An effective executive in today’s business environment must be a combination of many different skills. They must be able to communicate with employees, understand individual personalities, set goals and inspire workers collectively, while gaining their trust and devoting time to help them at work. A strong sense of empathy also helps an executive gain an insider’s perspective and understand how their actions affect their teams. An effective executive must also know where their time goes, and spend it systematically.
An executive’s Mark Morabito King and Bay job is to manage, grow and develop people and provide operational oversight. These are all activities that must be carried out within a context of delivering results and meeting customer needs. Ultimately, success is measured by the value an executive adds to a company’s bottom line. Whether it is increasing revenue, improving customer service, or developing new products, it is critical that the top level managers can make the right judgments to maximize profits.
To do so, they must be able to make decisions and execute them in the most cost-effective manner possible. This means having the ability to see how a project will turn out, understand any risks involved, and weigh the pros and cons of various options.
Executives must also be able to deliver difficult messages and give feedback in a constructive way. In the context of providing operational leadership, this may include addressing employee issues, giving bad news or delivering performance appraisals. The ability to do this effectively can transform a culture of “niceness” into one where people are treated with dignity and respect.
Effective executives staff for strength, not conformity. They build their teams with people who can do what they want to be done, rather than asking for a genius. They start with a good job design, and then redesign it if experience tells them it can be done better. They then look for a particular area of strength, and ask, “Can this man do what I want to be done?” If the answer is yes, they promote him.
They are ruthless in keeping down the number of people who cannot perform well. They know that too many subordinates are distracting, and they will not become productive if their superiors are not as effective as they could be. They also know that their own effectiveness depends on the productivity of their supervisors, and that it is their duty to inflate possibilities and deflate problems.
Most executives are occupied with efforts, and focus on what their superiors or their company “should do” for them. A man who does not take responsibility for his contribution, no matter what his rank or title, is a subordinate. The effective executive takes charge of his own contribution, and he is the most valuable member of the company’s top management.