The grass is not as green as it looks when it comes to corporate C-level leadership. Are C-suite jobs becoming more complex and short lived? If you are an aspiring C-suite leader, what does this mean for you?
These are selected notes from recent Korn Ferry Insight articles:
* According to recent updates from Korn Ferry, around 222 CEOs (US) left their roles in January, the highest number for the month in at least 23 years. This comes after a record 2,221 top bosses – at US public, private, or government organizations – left their posts in 2024, a figure which itself topped the prior record of 1,914 set a year earlier.
* Disruption is a major cause of CEOs leaving, and then the CEO actually leaving is probably impacting that disruption further. Directors, themselves under pressure from a surge in activist investors, are showing less patience with CEOs who aren’t delivering positive results. At one point in 2024, nearly 40% of CEOs who left were forced out.
* When a CEO quits, it’s almost always a shock to the system. “All types of dynamics surface calling the success of the company’s future into question”.
As a result, experts say that firms need to make a special effort to develop promising talent. That may mean identifying potential successors who are currently working two or even three layers below the CEO job.
* Firms also seem to be reducing C-suite roles by collapsing and combining positions. Some tech companies have merged the CFO/COO roles, for instance, while others have folded CCO duties into those of the CMO – a role that has added responsibilities for sales, customer experience, and more – or have rebranded them under titles like CRO. This may be because combining roles could enable firms to respond faster to changes involving markets and competitors. The role-merging has happened thus far only on a small but noticeable scale.
* Developing C-suite leaders with cross-functional experience also helps firms build a pipeline of ready successors. Still, experts caution that consolidation in the C-suite runs risks. The executive who’s taking on the additional responsibilities might not perform well in their new role. Burnout is a risk.
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These are some of my reflections:
1. Companies have to increase focus on consciously developing and retaining leaders. Only focused efforts lead to positive outcomes at a systemic level.
2. A CEO change mostly leads to further leadership, talent and structural organizational changes. This can lead to major disruptions for talent, especially when uncertainty is high. Key talent engagement and retention should be on top of a leader’s agenda in such environments.
3. When a senior leader takes on multiple functions, time and attention tends to become a major challenge. Consciously or sub consciously, some teams and topics will get lesser leadership attention, leading to frustration for those members. This could lead to further disengagement. In such scenarios, it becomes critical for C-level leaders to ensure a strong second level of leaders, who can lead with high autonomy.
4. There seems to be increased chatter about broader job cuts in organizations in 2025 as well (which normally accompanies organization, work structure changes across all levels). eg. even when teams get consolidated, there are leadership and direction changes, which end up impacting even the junior levels.
5. Based on the trend of consolidation of leadership responsibilities, cross-functional/generalist experience could be back into serious leadership development focus.
Sources:
* The Shrinking C-Suite?; March 18, 2025; Korn Ferry Insights
* The Great CEO Exodus… Continues; March 12, 2025; Korn Ferry Insights
PURPOSE & IMPACT
Category: Organization (page 1 of 4)
A March 2025 article in the IMD site from a clinical/organisational psychologist, Merete Wedell-Wedellsborg, covers perspectives on this complex topic.
Selected notes from the article below:
“What to do when those in positions of authority behave in ways that contradict widely accepted norms of civility, empathy, and ethical leadership.
The only path forward is to engage and maximize your influence by building enough power and clout to respond effectively and understand the psychology of omnipotent leaders.
* Omnipotent leaders see themselves as exempt from the norms of ethical or socially acceptable behavior due to a heightened sense of self-importance and entitlement. The mission (or rather their mission) justifies most, if not all, means to an end. Such leaders often exhibit moral licensing, believing past good deeds justify present transgressions. A tell-tale sign is excessive risk-taking and skirting formalities and rules of procedure.
* Omnipotence can also be understood within the broader framework of leadership overconfidence and hubris. The hubris syndrome is a condition wherein prolonged power and success lead to narcissistic tendencies, overconfidence, and diminished capacity for critical self-reflection.
