The CEO Role, Responsibilities & Playbook for 2024
The CEOs Role & Responsibilities, Key Challenges & Playbook 2024
- Theme analysis of studies by McKinsey, Bain, PWC & Deloitte
- Unique capability tests to benchmark where you are on strategy and execution
The Role Of The CEO In 2024
We analyzed 100 CEO Job Descriptions between March and April 2024; these are the most common general requirements in priority order.
- Strategic Oversight: Define, align and deliver the organisation’s vision, strategy, values and objectives (100%)
- Operational oversight: Ensure that the organisation has the resources, skills and capability to enable it to deliver strategy (70%)
- Financial Management: Drive budgeting, forecasting, and financial reporting processes to inform strategic decision-making (68%)
- Senior Leadership: Lead, manage and motivate the Executive Team, and build a high-performing executive team (66%)
- Culture: Shaping and leading on organisational culture to retain and attract colleagues. (44%)
- Expansion Planning: Develop strategies for expansion e.g. targeting new regions and markets. (42%)
- Key Project Oversight: Oversee the delivery of key projects, driving satisfaction and retention. (17%)
- Internal Communications: Effective internal communications, people management, and recruitment practices. (15%)
- Responsiveness: Assess and respond to the operating environment, identifying opportunities and mitigating risks. (8%)
- PR: Act as a spokesperson for our company. (4%)
- Fundraising: Secure venture capital and manage investor relations. (4%)
- Role Model: Be an inspirational and inclusive role model to staff, exhibiting the behaviours we expect of all our people. (2%)
CEO Salaries
Our research found that although the roles were similar, the average salaries for Chief Executive Officers varied massively between countries. For example:
- The estimated total pay for a Chief Executive Officer is $413,907 per year in the United States area, with an average salary of $177,345 per year.
- The average salary for CEO is £169,127 per year in the United Kingdom. The average additional cash compensation for a CEO in the United Kingdom is £84,146
It was much lower in countries like Spain.
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Execution Capability Test
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Summary Of CEO Challenges In 2024
- Strategists have new options to consider and new challenges to resolve as they consider how to create and capture value today.
- Companies have historically differentiated on traditional sources of advantage: cost, quality, and focus. Those are still important, but advantage can now also be created in other ways, such as new business models, or new ways to reach consumers with immersive, personalized, and unique experiences.
- Regulatory changes and digital technologies have helped make it easier for new entrants—whether start-ups built with new capabilities or companies from another industry—to challenge legacy incumbents. This has changed who a competitor is (or might be) and challenged companies who were not anticipating competition from beyond their sector.
- Technologies from AI to biotech and space tech are creating new business opportunities and new sources of competitive advantage. Digital technologies have enhanced supply chain optimization and bolstered back-end functions that can enable powerful cost and quality gains. Perhaps even more visibly, they can pave the way for innovative, tech-enabled business models and new ways to reach and build relationships with consumers through direct, digital channels. Yet they also impose new costs and require new skills and processes that may raise the complexity of strategic options.
- Winning strategy today needs to reflect the fast-paced, disruptive environment that companies operate in, while managing the hard tension between commitment and flexibility in markets that are changing rapidly.
- When we speak with executives about their broad aspirations for strategy, the goal is not only for it to be better—more robust, data-driven, well-articulated, and actionable—but also more resilient, to accommodate the variety of challenges leadership teams face today due to the pace of change.
- While it’s as critical as ever for organizations to align on a “north star” ambition, it’s equally important to speed up the cycle of a company’s strategy refresh and strategic plan reviews to make sure that day-to-day execution and investments adapt to new conditions.
- Execution is a critical part of strategy, yet organizations too often tend to treat it separately. Strategists and operators should work together to both ensure insights from the frontlines are considered when setting and evolving strategy and to get the feedback needed to quickly assess the potential of their strategic choices. For example, prototyping and proofs-of-concept can allow businesses to test and revise their ideas in the real world to satisfy the “burden of proof” before making significant financial commitments.
- Experts in organizational change have long known that efforts to steer a new course require bold action. As leaders consider translating their strategy into new behavior, they should consider decisive and differentiated investments in a company’s capabilities and management systems.
- Source
- The biggest story of this year (or decade) was the arrival of generative AI (gen AI). This is the real deal, folks. Thousands of companies in every industry and in every part of the world are already using a simple gen AI interface to radically transform every imaginable business activity.
- As the digital era enters middle age, most companies have at least started a digital and AI transformation. But few are getting the results they want; that’s usually because they haven’t done the fundamental organizational rewiring needed to extract maximum value from the hard work of digitizing the enterprise.
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Every company needs to know what their superpower is today.
Ask yourself, what is uniquely true about your skill set and competencies as an organization that enables you to have competitive advantage?
What or how do those capabilities need to change?
- And as an organization, if you’re not clear on how you’re building new muscles to compete differently, odds are you’re going to be left behind.
- For many, it will mean: turbocharge your core, by using technology to power growth. For others, it might mean: grow where you know, by improving sales productivity. And, as always, the most constant of all is: combine healthy organic growth with serial acquisitions.
- It’s a funny thing: growth is always job one for CEOs, but the path to get there is never clear. Sometimes it’s about seizing market share; sometimes it’s about expanding into new markets; sometimes it’s about making a left turn into something completely new.
- A high return on invested capital (ROIC) indicates a business model powered by a competitive advantage. Companies that generate stronger returns attract and deploy more capital, a virtuous cycle that enables them to grow faster and generate still higher returns.
- Business leaders need to follow a holistic growth blueprint consisting of three core elements: a bold aspiration and accompanying mindset, the right enablers embedded in the organization, and clear pathways in the form of a coherent set of growth initiatives.
