How to Become a Chief Executive
What Does it Take to Become a CEO in Your Organization?
What personality types become CEOs? What other CEO qualifications count? You need to learn the keys to success for senior executives in your own culture.
Every aspiring CEO wants to know what it takes to make it to the top. The critical point is that the required CEO qualifications depend on the situation. Also, there is fashion to consider. What it took to get to the top 30 years ago won’t work today. For example, leadership integrity and a concern for the environment are much more important now than they were even 10 years ago.
Senior Executive Personality Types
As in politics, the key to getting elected to a senior position is to have qualities most people in your organization admire. A wide range of personality types can make it to the top, so long as there is a match between your personality and that of your target organization. For example, advertising agencies and other sales-oriented companies are dominated by very dynamic personalities, people who are very lively, outgoing and socially confident. To get selected for senior roles in these companies, you need to have this sort of personality. Conversely, in highly technical, scientific and engineering companies, you can be on the quiet side if you have impressive credentials: the right academic qualifications and a track record of major achievement in your field. To become CEO in a pharmaceutical company with a strong research tradition, you need an exceptional research track record. You could become CEO in such a company even if your personality is on the quiet side.
At both ends of this spectrum, you still need a strong personality. Even if you are quiet, you must have strong views on key issues, convey a sense of knowing what to do and the assertiveness to make a strong case for your preferred decisions. People who elect you must be confident that you know better what to do than other candidates.
Of course, you need qualities other than the right personality to become a CEO. Knowing what to do is not limited to technical content. You also need a strong commercial understanding, a deep awareness of your market and an ability to manage people. Being able to manage people also varies across organizational cultures. Lively, dynamic employees will find it hard to get inspired by a quiet, reserved leader. And being lively won’t impress scientific types if you don’t know what you are talking about.
There is also a continuum from knowledge intensive businesses to those that are quite low tech. For example, you don’t need the same degree of intelligence or formal education to run a facilities management business where most of your employees are cleaners and maintenance people as you would need to run a high tech company. This comment may not be politically correct, but the reality is that aspiring CEOs need to compete with their peers on an intellectual level. You may not need to be an Einstein to run even the most knowledge intensive companies but you need to be at least as smart as competing CEO candidates. Otherwise you won’t impress your prospective supporters as really knowing what you are talking about.
Study the executives above you in your target organization to gain insight into what it took them to succeed. Asking them this question is a good way of finding out and also of creating an ally. People are flattered to be asked about their keys to success.