Three key approaches can be employed while engaging with omnipotent leaders:
* Rather than challenging an omnipotent leader head-on, anchor your ideas as a natural plot in the leader’s vision, define yourself as a main character, and shape the narrative early. Whoever speaks early sets the stage.
* Frame feedback to omnipotent leaders that align or complement their self-image. Validate their leadership before steering the conversation toward constructive insights.
* Speed matters – shape the story before they do. Build rapport by finding even the smallest points of agreement. If escalation is inevitable, don’t go for it alone.
In a world where power dynamics are accelerating and all-powerful leaders set the tempo, the challenge is not simply to resist or comply but to navigate strategically and psychologically. “
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What other approaches have worked for you?
Source: Three ways to deal with the almighty boss; Merete Wedell-Wedellsborg; 14 March 2025; I by IMD
Image Source: TungArt7, Pixabay
Maruti Suzuki India Limited (MSIL) Chairman R C Bhargava on Osamu Suzuki, who led Japan’s Suzuki Motor for more than four decades and played a key role in turning India into a flourishing auto market. Osamu Suzuki died on Christmas day, aged 94.
“I have lost someone who was closer than a brother. He changed my life and showed how nationality is no barrier to people building unbreakable bonds of trust in each other. He was my teacher, mentor and person who stood by me even in my darkest days. If I played a role in the success of Maruti, it was because I was his student and he taught me how best to grow a firm and make it competitive…”
In April 1982, when Osamu Suzuki, then President of Suzuki Motor Corporation, signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Maruti Udyog Limited to manufature a 800cc car(which later became the iconic Maruti 800), a carry van and a pickup truck, even the Japanese embassy in Delhi was not in favour of the deal. Bhargava, then an IAS officer working at Maruti, had met Suzuki for the first time just a month before the MoU was signed.
In the first year of production, about 850 units of Maruti 800 were sold. Last financial year, MSIL produced 2.135 million vehicles. Today, MSIL is India’s largest car maker with more than 40 percent market share by volume.
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Source: Business Standard, 28 December 2024, Visionary auto tycoon who made winning bet on India, Reuters, Tokyo, 27 December, 2024
Psychological Safety is a critical element of highly effective teams and impactful work. This is too important to ignore for leaders, teams and organizations.
Google researchers did a famous study to discover the secrets of effective teams. It was code-named Project Aristotle – a tribute to Aristotle’s quote, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. The goal was to answer the question: “What makes a team effective at Google?”
The researchers found that what really mattered was less about who is on the team, and more about how the team worked together.
They found that psychological safety is the most important element of team effectiveness. “Psychological safety refers to an individual’s perception of the consequences of taking an interpersonal risk or a belief that a team is safe for risk taking in the face of being seen as ignorant, incompetent, negative, or disruptive. In a team with high psychological safety, teammates feel safe to take risks around their team members. They feel confident that no one on the team will embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question, or offering a new idea.”
According to Dr. Amy C. Edmondson, Harvard professor who researched/developed this concept shares that over a thousand research papers in fields ranging from education to business to medicine have shown that teams and organizations with higher psychological safety have better performance, lower burnout, and, in medicine, even lower patient mortality.
Sources:
* Understand team effectiveness; Google
* The Intelligent Failure that Led to the Discovery of Psychological Safety; Behavioral Scientist; October 4, 2023
I’ve been following leadership frameworks over the years. Leadership frameworks are quite interesting to study because they tend to highlight the critical elements and expert thinking about effective leaders and leadership.
This new framework shared in IMD (Switzerland) seems to reinforce the fundamental elements and bring together nicely (with case examples).
According to the article, Patrick Flesner who developed this ‘Leadership House’ framework, has experiences in top-level sports, roles as a partner in prestigious German law firms, leadership position in a publicly traded company, partner in a venture capital fund and author. Probably, bit of the European context as well.
