We’re Doing CEO Feedback Wrong

Weekly Business Insights from Top Ten Business Magazines | Week 332

Extractive summaries and key takeaways from the articles curated from TOP TEN BUSINESS MAGAZINES to promote informed business decision-making | Since September 2017 | Week 332 | January 19-25, 2024

Leading & Managing Section | 1

We’re Doing CEO Feedback Wrong

By Anand Joshi | MIT Sloan Management Review | January 22, 2024

Extractive Summary of the Article | Listen

Maybe this sounds familiar: Once a year, your company’s leadership team takes an online survey or participates in individual interviews with the board chair or a leadership adviser about the CEO’s strengths and weaknesses. The resulting feedback is analyzed, prioritized, and then delivered to the CEO by the board chair.  

This standard procedure is largely a wasted opportunity. For one, CEOs generally know their strengths and weaknesses pretty well; they’ve been getting input on them for decades.  Second, the CEO role is, by nature, uniquely broad in its reach, and involves dealing with a wide variety of stakeholders. But this is not reflected in the typical feedback process.  A third, more subtle issue relates to how the raw input is filtered. The CEO typically gets a list of the top three areas for improvement, prioritized based on either frequency (the number of people who said it) or emotional intensity (how strongly someone felt about it). Neither approach centers on the truly important thing: the needs of the business.

The author introduced a new approach to feedback referred as mission-focused feedback. It starts with either the board, the CEO, or HR leadership recognizing the opportunity and proposing a change to the process.  Three proven, interlinked ideas that can dramatically increase the impact of your annual CEO feedback process are:

1. Start with the company’s mission.  At a fundamental level, CEO feedback should no longer about the individual’s professional growth; it should be about the company’s growth. All feedback should be filtered through that metric for maximum impact.  Specifically, when asking people for CEO feedback, it is effective to do so in two stages:  focus on the mission and then person how can he/she contribute in pursuing the mission.
2. Selectively expand the circle of feedback providers.  CEO feedback normally comes from a small, usual-suspects group of 12 or so people: the management team and the board. Besides supporting efficiency, the narrow scope of this process offers the perceived benefit of discretion.  CEOs, however, interact with many people beyond their inner circle, and hearing from some of those stakeholders is crucial. While interviewing them all is not viable, a selective expansion of the feedback circle can make a big difference.
3. Use social reinforcement to scale impact.  Even the most on-point feedback is useless if it’s not implemented. To that end, the usual “let’s revisit this in three months” action plan doesn’t cut it. It simply falls by the wayside, given the unrelenting pressures on the CEO’s time and attention.  One effective counter to this is to make parts of the follow-up process social. Drawing on the CEO’s colleagues and others to support the change can help to build a powerful, shared habit of more informal, ongoing improvement.

2 key takeaways from the article

1. Once a year, your company’s leadership team takes an online survey or participates in individual interviews with the board chair or a leadership adviser about the CEO’s strengths and weaknesses. The resulting feedback is analyzed, prioritized, and then delivered to the CEO by the board chair.  This standard procedure is largely a wasted opportunity.
2. A new approach to feedback referred as mission-focused feedback starts with either the board, the CEO, or HR leadership recognizing the opportunity and proposing a change to the process.  Three proven, interlinked ideas in this approach that can dramatically increase the impact of your annual CEO feedback process are: start with the company’s mission, not the person; selectively seek feedback beyond the C-suite; and make the follow-up process a shared undertaking.

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Topics:  Leadership, Board, Performance Review