I’ve been doing some research about CEO concerns right now and have found it comes down to these key themes:

• People and culture
•  Leadership and decision making
• Cost management and improving the bottom line
• Growth by finding new revenue streams and innovation
• Productivity
• Risk management

You could also throw in brand and reputation risks as a standalone theme given the current environment and it’s a topic on everyone’s lips, particularly personal brand risks.

I’ve broken these issues down a little more based on the various research reports I’ve read and because I want to get to the heart of them because,

If you don’t understand or can’t see a problem, you can’t help fix it.

At the end of the day, business is really just problem-solving.

And that’s what we’re good at, right?

So without further ado, here is a breakdown of top of mind issues for CEOs right now:

• Decision making in a downturn
• Maximising business development opportunities, identifying new markets and M&A opportunities
• Driving productivity – Sam Altman reckons, if you’re aiming for anything less than a 20% improvement, you’re aiming too low…
• Increasing profitability
• Reducing cost
• Having the resilience and speed to deal with adversity, withstand shock and adapt fast
• Influencing stakeholders to support necessary change when change fatigue is rife
• Dealing with challenging bosses, disengaged employees and dysfunctional leadership teams
• Having the best talent in value-driving roles, because with the best teams, good things happen – even in tougher times
• Establishing a culture of trust and respect
• Innovation and commercialisation of new ideas and products
• Maintaining morale when cost strategies are being implemented
• Having the right coaching models across the business to create lasting change
• Active risk management risk – pre-empting issues and responses
• Brand and marketing cohesion
• Navigating the regulatory landscape
• Finding time to think
• Figuring out who to trust

No wonder some people can’t sleep!

What do you think? What would you add? How many can you relate to? Why does this matter?

Better yet, how can you help?

Over the next few weeks I’ll be diving into these topics in more depth and sharing some tools to help tackle them, but if you’d like to jump the queue just drop me a note.

Before I sign off:

Something I thought was interesting to emerge from the data was that there’s an appetite for CEOs to maximise their online profiles to drive business.

This wasn’t really a surprise given there’s a glut of totally inadequate profiles, but it shows a massive shift in how CEOs think about how they can use online channels for business development. And that’s going to change the game on places like LinkedIn.

If you’re thinking you’d like to be actually dealing with these problems and figuring out ways to solve them, just reach out. Our Quarterly Game Plan sessions tackle these problems head on.

These workshops are designed to help you set up a plan of attack for the next quarter and give you the clarity and tools you need to achieve more orders, fewer losses to the competition, bigger or more profitable contracts and better customer retention.

Talk soon,

Nina