“I’ve never seen a period of time that’s been so stressful for CEOs”

For the first edition of The Loop of 2022, we spoke to Kevin Cashman, Global Leader on CEO & Executive Development at Korn Ferry. He argues that leaders are shifting from an ‘executive’ to an ‘enterprise’ style of leadership as a result of the pandemic, and that getting the balance right between their businesses performing and transforming is crucial.

How, in your view, has the pandemic impacted the demands that are placed on the shoulders of CEOs

I’ve never seen a period of time that’s been so stressful for CEOs. CEOs have been retiring early, and leaders who could picture a 10-year roadmap for their company could not see themselves in the role even 18 months down the line – that’s very indicative of how people felt even if they couldn’t articulate it.
 
Personally, it has drained people’s resilience, energy and resources. And it’s not only a lonely job, it’s an unbelievably stressful and energy draining job.
 
Ultimately, leaders multiply energy because without human energy there is no fulfilling the organisational strategy. But to multiply energy CEOs have to have it and it’s been really tough to have it during the pandemic.
 
Professionally, we’ve seen innovations happen faster than ever before. There’s nothing like a crisis to accelerate change and that’s what happened; CEOs tried things they hadn’t tried before. In the beginning of the pandemic maybe it was a little bit of panic and reactivity, but then people started to enact not just reactive strategies but started to invest in their long term, particularly technological, strategies.
 
During the pandemic, I suffered a near-fatal accident which required a lengthy stay in the hospital, which, on reflection, taught me a huge amount that can be applied to CEOs.
 
I had to go on a journey, like a lot of our CEOs have had to. Do I want to come back? Do I want to retire? I ended up facing a lot of things in a dramatic way, like our clients have been facing during this time. I’ve come back and the work has been more enjoyable, more meaningful, more purposeful. The ideas of resilience and purpose are life or death to CEOs and to all of us.
 
What differentiates the traditional pre-pandemic CEO leadership style from ‘agile’ leadership that many have called to be adopted?
 
We have slightly different terminology. What we’ve been seeing for quite some time, and has been accelerated, is the move from executive leadership to enterprise leadership.
 
Executive leadership is more silo-based, focused on the organisation or specific divisions or functions. That’s been the prevailing model of leadership for a long time, for better or worse, from tribes to religious and governmental institutions, which tend to be hierarchical and function in a vertical manner.
 
The enterprise model (what we might call agile) is much more horizontal. It operates across all functions, geographies, and divisions to strategise but also inspiring across with purpose; collaborating across to innovate; serving across a multitude of constituencies and ecosystems.
 
However, moving from executive to enterprise is like an athlete moving from one sport to another. They are conditioned to perform in one, and now they have to transition to the other, where they need different muscles and attributes.
 
These enterprise leaders tend to share five mindsets that open their capabilities up to make a bigger impact. These mindsets are purpose, courage, awareness of self and others, inclusion and integrated thinking. While they’re not all of the mindsets that are needed, these five mindsets can create more impact with people’s capabilities. If someone is a great thinker, but lacks personal and interpersonal courage, their gift, their capability for strategy will be inhibited.
 
It impacts performance, and we need to keep these mind-sets more open to deal with the ambiguity and uncertainty that’s coming after the pandemic.
 
What do you feel are the key goals looking ahead for these more agile CEOs and their organisations?
 
I think there’s some combination of how we keep innovation going as if the next challenge is coming. So if we don’t innovate continuously, we’re at risk. The second thing I think needs to be attended to is resilience in the workplace. How are CEOs and the organisation going to better maintain their energy?
 
Another is how are we going to collaborate in this new world? Collaboration gives us energy. Innovation is a collaborative sport. An innovation researcher named Steven Johnson did an analysis of major historical breakthroughs, like heat and glass, and how they changed the world. His conclusion is, there was always a great “inventor”, but it was always grand collaboration that got attached to some individual. But all innovation was really grand collaboration.
 
The final one is how can inclusion be more than a metric for an organisation? How can it bring about real meaning that changes the game? I think it’s all good stuff, but sometimes it’s more about the image of the company than what they’re really meaningfully committed to.
 
John de Yonge of Ernst & Young has called on CEOs to seize the opportunity to transform from ‘pragmatic’ leaders who recognise the need for change but haven’t committed to it, into ‘value visionaries’ who embrace new practices to reframe their enterprises, or risk seeing their organisations being left behind. Do you agree with that sentiment?
 
It is essential and it was demonstrated in the pandemic, but it’s a constant need. Organisations will not succeed or sustain themselves unless they’re constantly oscillating between “performing” and “transforming”. These two realities are always interacting and always important. Some companies are very much a perform culture and they succeed now, and in the short term, but if they don’t transform, they’ll be gone. However, if companies are always in transform mode, they wear out and have a hard time converting their transformation into real performance.
 
So the constant oscillation between perform and transform is what sustains value creation. And it’s not just a dualistic model. It is a holistic model, meaning, perform cultures need to transform their perform and transform cultures, which are rarer, need to perform their transform, make it real.
 
And ideally, those things are all going on in the same organisation. Organisations and leaders that go beyond “survival of the most adaptable” to “oscillating constantly between perform and transform” will own the future.
 
What information would be helpful to aid leaders in becoming more agile, or as you put it earlier, more representative of the enterprise leadership model?
 
I think technology or information that can feed integrated thinking adds tremendous value in this new world. Technology or information that reveals current patterns, and also the patterns that are yet to emerge. CEOs today need to see how the dots are currently connected while adding new dots and reconnecting them to innovate. Technology that does this will completely change the game.
 
What we also see in our research is that the leaders who are clear and driven, but also empathetic, possess a type of athleticism that reconciles opposites. Like most leadership characteristics, it’s the configuration and combination of opposites that allow us to be agile. So information that lets leaders know when to apply an edge and when to apply the empathy, and being aware enough to get that right. When empathy and drive are more balanced, it adds tremendous value.