Selected Notes:
* The Leadership House is built on a solid foundation of trust. Trust provides a strong feeling of safety. In trusting relationships, it’s about the issue, not the person.
* A strong team is the first pillar. It’s about more than hiring the right people and putting them in the right roles.
* Having the right people has two dimensions: the first is functional fit and the second is cultural fit. A strong culture is a competitive advantage and separates the best teams from the rest.
* Purpose and vision are important but almost always intangible. It is vital to clarify what must be done to achieve your company’s vision and turn it into reality. We should invite team members to the goal-setting process and ask them about what they believe must be done to turn purpose and vision into reality. In this way, our team members will become the owners of the goals and do whatever possible to achieve them, which is psychologically very powerful.
* We must ask our teams to translate shared goals into “joint plans”. We must show what each team and its members must do (and, importantly, deliver in terms of results) so we achieve our shared goals. Joint plans are more granular and make execution possible.
* Team members are held accountable for both the tasks and the results they achieve. This is why it is so important that joint plans also show the results to be delivered.
* We can only hold team members accountable if we empower them.
* Without execution, there are no results; without results, there is no effective leadership. Execution is where leadership shifts from theory to practice, yet it’s often where leaders struggle the most. One of the key challenges is finding the right level of involvement – too much oversight risks micromanagement, stifling creativity and independence. Too little involvement leads to confusion and a lack of direction.
* No leader has all the answers, and that’s fine. Leadership isn’t about knowing everything but about creating the conditions for your team to find the answers together. In life and business, outcomes depend on external factors, and, often, a bit of luck. What we can influence and control is building a great team, setting it up for success, and working together toward shared goals.
Source:
I by IMD; The Leadership House: Building solid foundations for leadership and business success; Patrick Flesner; 18 November 2024
Image Source: Robin Higgins, Pixabay
Middle Managers often feel “sandwiched” and frustrated in organizations, especially during changes. Recent studies indicate further reduction in the number of middle managers in organizations.
How do middle managers navigate successfully, manage selves and stay increasingly relevant in a fast changing/evolving world?
Organizations also need to tread cautiously with a longer term perspective and focused work on changing mindset and culture, as they plan changes.
These are selected notes, interesting data from a couple of Korn Ferry articles – Where’d My Manager Go? (LinkedIn), and A World with No Managers? (Korn Ferry website).
* Last year, in a sign of the aggressiveness with which firms are removing them, middle managers represented 31.5% of all layoffs, and an average of 22% between 2018 and 2022.
* And when middle managers depart voluntarily, they are not being replaced, which creates a void in leadership.
“If you cut and cut and cut, but don’t change mindsets, you can accelerate vertical hierarchy,” says Mark Arian, CEO of Korn Ferry Consulting. “You can end up in a bit of a death spiral.”
* In theory, trimming the middle layer can strengthen workflows: Autonomy and decision-making extend downward, and customer responsiveness improves, along with accountability and morale. But “that doesn’t necessarily happen”. In practice, sometimes authority coalesces at top levels, leaving underlings awaiting signals.
* But experts say today’s middle managers are under unprecedented pressure. Half are burned-out. Thirty percent are too stressed to support their teams, according to employees participating in LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence survey.
* Experts advise firm leaders to proceed with great caution. “When you get rid of middle managers, the margin for error becomes minuscule.”
* Rather than making deep cuts, experts advise piloting studies of new organizational structures.
* Experts advise training teams to be inclusive and knowledgeable about the expertise and leadership of each trainee.
In my observation and personal experiences, during most times after the organizational deep cuts, the vaccum between the top and front line grows leading to major communication gaps and frustration among team members. Top levels of the organizations do not end up having sufficient time to manage the increased demands and need for attention. For those reasons, it is extremely important to work on workforce culture and mindset changes proactively, in order to ensure better readiness. Most times, there is a mad scramble after the quick cuts are implemented. It is also important to think about the inter generational shifts in the workplace and related impacts.
