How to Influence Your CEO

While any good manager, CEOs included, will support an executive coming to a conversation with what they need help with, the truth is CEOs are happiest to have thought partners and help with the number one problem. Because the number one problem is usually the existential threat to the business at any given point in time. To the extent that you are bringing informed data, not just opinions, but informed data or difficult questions that help shape the CEO's thinking on whatever the number one problem is, you're likely to become a partner who has influence over time because you are providing something that the CEO needs help with when they most need help. And your priorities will inherently be aligned with what the CEO thinks is most important for the business.

What could that look like to bring informed data or difficult questions to the CEO?

An example that another CEO shared with me recently was super illuminating. The company had a product that was in market that was the legacy product. It had really well understood performance attributes and the CEO and the exec team had determined that was not the future. It was not the future of the company, but it paid the bills. So it was pretty important. There's a new product that the CEO and the board believes is the future of the company. So it's really hard for the exec team in that situation— because they're trying to figure out, 'Do I bring my resources to the new product that is much earlier stage or do I support legacy thing that's actually operationally sustaining us right now?' And the CEO came in with pretty muddy messaging about it to on one side grow the new product, but on the other side, you'd better not churn out any of the revenue from the old product.

An executive team trying to operate in that situation can't succeed. There was an exec on the team who came forward to the CEO—and this was not surprisingly an exec on the customer side—who was like, 'If you had to pick, would you choose that I renew all the customers on the new product, even though it's a much smaller number of them? Do you want that to be 100% or do you want me to hit the revenue metric that we need to hit with the old product? You get to pick one and trade off the other.' The question was so clarifying because that executive brought forward a bunch of data to show why they didn't have the resources to do both. So the CEO was like, 'Yes, the new product is the North Star. I'm willing to live with the trade-offs of missing the first target.'

That cleaned up everything for the whole company because then it wasn't just the customer leader. Now the product leader is able to say, 'I get it. I need to put more of my engineers over here, and if we lose some customers, we're going to live with that trade off.' And the people team gets it clarified because they understand the skills that they're trying to recruit for are more in alignment with where it's going. So you start playing it through the whole system. But the thing that helped was this exec coming with like, 'I have data to show you. You want A and B, I can't do A and B. I can do A or B, which do you want? And I'm going to do it.' That was a very, very helpful data-driven way to drive the conversation.

Do you have any specific advice for executives who are in people leadership roles? How can a chief human resources officer (CHRO) best influence a CEO?

Where a CEO and a CHRO have a good relationship, the typical dynamic is the CHRO is valued for their coaching skill. Maybe being a sounding board, maybe they can help you think through culture issues. But the opportunity for the best CEOs is much less reactive. So when I work with CHROs who are trying to influence their CEOs, I suggest that the top question you can ask and make sure the exec team is clear on is, 'What is the business trying to achieve in the next 12 to 18 months? What are the revenue metrics we need to hit? Which products are they coming from? Given now that we agree on that stuff, here's what I think it means for our people system. I think we have resources here. We need to move them here. Or we have our engineering team currently organized by technical area. Now maybe we need to organize them by product.' Get a little bit more proactive and aligned to the traditional business metrics of the business.

The CHRO has a huge opportunity to really galvanize alignment around that conversation in a way that finance leaders nominally have been doing for a long time. But CHROs get beyond just the dollars and cents. They get into what does it mean for the way the organization is structured? How do we manage people? How do we performance manage people? What do we value? Those are CHRO questions.

You're suggesting they deeply understand the business strategy and objectives and then identify how the people strategy lines up against that?

Let me give you an example. I had a conversation with a CHRO a couple of months ago who was complaining that their organization wasn't very good at feedback, which is common. 'We're doing all these trainings, they're not really working.' And I was like, 'I have a question for you: If you have a manager in your organization and they hit every deliverable for their team, it's on time, the quality is great, but they just totally opt out of the performance review process. They don't even bother. Does that person get promoted or do they get fired?' The CHRO was like, 'Well, they get promoted. They hit all their deliverables.' I said, 'You're never going to fix your feedback problem. It's not actually a real accountability.' And they said, 'How would I do that?' I replied, 'You actually would need to have a conversation with your CEO and the rest of your exec team that elevates that to the level of management accountability.'

That seems pretty scary. And I was like, 'Well, good luck then. That's your job.' Understanding what are the metrics, the performance indicators that really in the organization get people promoted or fired, those become the strategy that the people leader then needs to implement around the organization. It's really valuable to a CEO when a people leader can ask those questions in such a clarifying way because it forces alignment and it lets the CEO say, 'Yeah, actually it's not the feedback stuff.' Cool. Not that important. Or, 'Actually, yeah, I don't want any managers in my organization who aren't managers first,.' But most CEOs don't have to make those trade-offs because they happen invisibly below the CEO.

If you want to influence the CEO, what should you not do?

By the time you're an executive, you are presumably much stronger in your function than your CEO is. That's why the CEO hired you. So the CEO wants to trust you on operational basics. It means that, of course, you can bring up blockers when they come up. But if the majority of your conversation is about functional basics or operational basics, like, 'Gosh, my team is somehow not turning the corner to get this done.' Okay, you're an executive, manage your team. What do you need to do here? Or, 'Gosh, I'm struggling with this counterpart elsewhere in the organization. They're not really getting into alignment.' Okay, well, what are you going to do about that? We're all human, and so you see your boss as a place to get support with whatever you need. That is somewhat true, but by the time you're a senior executive, you do limit your scope of opportunity for influence if you're focusing on things that you're already nominally the expert in. Your CEO will spend time with you on that, but it's not the place from which you can mainly influence the business. That's the biggest mistake I've seen people make.

This article was written by Kevin Delaney. ©2024, Charter Works, Inc. This article is reprinted with permission from Charter Works, Inc. All rights reserved.