ceo challenge 2015 what is on the agenda?

The ‘CEO Challenge 2015’ was a survey produced by The Conference Board, conducted across 943 business leaders in 2015. The survey was looking to provide insight into the strategic and tactical priorities of CEO’s worldwide, and the results show that they are putting their people and high-performance cultures at the top of their priority lists.

What were the results?

Across all 5 global regions surveyed, one of the top three concerns listed by senior executives was “changes in consumer behaviour”.  In fact, the UK respondents cited ‘social media management, ‘changes in consumer behaviour’ and ‘cyber security’ to be the three biggest challenges they faced that year.

Globally, the top strategic priority was to develop human capital and in Europe, including the UK, the top priority was customer relationships.

How were CEO’s planning to tackle these priorities?

In the UK, the top strategies of CEO’s for running a high-performance organisation was to:

  1. Create a strong customer-centric culture
  2. Create and maintain a culture of accountability
  3. Empower employees to make appropriate decisions and execute them effectively.

Globally, the following strategies were at the top of the priority list as ways to tackle the greatest challenges expected by CEO’s.

  1. Strengthening human capital through a grow-your-own strategy

Effective use of human capital resources is their top priority, and their strategies to improve productivity focus on greater leadership effectiveness, building a performance culture, providing training to upskill their workforce, and raising engagement.

  1. Building a stronger and more dynamic relationship with customers

CEOs are now placing more emphasis on what their customers are trying to achieve rather than on what their companies are trying to sell. Judging by the importance they place on customer-centric strategies to meet an array of challenges, understanding changing customer needs is at the centre of their growth strategies.

What do organisations need to do?

The results of this survey indicate a real need for an era of culture change. Shifting employee thinking to a customer-centric view is a process which needs to be adopted by every member of the organisation, starting at the top.

The way consumers conduct business has been rapidly changing in the last 5 years.  As the use of social media platforms increase, customers expect responses immediately and many more avenues of communication with an organisation have been opened.

Customer relationship management has a different meaning now to what it did as little as 3 years ago.  Businesses are needing to change their processes, technology and most importantly, mindset. Not only that, they need to do it quickly in an ever-evolving world.

Brightstone understand the change management process and work with organisations across all sectorshttps://www.brightstone.co.uk/success-stories/ to introduce a culture change. We help senior management truly understand their current culture and work towards a new culture which is well defined and understood by everyone. This is what we do best.

If you, like these CEO’s surveyed, feel the need for a change to keep up with the challenges and changes of the modern world, give Richard at Brighstone a call and see how he can help.