- Few of the people responsible for designing a firm’s customer experiences have ever been involved in delivering those same experiences. The front line is in a privileged position when it comes to understanding customers. In fact, these workers already generate many of the best ideas for delighting customers.
- Rethinking talent strategy through the lens of the individual worker’s full potential to create a desirable place to work, tap into the discretionary energy, and unlock hidden talent pools.
- Build a culture of growth, a mindset of growth, and a culture of innovation.
- 80 percent of most companies’ reported growth comes from the core of their business. So ask yourself - Where will I get incremental growth from the core?
- Sources
- AI will create disruption across industries; assess your risk, set an ambition, and develop a strategic path forward.
- AI will spur disruption across all sectors with varying degrees; the speed and form will be shaped by the interplay of customer expectations, technological evolution, and regulation.
- AI will create brand new business models as disruptive as those born from prior groundbreaking technological innovations (e.g., Internet, mobile), reshaping the playing field and what it takes to win.
- AI will do repetitive, arduous tasks (increasing productivity), as well as personalized and timely communications at scale (improving customer experience and sales).
- Estimated labor time automated - Management, finance ops (40%). Legal, IT (37%), Research 36%, Marketing & PR (32%), Admin (31%), Sales & Customer Service (29%).
- AI’s impact on what customers value and how companies operate will determine sector-level disruption.
- The days of menial jobs that leave us feeling less like humans and more like placeholders for machines may soon be behind us.
- There is still substantial room for improvement in helping workers find jobs that will tap their full potential.
- 56% of workers feel the pandemic forced them to rethink work-life balance. But profound changes were starting to surface even before the pandemic.
- Business leaders are aware that they need to change the way they think about their workforce to stay ahead of the whirlwind of technological and sociological changes. Yet they struggle to determine which actions will make a real difference.
- Winning firms will pivot from being talent takers to talent makers. This requires scaling investments in learning, thinking laterally about career journeys, and cultivating a growth mindset in their organization.
- Leaders will stop managing workers like machines, instead supporting them to build personal capacity and create a career that matches their individual idea of a meaningful life. As part of this, leaders will reorganize workflows to help individuals best utilize their uniquely human advantages.
- Winning firms will build an organization that offers a sense of belonging and opportunity for its many unique workers while remaining united through a shared vision and communal values.
- Rethinking talent strategy through the lens of the individual worker’s full potential will be transformative. It will place firms ahead of their competitors as a desirable place to work, allow them to better tap into the discretionary energy of their people, and enable them to unlock hidden talent pools that already exist within the organization.
- Successful businesses will celebrate and cultivate their different groups, while also working hard to ensure their organization continues to operate as a cohesive whole. Inclusive teaming will be critical to this, especially in cross-functional settings.
- Source
- Sitting still is not an option, and answering foundational questions can help illuminate your path forward: Are we differentiated and fit for growth? Is our technology holding us back? Do we have the right portfolio of businesses?
- Your legacy rests on your ability to lead the reinvention of your organization to capitalize on change and deliver returns to stakeholders. To be effective change agents, CEOs rely on an important, intangible asset: trust.
- Competitive intensity is poised to increase, making it more difficult for a CEO to take a wait-and-see approach.
- You and the board have very different responsibilities, but you have the same goal: securing the future of the company. To accomplish that, your relationship with the board is of paramount importance. Yet there are competing relationships that need your attention as these stakeholders can wield power over your vision.
- Your company can never be too productive or too profitable. Fine-tuning the business to deliver stronger growth is harder amid today’s high interest rates, “sticky” inflation and geopolitical fractures. Cutting costs may work in the short-term, but possibly at the cost of impairing your company’s potential.
- A better path to consider is flipping the cost-cutting script – judge the importance of an expense by its value to the business strategy, not by its cost.
- Accomplishing everything you envision calls for a new equation for how business gets done.
- 45% of global CEOs think their organization will no longer be economically viable in 10 years' time, if it continues on its current course, up from 39% in 2023.
- Having a well-oiled, profit-making machine is good for today, but a poor strategic plan for delivering long-term value. Your choice is stark: either change the company to enable survival or risk having change forced upon it.
- 44% of US CEOs see GenAI boosting profit this year. Generative AI shows tangible results, boost employee efficiency, make products better and boost profits.
- Technology is at the core of your business model reinvention. But for all of the leaps forward in computing, many companies struggle to realize ROI from technology. The ones who succeed at unlocking digital value know that it’s how they employ technology that makes the difference. They are outcomes obsessed and view breakthroughs, such as generative AI, as a tool that can deliver specific financial targets.
- While excitement and budgets are rising for cutting-edge security programmes, progress on actually improving security is sluggish, even stagnant. 30% of respondents have revenues of $10 billion or more — shows considerable room for improvement in cybersecurity. Consider these findings. Breach costs and the number of high-dollar breaches continue to increase. Although cloud attacks are the top cyber concern, about one-third of organisations have no risk management plan to address cloud service provider challenges.
- Source
2024 Priorities & Plays
- Ensure you have a source of advantage, ideally a superpower.
- Get ahead of comp. and win the battle of customer value and experience.
- Ensure the people interacting with customers are part of your strategic discussions.
- Incorporating technological change - AI, Machine Learning, Automations. to compete on productivity, employee and customer experience.
- Develop and maintain a super healthy core business, this is the engine room of growth.
- Modernize approaches to strategy execution with better management systems.
- Lead on talent management, development, and hiring, and leverage employees uniquely human advantage in areas like creativity, empathy and relationship building.
The Good Strategy Test
- 2 - 4 mins
- Answer 7 questions and discover how good your strategic capability is, and where it might be improved.
Execution Capability Test
- 2 - 4 mins
- Answer 5 questions and discover how good your execution capability is, and where it might be improved.
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