identify any gaps in performance and effectiveness that need to be closed.
Numerous behavioural and other assessment tools can assist CEOs in understanding their personality types and tendencies in specific areas. However, very few assessments are explicitly tailored to measure CEO effectiveness. That’s why we developed the CEO Effectiveness Survey, designed specifically for CEOs.
Our CEO Effectiveness Survey and resulting CEO Effectiveness Report offer the following benefits:
- Enhanced self-awareness: Helps your CEO understand discrepancies between their self-perception and how they are perceived by the board and direct reports, fostering self-awareness and guiding change strategies.
- CEO attribute ranking survey: When included in the report, it helps align the board around critical CEO attributes for the organisation’s current lifecycle stage. This alignment enables the board and CEO to amplify strengths in these crucial areas.
- Development focus: Facilitates board alignment on CEO development priorities, enabling collaboration with the CEO to create a tailored development plan.
Our CEO Attribute Ranking Survey
Whilst we have identified 36 attributes of a great CEO, not all CEO attributes should be ranked equally. Further, some attributes will be more important and some less necessary at different stages of an organisation’s journey. For example, an organisation in the start-up or early growth phase will need a CEO with attributes different from those of a company going through significant change, consolidation, or a more mature phase.
To facilitate alignment among directors on crucial CEO attributes—whether to support the development of the current CEO or to prepare for CEO succession—we offer the CEO Attribute Ranking Survey. Directors and/or direct reports are prompted to assess the importance of various CEO attributes by assigning ratings of 1, 2, or 3 to each attribute. They must allocate 12 ratings of 1, 12 ratings of 2, and 12 ratings of 3 out of a total of 36 ratings, where 1 indicates lowest importance, 2 signifies medium importance, and 3 denotes highest importance.
The resulting CEO Attribute Ranking Report assists boards in achieving consensus on the most critical CEO attributes for their organisation. Boards often find substantial value in discussing and resolving differences in perspectives regarding desired CEO attributes.
Furthermore, this attribute ranking process allows for the calibration of each attribute’s importance, significantly enhancing the insights provided by the CEO Effectiveness Report, which follows the completion of the CEO Effectiveness Survey.
Our CEO Effectiveness Survey Process
We recommend completing the CEO Attribute Ranking Survey alongside the CEO Effectiveness Survey for optimal insight. However, the CEO Effectiveness Survey can also be conducted independently.
Both surveys are typically completed by the CEO and the board and often by the CEO’s direct reports. Additional responses enhance the process, especially when respondents provide constructive written feedback on the CEO’s strengths and areas for improvement. These comments often align with the perceived strengths and improvement areas identified in the survey ratings, further enriching the CEO Effectiveness Report.
We or one of our partners can debrief the Chair or another designated individual on interpreting and supporting action based on the CEO Effectiveness Report. We also offer assistance with debriefing the CEO and developing a tailored CEO development plan.
Please contact us for further assistance in this area.
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Our Surveys
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Board Benchmarking has developed other surveys and reports to help boards achieve organisational success. These surveys are supported by expert advice on how to interpret and act on the results by our Global Board Advisory Partners.
