Chief executives should inspire and motivate, but half don’t manage it

Chief executives should be inspiring, motivating and “future thinking” to run a successful business, a new survey has found, but more than half of Irish employees said their own CEOs’ performance failed to live up to that.

The survey, which was conducted by Hanover Communications and Censuswide during the month, questioned 501 Irish employees currently working in companies of more than 50 staff about the importance of various character traits in an ideal company head.

It found 71 per cent of respondents thought a chief executive with a clear personality that everyone in the business understands is more likely to run a successful business, with 87 per cent saying it was important to be inspiring and motivating.

But only 40 per cent said their own chief executive was motivating, while less than a third said their company head was inspiring.

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Almost three quarters of respondents said their chief executive wanted to have a positive impact, and almost two thirds said their company head acted as a role model. However, one in eight people said they weren’t sure their chief executive was practising what they preached, and only 20 per cent said their performance would be classed as “excellent”. A third said their CEO’s performance could be rated as very poor to average .

The research results were presented at Hanover Dublin’s “The Cult of the CEO” event in Dublin on Thursday.

Media impact

"The media has had an enormous impact on our perceptions of CEOs and what makes a good one. The media shares the desire of its consumers to simplify complexity by identifying real people to serve as shorthand for what are, in reality, many-headed organisations," said Lorna Jennings, managing director of Hanover Communications Dublin.

"Where 20 years ago you might have seen a short clip on RTÉ of a CEO's latest unfortunate slip of the tongue or a stock tumbling mistake, today you can watch it replayed on social media, on RTÉ News Now and hear it cut down into animating broadcast clips with endless talking heads and commentators ascribing ever more significance to what began as a board room comment."

She said a more dangerous effect was that people begin to believe the storybook characters that were being painted. “Having told our chief executives that they are the company, it’s not entirely unreasonable of them to allow such delusions of grandeur to go to their heads.”