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We often think of CEOs as superheroes, carrying the weight of their organizations on their shoulders. Their jobs extend beyond making decisions and collaborating with stakeholders; CEOs have an inherent responsibility to stay updated on everything that’s happening around the world — from volatile market conditions to turbulent current events.
As the head of the company, they don’t panic — rather, they act swiftly and make informed decisions that guide the business to growth. Despite having so much on their plate, CEOs take the time to recalibrate their priorities. This article discusses the top leadership priorities in the US, namely agility, talent, and trusted partners.
Agility As Part of A CEO’s Playbook
Agility demonstrates how well a business adapts and thrives in a dynamic, ever-evolving market. Agile companies are prepared for sudden market changes, reflected in their resilient business strategies that ensure both success and customer satisfaction.
One must not treat agility as a run-of-the-mill buzzword, but as a framework that helps all levels of the organization — from the CEO to employees — to stay ahead of the curve.
The following sections tackle the benefits of agility and provide tips for CEOs to prioritize a more agile business model.
The 5 Advantages of An Agile Business
In a world of rising customer expectations and fast-paced industry changes, agility has become a crucial indicator of an organization’s adaptability. Here are the advantages of an agile business:
- Enhances Customer Satisfaction
Because customers are the drivers of success, agile businesses remain cognizant of their evolving needs and preferences, translating their feedback into tailored products and experiences that reflect their current expectations.
- Enables Faster Product Development and Delivery
Speed to market, or time to market, refers to how fast a company can ideate a product and deliver the finished product to customers. Agile leaders don’t sit around; they take action and prioritize speed to market as faster development cycles create opportunities for greater market share and relevance in a volatile market.
- Bolsters Resilience
Agile businesses always prepare for the unexpected. An upcoming health crisis? An agile organization may already have business continuity measures in place to help employees shift to remote work. By remaining agile — despite looming crises and emerging industry trends — businesses can stay futureproof and adapt to changes without disruptions.
- Promotes Growth Mindset
Agility instills the importance of a growth mindset. Agile leaders and employees are open to change. They innovate processes, strategies, and products as needed due to market shifts. Through innovation, businesses can become more competitive and promote a culture of creativity, responsiveness, and resilience.
- Sharpens Emotional Intelligence
Agility entails investing in emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence equips leaders and staff with the ability to engage in quick, rational decision-making processes and handle feelings of discomfort.
It also helps everyone resolve conflicts diplomatically, take constructive criticism, work with people of different personalities, and resolve frustrations when things don’t go well accordingly.
How CEOs Can Prioritize Business Agility
Prioritizing agility comes with structural change. While change doesn’t come overnight, there are three ways you can bring agility to the forefront of your organization:
- Remain Open for Changes
One big mistake CEOs must avoid is creating a rigid, set-in-stone plan or strategy. Agility is about being uncomfortable with change and uncertainty. This doesn’t mean scrapping everything altogether. As a CEO, make it a habit to tweak your plans and strategies based on current best practices and market trends.
By staying informed about trends and current events, you can think two steps ahead and anticipate possible changes, reassuring everyone that your organization can navigate whatever challenges come its way.
- Promote Continuous Learning and Growth Mindset
To embrace agility is to embrace a love for a growth mindset and continuous learning. Challenges are perceived as opportunities, mistakes and failures are treated as avenues for learning, and skills can be further honed through effort and dedication. An agile workplace teaches employees resilience despite setbacks and imperfections. But a culture of growth and learning begins with you — the CEO.
One example is Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO. Previously, the tech giant had a “know-it-all” culture that focused on rigidity and cultural resistance, including the gatekeeping of knowledge. Under Nadella’s leadership, Microsoft started embracing a “learn-it-all” culture — a culture that promotes collaboration, shared learning, and experimentation.
Thanks to this shift, the company has risk-takers who are open to learning from failure, which has borne fruit in new technologies: GitHub Copilot, an AI-powered coding assistant, and Azure AI, a cloud service suite. If it weren’t for this cultural shift, Microsoft would still be behind other industry giants in AI and cloud computing technology.