McKinsey recently shared an interesting discussion regarding how the HR function’s own stress is showing. This is a very relevant and needed discussion because during most times of intense changes, HR members also feel exasperated and in a thankless role (referenced in a recent New York Times article). They feel caught in between, and hit from all sides. Many HR professionals can relate to this discussion, based on their own experiences.
One differentiator for great HR professionals and leaders is that they take the time to reflect, process, learn from the challenges and figure out ways to work through them proactively with a growth mindset. This discussion is valuable food for thinking for not just HR professionals but also for all key stakeholders.
Here are some highlight notes for me from the discussion.
* Research reporting that 35 percent of HR leaders surveyed don’t believe their management team cares about their mental health.
* The HR function lives in the friction between caring for the employee and caring for the organization.
* Organizations need to understand the importance of partnering with their HR colleagues and engaging them early when they’re thinking about strategic changes. The earlier you engage your HR business partners in those conversations, the better it is for the organization.
* When it comes to capability building, we need to be thoughtful about what we put on HR versus the rest of the enterprise and ensure that people leadership is a joint capability.
* It’s very easy to add things to the portfolio of trainings, surveys, and information gathering. It’s a lot harder to stop doing things. So creating and building that muscle and challenging the status quo is something that every organization needs.
* As an HR leader, I can bring joy if I can be my authentic self with a team that is excited to work with me and views my input as a real contribution.
* If my day-to-day is going to be more joyful, more energetic, and more fun, then I am working with people I like and respect who like and respect me. And we’re engaging on some cool topics together, making our organization a better place.
* Sometimes HR is the messenger caught in the middle.
* Over time, the administrative side will likely become easier or more automated. However, there is still an unbelievable need for a human element that can translate even self-serve tools to help a colleague in need.
* Trust is hard earned but can go away in a second. And it can go away in a second because of HR but also, unfortunately, because of business leaders. It’s important to be thoughtful in those moments. The unified voice helps build trust, but a little division amplifies quickly across teams and organizations. If leaders understood that impact, they might choose their words differently.
* We also need to build trust within HR. HR has to stick up for HR, too. And everybody has to own the full agenda. We need everybody in HR to speak up. Otherwise, you may build immediate trust but undermine trust in HR as a whole.
Source:
Why being in HR is getting tougher—and how to break through; November 1, 2024; McKinsey & Company
Content Credit: BiancaVanDijk (Pixabay)
I wanted to share some useful notes from the book, “The Psychology Of Fear In Organizations” by Dr. Sheila M Keegan, a Chartered Psychologist, and Fellow of the Market Research Society and Bath Business School. A lot of these play out in organizations every day and it helps a lot for leaders to be aware.
*Business psychologist and coach, Chris Welford identifies five telltale signs of a fear-based culture.
1. There is a preoccupation with status and conformity, and where rules have precedence over common sense.
2. Distinct in-groups exist and there is little opportunity to cross the boundaries between them.
3. Everything is measured but nothing is questioned.
4. Appraisals are only ever one-way.
5. The accent is on pace but short-term gain is known to be at the long term cost.
…Not surprisingly, in a fearful working climate, employees tend to mirror the behaviour of their managers. Management over-control generally has the effect of discouraging risk-taking, squashing initiatives and dispelling creativity and novel thinking.
… Feeling fearful, threatened or undermined at work can have a major effect on our work performance, as well as on our mental and physical health. Fear impacts our relationships with our colleagues and managers. We bring fear home with us…
How To Develop Personal Resilience, A Critical Element For Working Effectively Through Fear
…On a personal level, developing resilience is an ongoing process that involves a mixture of adjustments. Resilience can be developed by:
* having supportive work networks and healthy relationships.
* focusing time and energy on things we have some control over, rather than expending energy on aspects that are outside our control.
