Leading with
confidence

Disney, Starbucks, P&G, Microsoft, GE, Ford, Twitter, Dell, Nike, and scores of other marquee companies in their prime have stumbled painfully in CEO transitions.

“How do I motivate employees?” This question has been pondered by academics and managers since the dawn of the study of management.

All it takes is one great employee to change the whole business. Just ask Steve Jobs.

Profitable organizations are a key to providing innovative products and services, good jobs, and tax revenue for roads and schools.

Organizations typically look to past performance to identify future leaders. But an employee’s track record doesn’t tell you who might excel at things they haven’t done before.

There is a high chance that you entered the field of psychology because you have an ingrained passion and talent for understanding what drives people.

A complaint we hear often from boards is that the volume of data received from HR comes without a clear sense of the few salient datapoints that should have the greatest impact on strategy-setting and policymaking.

We all know that success at work is an important factor in feeling successful or unsuccessful in life. And the truth is that most people struggle to manage their careers.

Another chief executive rolled off the Unilever production line last week, when Leena Nair was appointed to run luxury goods company Chanel.

The days of “management by walking around” are over. Business books from the 1980s encouraged managers to wander around the office, chit-chat with colleagues, and learn valuable information at the water cooler.

Celebrity bosses used to have nicknames that made a virtue of short fuses and brutality. “Chainsaw Al” and “Neutron Jack” sounded more like wrestlers than men in suits.

Greater talent diversity in finance is unambiguously good for business and for society.

At unprecedented rates, people globally are quitting their jobs. Why? Perhaps it has something to do with a search for meaning

The pandemic has changed more than where we work; it's also required us to reassess how we work.

The second season finale of HBO’s Succession left us hanging – will ailing patriarch Logan Roy survive his eldest son’s treacherous attempt at corporate assassination?

The pipeline to the C-Suite has been, in a word, hampered since women started entering the workforce but due to the pandemic, the progression has become even more stalled.

One of the great surprises of the remote and hybrid teams spurred by the pandemic is how productive they have been. But then, the Great Resignation began.

Kahlil Greene, a senior at Yale who served as the first Black student body president, takes us inside the conversations amongst Gen Zers deciding where to work.

On June 17, 2021, President Biden signed into law Juneteenth as a new Federal holiday. ghSMART Fellow Noah Harris reflects on this momentous occasion; Noah is the first Black man to serve as Harvard’s student body-elected president in the school’s 385 year history.

When it comes to attracting, developing, and retaining talent, corporate board members have long been an underutilized asset, largely relegated to traditional board compensation committees.

How much deep referencing did you conduct on your spouse or partner before getting serious? Which private investigator did you hire to run a background check and interview their exes?

Selecting the individuals to build a president’s cabinet and lead executive agencies is one of the biggest challenges facing a newly elected president and likely one of the most important sets of deci­sions the president will make in his or her presidency.

Productive relationships are as important for chief financial officers (CFOs) as for any other C-suite role.

You – and your teams – rose to the challenge of crisis response, and your organizations have arrived at a new steady state.

During the global COVID-19 crisis, Jeff McLean discovered that many lessons he had learned during his career as a Navy fighter pilot on aircraft carriers are relevant for business leaders during troubled and fast-changing times.

Over the last ten years, ghSMART & Co., a leadership advisory firm, has conducted research on over 2,000 CEOs. The study, called CEO Genome, uncovered an aspect of the job that often goes unspoken.

Many companies are following the playbook that we outlined in the first two parts of this series.

In Part One of this series, we emphasized the importance of continuing to advance the ball on mission-critical hires and how to adapt the hiring process given remote conditions.

This is part 1 of a three-part series. Part 1 focuses on how to adapt your interview process with finalist candidates.

Employees thrust into leadership during a crisis need to be coached in four behaviors to be most effective in their roles.

The traditional stepping stones to the chief executive position are jobs responsible for the bottom line—such as head of division—and those roles are still overwhelmingly filled by men.

It is tempting to assume that the largest academy companies like GE and McKinsey have an edge when it comes to developing talent.

Maintaining the CEO pipeline is most boards’ top succession planning challenge. Yet even at the most respected companies with disciplined succession processes in place, well-suited candidates may be overshadowed by “safe” or “chosen” ones.