Microsoft’s transformation showcases that learning and innovating don’t stop just because you’re a well-known name in the industry. As a CEO, you have to be a learner, too. Request feedback from staff, catch up and share insights on industry trends, and join employees at workshops and seminars. All these show how invested you are in intellectual growth.
By modeling intellectual growth, your employees will follow suit and become as invested as you in expanding existing knowledge.
- Encourage Cross-Functional Collaboration
Knowledge should not be kept in silos. Strengthening teamwork lies in sharing information between teams and departments. In Microsoft’s case, Azure AI and GitHub Copilot were made possible thanks to the close collaboration of its departments. By working with other teams, your employees get exposed to diverse perspectives and new tools, which helps identify blind spots in problem-solving. In turn, this coalescence of ideas sparks innovation.
To foster cross-team collaboration, get everyone on board first. Create shared objectives and align them with company goals. A dedicated group chat is also great for virtual correspondence between members. Whether it’s work, feedback, or watercooler banter, a virtual channel encourages open communication between departments.
All members should be oriented on their roles and expectations, as well as the functions of each department in your company. This helps them take responsibility for all their tasks and understand the complexities of a department.
Encourage everyone to try out unorthodox ways of doing things and share their outcomes with others, which helps promote knowledge sharing. Finally, by making everyone feel valued for their ideas and contributions, you build a culture of mutual respect between you, your employees, and their colleagues.
While implementing these measures is easier said than done, the time and resources you put into cross-functional collaboration transform your organization from a stagnant business with uncooperative teams into a flourishing, agile company with strong camaraderie.
Talent As a Driver of Competitive Advantage
Talent drives organizational success. Because talent is the face of a company, it should be treated as an investment. With labor shortages along with the rising expectations and standards of candidates, talent issues are no longer the sole responsibility of HR leaders.
Now, CEOs and HR departments are treating talent as a strategic priority to access specialized skills, gain a competitive advantage, and harness innovation. If investing in your people has never been a priority, the next sections will convince you to think otherwise.
3 Reasons Why CEOs Should Invest In Talent Management and Acquisition
CEOs and senior leaders who invest in talent position their organizations for success. Here’s why you should do the same:
- Attract and Retain Talent
Integrated Benefits Institute (IBI), cited by Achievers, found that most employers report difficulties in drawing (73%) and retaining (61%) their talent. How well an organization can acquire and retain talent can make the difference between optimizing and pooling more resources on recruitment.
- Improve Employee Engagement and Performance
CEOs and HR leaders must not neglect employee engagement and performance. The more employees are engaged, the better they perform. This improves retention rates and motivates staff to come to work, incentivizing top performers to stay and saving the company hundreds of dollars on turnover, onboarding, and training.
- Boosts Quality of Customer Service
The quality of employees determines a company’s quality of customer service. When organizations fail to keep tenured, high-performing employees or settle for mediocre hires, they can’t expect to maintain a high quality of customer service. Consequently, poor customer service leads to dissatisfaction and loss of revenue.
How CEOs Can Invest In Talent
Talent investment doesn’t stop at hiring the right candidate. In fact, nurturing new and existing employees can bolster productivity and drive growth for your organization. Here are two ways to invest in talent:
- Assess A Candidate’s Culture Fit
Just because a candidate has all the skills, qualifications, and experience to do the job doesn’t mean they’re the right fit. By assessing culture fit, you can determine whether a candidate’s behavior, personality, communication style, and values align with your organization’s culture.
Culturally fit employees are more engaged, collaborative, and productive, which helps build a positive office culture and professional relationships between their colleagues and senior leaders.
To evaluate a candidate’s culture fit, ask behavioral questions that probe into how they resolve conflicts or overcome challenges. Questions related to work environments and their preferred level of autonomy are great, too. By asking the right questions, you can filter out ill-fitted candidates and avoid unnecessary turnover.
- Develop and Empower Talent
Whether it’s a new hire or a seasoned employee, talent development and empowerment go a long way in maintaining performance and retention. According to Deloitte, CEOs are empowering talent through the following ways:
- Flexible hours and location (87% of CEOs)
- Rewarding or giving credit to employees who shoulder additional responsibilities (73%)
- Employee upskilling or reskilling (58%)
- Opportunities for internal mobility or other career options (50%)
While flexibility and recognition are important, they’re only half of the story. As a CEO, you must also challenge your employees and renew their sense of purpose at work. To develop and empower your people, provide mentorship opportunities where senior leaders train and nurture employees’ people management and leadership skills.