* actively looking for opportunities for self discovery and broadening our perspectives.
* practising cognitive restructuring: changing the way in which we think about negative situations.
* paying attention to our body as well as our mind, paying attention to one’s own needs and feelings.
* keeping a long term perspective, and considering the broader context.
* taking decisive actions.
* maintaining a hopeful outlook…
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These are only few perspectives on a much broader topic.
Recent data from BCG on corporate transformation and link with total shareholder return(TSR) hold valuable food for reflection.
We see transformation initiatives in most companies nowadays, especially when leadership changes happen.
Selected Notes from the article:
* The empirical patterns of transformation are quite stable: At any point in the past 20 years, roughly 30% of companies significantly underperformed their sector for a period of multiple years, making transformation a necessity for performance reasons.
* Successful transformations are the exception, rather than the norm, even when measured on very modest criteria. Only 26% of corporate transformations successfully created value in both the short and long terms. More than 70% of companies fail to outperform their industry peer group average in both the short (one year) and long term (five years), after a previous performance downturn period (numbers quite similar to the findings in 2018 report). Sustainable value creation through transformation remains so rare.
* Pre-emptive transformations create significantly more value in the medium and long run.
* A leadership change during a transformation is associated with higher TSR performance over the five-year time horizon. The positive impact is even higher if the new leadership comes from outside of the company. However, a change in leadership is not a guaranteed success driver.
* You cannot cut your way to greatness: differential growth is critical to sustained value creation.
* Achieving sustainable growth and a future-proof operating model requires entering transformations with a long-term orientation, rather than merely focusing on addressing performance woes or catching up to peers in terms of technology stack or organizational best practices. Beyond mindset, culture, and metrics, a long-term orientation also means investing in the exploration of new ideas that could be the basis of future advantage.
* Putting a formal transformation program in place, scale of the program and the willingness to invest in change matter. Formalizing the transformation entails defining a clear governance and process-or setting up a dedicated transformation office-for coordinating and tracking progress on change initiatives, as well as regularly communicating it to the executive leadership team so that roadblocks can be addressed promptly. Moreover, it may mean putting in place a chief transformation officer to helm an ambitious change effort, which our prior research shows can improve transformation odds significantly. The role must be designed appropriately and filled by someone who is persistent, vigilant, and flexible—and who is trained for the job.
Source: Five Truths (and One Lie) About Corporate Transformation, April 12, 2024, BCG
Image: Pixabay, RoderickQiu
Some of us have seen this happen few times during our lifetimes. A highly successful, global company with thousands of employees and the darling of the press and management books gets into trouble slowly and loses its shine eventually. Thousands of jobs are cut, announced in phases over years and the decline become more visible gradually. Issues become too big to ignore, other companies start taking over market share and breakdowns become more frequent with increasing number of unhappy customers. Few revered corporate names have been visible in the press for these reasons, even during the last week. This has happened to non-profit organisations as well.
The golden mindset to protect dearly during success is conscious humility.
A 2016 HBR Article (The Scary Truth About Corporate Survival) noted that 80% of the companies that existed before 1980 were no longer around. Professors Vijay Govindarajan and Anup Srivastava looked at all companies that listed on U.S. stock markets from 1960 to 2009 and confirmed that longevity is decreasing. Companies that listed before 1970 had a 92% chance of surviving the next five years, whereas companies that listed from 2000 to 2009 had only a 63% chance. They wrote that the bad news for the newer firms is that their days are numbered, unless they continually innovate. In short, even seemingly successful and rich companies can fall into a fight for survival sooner than expected.1
From a behavioural perspective, a consistent common pattern is noticeable. As companies become more successful, arrogance tends to creeps in. When this happens at the leadership levels and manifests in decisions, judgment calls and cultural elements, the damage can be enormous. Most times, the degradation is not evident quickly. This may show up in the form of increased ignorance of contradicting views and potential risks, lack of openness, increased feelings of invincibility, sometimes even translating to visible disrespect. For leaders, even listening to varying perspectives from internal stakeholders goes down. There is a rigid focus on “our approach, our process and we know what is right” thinking. Stakeholders outside the organisation most times see this degradation earlier than those inside. Even at this stage, the general feeling is that nothing could go wrong. Leaders can also become overly focused on themselves. While some leaders may seem to be humble at a personal level, it’s important to watch out for reduced humility at an intellectual level (eg. openness to discussing varying and contradicting perspectives, disregarding others quickly).