The careers of talented executives are often derailed by seemingly trivial issues, many of which are utterly fixable.

Most leaders are, deep down, afraid of failure. But a 10-year study of over 2,600 leaders showed almost half (45%) suffered at least one major career blow-up — like getting fired, messing up a major deal, or blowing an acquisition.

Check out five of the most common safety traps executives fall into when selecting the people that make up their leadership team.

It turns out that everything you might think about CEOs may be wrong.

People assume CEOs had their eyes on the top job from day one. Actually that’s not the case - our research shows 70% of CEOs don’t start out their careers with that goal in mind.

As the public debates the merits of the recent corporate tax cuts, most people are dangerously oblivious to a bigger and in the long run costlier problem: that of picking the wrong CEOs to lead companies in the first place.

Elena L. Botelho and Kim R. Powell overturn the myths about what it takes to get to the top and succeed.

We were recently called up to Chicago to coach an entrepreneur of a $50-million company whose frustration level with his board was moving toward detonation.

Congratulations, you’ve made the short list of candidates for your dream job. Now all you have to do is pass the final test: How do I walk into the room and convince the decision makers that I’m their best choice?

Whether early or late in our careers, most of us don’t think we’ll ever get promoted to the elite circle of people who are CEOs, let alone successful CEOs.

In a dataset of 2,600 CEOs, analysts were surprised to discover that 8% had no college degree.

To develop successful relationships, a new CEO needs to jump right in when it comes to establishing a leadership role with the board.

A 10-year study of more than 17,000 C-suite executive assessments looked at who gets to the top and how.

At the top of the ladder, the stakes are high and the demands intense. Too many CEOs falter in the job; about a quarter of the Fortune 500 chiefs who leave their firms each year are forced out.

In his 1974 interview with ABC News, science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke painted a picture of how computers would change our way of life by the year 2001.

Is your team running at full power? Only 10% of leaders do.

A lot of CEOs are being shown the door lately. These companies are in trouble, and their boards must select new CEOs under highly charged circumstances.

CEO succession is an inherently bumpy process. Even when the outgoing leader has performed well and seems ready to retire, the transfer of power is fraught with sensitivities.

I have a challenge for you. If you are a business leader at the very top of your game, it will help you avoid career stagnation. And in so doing, it will also contribute to solving a broader problem: broken government.

The solution to our #1 problem, broken government, is hiring more great leaders (like you) into government. The purpose of the book Leadocracy is to amplify the movement of outstanding private sector leaders into government.

In business, you are who you hire. In Who, Smart and Street offer a ground-breaking solution to your #1 problem – hiring mistakes.

G.H. Smart & Company, LLC was ranked #1 in the 2024 Vault study of "Best Consulting Firms to Work For" in fourteen categories, including Work/Life Balance, Compensation, Hours in the Office, Selectivity, and Diversity.

We are excited to announce the launch of ghSMART’s new brand.

How ghSMART founder and chairman Geoff Smart created a leadership consultancy that has been outscoring rivals like McKinsey, Bain and BCG on metrics like pay, prestige and employee satisfaction.

G.H. Smart & Company, LLC, a preeminent Leadership Advisory firm, earned certification by Great Place to Work®, the global authority on workplace culture.

For 15 years, Tuck professor Morten Sørensen has been analyzing a unique dataset on top executives, uncovering the traits that make them effective and different from others.

Alan is a partner at ghSMART & Company, and a true believer in the power of mentoring for helping young people succeed.

Most professional development courses are off-the-shelf courses that cannot be customized for the unique foci, interests, and pain points of an organization or team.

G.H. Smart & Company, LLC was today ranked #1 in the 2021 Vault study of Best Consulting Firms to Work For in the categories of client interaction, level of challenge, overall satisfaction, and was named "Best Boutique Firm" for the first time.

Prestige often comes with a subjective interpretation. Most times, it simply reinforces the status quo.

ghSMART & Company has been named to the Forbes list of America's Best Management Consulting Firms for the fourth consecutive year.

Need some suggestions on what to crack open next? Here are more than a dozen inspiring titles recommended by high-achieving executives.