Leadership development equips employees with the grit to handle responsibilities that come with leadership roles. It also prepares the organization for the next generation of managers and executives who can lead teams with confidence and empathy. By encouraging employees to lead smaller teams or projects, they gain a first-hand experience in navigating team dynamics, addressing conflict, and delegating tasks.
Apart from leadership development, you can also spearhead cross-training sessions or hold workshops to empower employees to move out of their comfort zones. However, it’s important to remember that employee development and empowerment involve active participation from leaders at all levels of the organization.
Outsourcing Companies As Strategic Partners
Outsourcing has evolved into a strategic asset. Businesses treat it as an avenue to bridge talent gaps, expand their market, innovate systems, and scale departments without the slowdown of overhead expenses.
Cost-cutting remains an appeal, though. However, forward-thinking CEOs and senior executives understand that outsourcing companies are not just vendors, but an extension of an organization.
The next two sections tackle the advantages of working with outsourcing companies and include a brief tutorial on finding the right outsourcing partner.
3 Reasons Why CEOs Must Partner With Outsourcing Providers
Although outsourcing is not for every company, we can’t deny the advantages it brings. Here are three reasons why CEOs must outsource to a service provider:
- You Can Access Cheaper Labor
Unsurprisingly, companies are leveraging outsourcing as a talent strategy. According to data by SHRM, US hiring costs amount to an average of $4,683 USD per employee. By outsourcing to the Philippines, or a developing country, you can drastically cut 70% of labor costs, leaving you with more resources to fund R&D initiatives and other high-impact investments.
- You Can Easily Scale Teams
Scaling teams with outsourcing partners is easier. For example, if you need to ramp up graphic design production, you can hire Philippine graphic designers for an average of $403 USD to $579 USD, depending on the designer’s experience.
With faster time-to-hire and lower cost of Filipino graphic designers (or any outsourced role), outsourcing puts you at an advantage where doubling team headcounts and scaling a business becomes financially viable without ballooning overhead.
- Opportunities for Market Expansion
Outsourcing has become a driver of market share expansion. When companies outsource to service providers, they get acquainted with the local market, monitoring trends and patterns. From there, organizations can appeal to the said market, which helps improve their brand visibility.
How CEOs Can Find the Right Outsourcing Partner
Partnering with the right outsourcing company brings strategic value that surpasses cost savings. Here’s how to begin your search:
- Know Your Rationale for Outsourcing
A successful leader weighs the pros and cons of outsourcing. Hence, as a CEO, you’re expected to have well-defined goals and a clear rationale for outsourcing. Is it to modernize outdated infrastructure and systems? Do you need more specialized talent?
Either way, objectively evaluating your workforce and daily operations helps you decide if outsourcing is the right strategy to complement your team and meet business needs.
- Don’t Settle for the Cheapest Option
Cheap doesn’t mean best. When evaluating potential outsourcing partners, do a comprehensive background check of your shortlisted service providers. The best BPO companies boast the following:
- A diverse portfolio that details the results of their services.
- A high-performing workforce with skilled employees.
- Multiple client success stories on the company’s website or social media pages.
There are outsourcing firms that specialize in a particular function. For instance, if you’re outsourcing accounting and finance, consider working with the best accounting firms for optimal results.
Look for BPO companies with similar goals, values, mission, and vision as your organization. This ensures alignment, trust, and understanding between your company and the service provider.
Transform Into An Agile, Resilient Organization With KDCI Outsourcing
There’s only so much a CEO can do by themselves. But with the help of a BPO provider like KDCI Outsourcing, we can ease the burden off your shoulders, so you can focus on what you do best: decision-making, management, and collaboration.
KDCI Outsourcing offers tailored offshore outsourcing solutions for various functions and industries, including human resources, real estate, property management, and many more. By helping you build your offshore team, you can scale your operations and maintain utmost flexibility even in the most turbulent of times.
Let’s help you become an agile, future-proof organization. Speak to our outsourcing experts today!
