Work It Podcast: A CEO’s first 100-day action plan

While CEOs are an exclusive group of individuals, their decisions have a profound impact on many lives. What is the first order of business for new CEOs transiting into a company?

"CEO whisperer" Dr Ty Wiggins from Russell Reynolds Associates shares his observations after having built a career advising top business leaders.

Jump to these key moments:

• 4:10 Key mistakes
• 6:26 First order of business
• 11:13 Difference between first time and seasoned CEOs
• 15:44 Making changes humanely
• 24:12 AMA: Boss having crisis of confidence

Here's an excerpt from the podcast:

Tiffany Ang:
A lot of people say that CEOs don't necessarily have to go into the trenches with their people. They don't need to understand every single part of the operations. So when you say communicate, is the CEO expected to communicate with everyone, or just selected people in their company.  

Dr Ty Wiggins:

I think from a CEO point of view, it's everyone. So the trenches comment that you made, the understanding the operations, CEOs that I see do this transition really well, they do take the time to get to a variety of levels within the organisation to really understand what's going on.

So one of the key differences I see between a first time CEO and a second or third time CEO is the first time CEO spends a lot of time looking at the numbers, looking at the structure, the operating model. They tend to have rapid sequence of half an hour meetings with everyone trying to glean all the information. They're trying to understand the entire organisation in one go.

Second and third time CEOs take a view of “I can read the financials over the weekend. The CFO (chief financial officer) can give me that brief. The CMO (chief marketing officer) can talk to me about the numbers. What I need to understand is the people.”

So you see them setting up one-and-a-half to two-hour long meetings with individuals and doing it at multiple skip levels, because the way they articulate it is everything that I need to understand about why this business is where it's at and how it gets to where it needs to be, is trapped with the individuals.

If I don't understand what's going on here, I'm not really going to be understanding the business. And this concept of the culture being aligned to where the CEO wants to take the organisation, I think spending time and understanding the operations is really important.

And one of the things that I suggest to clients as a bit of a sort of test to see if they are asking this is I say to them, “Go to multiple levels and ask people to explain some of the workarounds that they have.”

Every organisation has workarounds and this is what you learn that isn't in the manual. So understand what part of the process, what part of the technology, what part of the structure doesn't work. And the employees have probably tried to tell people, without success, and go, “Well, we'll just build this workaround and we'll make it work for the customer. We'll make it work for the organisation, regardless of management support.”

Find those things, understand why they're there. Fix some of those early and you'll really win some hearts and minds.