Building A Relationship With The Board Is Critical For New CEOs
February 2, 2018 | PublicationTo develop successful relationships, a new CEO needs to jump right in when it comes to establishing a leadership role with the board.
Mistakes can be costly for a first-time CEO. In our research for “The CEO Next Door: The 4 Behaviors that Transform Ordinary People into World-Class Leaders,” we found that on average, boards remove underperforming CEOs in roughly two years.
If you find yourself hitting inevitable headwinds, how do you make it past this hurdle? The answer lies in cultivating better relationships with your board.
Over the last 10 years, we have compiled comprehensive research, including quantitative analysis of thousands of CEO assessments as well as qualitative interviews. We asked CEOs about the missteps they had made. We weren’t surprised when the CEOs listed “failure to manage the board” as one of the top three. But we found that CEOs who had strong board relationships extended their runway, leveraging the credibility they built with the board.