The mindset of conscious humility and curiosity are closely related. Genuine curiosity comes from being humble about one’s own views and openness to others. Conscious humility are also related to compassion and empathy. Behaviours are consistently leading indicators of organisational unhealthiness and degradation, while the slowing business results may show up much later. Once the negative impact on business results indicates a pattern, it becomes hard to turn around the ship quickly. The focus then shifts to cost cutting and prevailing phases of uncertainty, leading to complex environments. Does this sound familiar?
Professor Jim Collins (Good To Great) wrote about the Five Stages of Decline, in the book, How the Mighty Fall. He called Stage 1 the “Hubris Born of Success”. “Great enterprises can become insulated by success; accumulated momentum can carry an enterprise forward, for a while, even if its leaders make poor decisions or lose discipline. Stage 1 kicks in when people become arrogant, regarding success virtually as an entitlement, and they lose sight of the true underlying factors that created success in the first place. When the rhetoric of success (“We’re successful because we do these specific things”) replaces penetrating understanding and insight (“We’re successful because we understand why we do these specific things and under what conditions they would no longer work”), decline will very likely follow. Institutions can be sick on the inside and yet still look strong on the outside; decline can sneak up on you, and then-seemingly all of a sudden-you’re in big trouble. Stage 3 is Denial Of Risk And Peril. As companies move into Stage 3, internal warning signs begin to mount, yet external results remain strong enough to “explain away” disturbing data or to suggest that the difficulties are “temporary” or “cyclic” or “not that bad,” and “nothing is fundamentally wrong.” In Stage 3, leaders discount negative data, amplify positive data, and put a positive spin on ambiguous data. Those in power start to blame external factors for setbacks rather than accept responsibility.”2
While sometimes organisations may be truly unlucky in their journey to get hit with factors outside their control, most times, the start of organisational failures can be traced back to the hubris of success and lack of humility. Leaders play a very important role in protecting and ensuring humility in day to day operations. This starts with role modelling related behaviours and incorporating conscious humility mindset into the heart of thinking, decision making and organisation culture. Ignoring these elements can invite serious repercussions.
In the book, Trillion Dollar Coach, the traits of coachability Bill Campbell sought were honesty and humility, the willingness to preserve and work hard and a constant openness to learning. Honesty and humility, because a successful coaching relationship requires a high degree of vulnerability.3 Openness as well cannot exist without humility. Humility can be developed consciously.
References
- The Scary Truth About Corporate Survival, December 2016
- Five Stages of Decline, Jim Collins
- Trillion Dollar Coach, Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, Alan Eagle
About Tojo Eapen
Leadership Coach, Consultant, HR Leader with diverse, global experiences (U.S.A, Europe, APAC).
Master of Human Resource Management from Rutgers University, New Jersey, U.S.A. Recipient of the U.S. Garden State Council SHRM HR Leadership Scholarship.
Bachelor of Technology in Civil Engineering from College of Engineering, Trivandrum, India.
Certifications: MBTI, Hogan, RBL Leadership Code, SHL 360, Team Management Profile, NeuroLeadership Results & Team Coaching.
Facilitated coaching sessions, workshops and programs with multicultural teams in Helsinki, London, Berlin, New Delhi, Bangalore, Kerala, in addition to multiple Global/Virtual sessions.
Mission: Enable healthy, purposeful, and impactful organizations, through leadership knowledge and wisdom.
Contact
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