One of Scotland’s largest and most innovative charitable organisations, Enable supports more than 15,000 people to live, work and participate as active citizens across Scotland and beyond. This is a pivotal role, providing strategic and operational leadership across HR and Organisational Development.
Investigating the Future CEO
With accelerated digital transformation, war in Europe, talent shortages, supply chain challenges and ESG all part of the agenda, the current CEO doesn’t need to look far for challenges. With the VUCA market becoming the norm, does the Future CEO need to equip themself with new skills and do boards need to start thinking differently when appointing their next CEO?
In association with EY UK, Livingston James Group carried out a research project to investigate the future CEO. We surveyed and interviewed over 120 leaders across all sectors and functions in the Scottish market to identify what they believe will be the most important characteristics of the CEO of the future. What have we uncovered? In essence, the traditional playbook has evolved. The qualities that led to CEO success in the past are no longer adequate. The environment in which CEOs operate is undergoing a fundamental shift, rendering some traditional leadership approaches obsolete. This impacts what CEOs need to accomplish, how they go about it, and what essential characteristics are required for success in this new era.
To gauge what the Future CEO may look like, we explored the thoughts of current CEOs on what was keeping them awake at night, and what their opinions on the key characteristics of the Future CEO. We asked them to consider perceived challenges to delivering their strategy, which skillsets they believed to be most important, and who they felt would be best suited to take on the Future CEO role from their current team of functional heads/directors.
We also asked the same questions to Non-Executive Directors and functional leaders to gain more insight into what they thought was most important in the make-up of the Future CEO. We explored if they were personally in line for CEO succession, and if not, who they believed was best suited. As advisors to many Board and C-suite professionals, we also spoke directly to leaders in our network, complementing this with our event series where we brought together leaders from all sectors and job functions to debate the survey results.
We asked these business leaders the following six questions:
If you would like the answers to the above questions, please reach out to the Livingston James team to request the full copy of the Future CEO Report – [email protected].
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