Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen is the world’s best CEO according to a global ranking by Comparably, based on employee reviews. He is followed by IBM’s Arvind Krishna, and Satya Nadella at Microsoft.

HBR‘s best-performing CEO rankings, using total shareholder return delivered during their tenure was last published in 2019, and ranked Nvidia’s Jensen Huang top, followed by Marc Benioff at Salesforce and François-Henri Pinault of Kering.

A key role is in building the reputation of the organisation, with all stakeholders, and in society at large. The Brand Guardianship Index ranks Mastercard’s Ajay Banga as top CEO, followed by Huang and Netflix’s Reed Hastings.

The new DNA of leadership

In my book Business Recoded: have you the courage to create a better future? I ask “What kind of future do you want to create, shape and lead?”

The future business will only emerge with your leadership. Leaders need the courage to step up, to envision and implement this future.

Having spent many hours with leaders, one to one, and with their teams – teaching, coaching and advising them on strategies and change – and explored the many leadership theories, and insights from today’s most inspiring leaders – it became clear that there are some common attributes.

These attributes form a pyramid, somewhat analogous to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. At the foundation are the essentials required to operate, and deliver performance. Above these are the attributes required for progress, to make sense of change, to find new growth, and drive innovation.

At the top are the attributes required of leaders who want to transform their organisations, guided by purpose beyond profit, to create a better business, and a better world.

In research for the book we found that these 12 attributes collectively make up the “new DNA of leadership”, with 3 levels from the top to the bottom:

“Creating better futures” attributes:

• Inspiring… being guided by a purpose and passion
• Courageous… daring to do what hasn’t been done before
• Farsighted … looking ahead with vision, foresight and intuition
• Progressive… pioneering, embracing challenge, seizing opportunities

“Making change happen” attributes:

• Curious… making sense of new, complex and uncertain environments
• Imaginative… envisioning a better future worth working towards
• Adaptive… having emotional agility to survive and drive relentless change
• Entrepreneurial… the creative spirit to explore new ideas and think differently

“Delivering positive impact” attributes

• Empathetic … engaging people, tapping into their human qualities
• Collaborative … working together, embracing diversity, to achieve more
• Resilient… sticking to the task, enduring turbulence, motivated and optimistic
• Impactful… making a positive difference to business, stakeholders and the world

Have the courage to lead the future

The implications for business are broad and significant: a better approach to people and the jobs they do, organisation structures and how people work, a different approach to strategic development and innovation, how brands develop and engage customers, and a more enlightened approach to how businesses grow to create and share value.

The new codes of business challenge our deeply engrained assumptions and practices, some extending and strengthening what we already do, others replacing the old ways.

There is no magic formula for business success, although plenty of concepts and models, frameworks and tools which can help. Developing leaders in today’s world is much more of a mindset, a way of thinking, opening your mind to a new world of possibilities, and the many ways to succeed in it. Most importantly it includes the inspiration to do it.

Inspiration, for me, comes from real people – ordinary people who have applied themselves to make dreams come true, turn challenge into opportunity, bring others together to achieve incredible results. I am most inspired by people around the world, who are leading, shaping and creating the businesses of the future right now.

7 Big Questions for CEOs

When working with a CEO catalyst and coach, I often sit down with leaders initially, and before we get into the detail of mapping out new transformational ideas, strategies and priorities, I encourage them to stop and reflect on their role:

• Can you articulate a vision for the future, and a strategic plan to get there?
• Can you make the culture real, and matter to people?
• Can you build teams where people can stretch themselves, safe together?
• Can you lead transformation?
• Can you really listen to people, see other viewpoints, and open to new ideas?
• Can you handle a crisis?
• Can you manage yourself, the many conflicting demands and priorities?

How CEOs spend their time

“Time is the scarcest resource leaders have. Where they allocate it matters – a lot” starts a recent Harvard report.

When I first stepped into the CEO role, this was my biggest challenge. My schedule no longer seemed like my own. In fact I’d made a point of managing my own online calendar until that point, choosing who to say yes or no to, and protecting time for myself. Now, as CEO, my schedule seemed to have become corporate property. Everybody wanted time, be it a one hour (why?) meeting, or a quick 5 minutes. Not just direct reports, but other stakeholders – particularly suppliers, and media.

I soon realised I needed to take control. A life of back to back meetings is far from productive. Leaders shouldn’t be the central point to every decision and action, and can quickly become the choke point, stopping anything happen. Time was the key. And I needed to recognise how I could best use it – while also staying effective, healthy and sane.

I’ve spent considerable time in recent years working with the business leaders of Microsoft, an organisation that has been transformed over the last 8 years, both culturally and commercially, by CEO Satya Nadella.

Nadella has two constants in his daily morning routine – exercise and self-reflection. Waking up at 7am, after getting his usual eight hours of sleep, the first thing he does is ask himself “what are you thankful for?” It’s a ritual he picked up from Dr. Michael Gervais, a high performance psychologist who has coached Microsoft employees and the Seattle Seahawks. “It’s just grounding. It gives you the ability to get up in the morning and orient yourself for the day,” he said on LinkedIn’s Hello Monday podcast.

Then it’s time for exercise. “For me, the daily ritual is just a half-hour of hitting the gym every day,” he said. “It doesn’t matter where I am, what time zone, how late I got in, I get up and get to the gym. It’s just 30 minutes of running, and it just makes a huge difference.”

Importantly Nadella doesn’t see “work and life” as a balancing act, but rather as work-life harmony, even though that hasn’t always been the case, “I used to always think that you need to find that balance between what’s considered relaxing versus what is working,” he told the Australian Financial Review. Now it’s all about integrating the two aspects of his life. “What I’m trying to do is harmonize what I deeply care about, my deep interests, with my work,” Nadella said, who believes that this approach “gives me a tremendous amount of satisfaction and energy to go back to work.”

“When Satya steps in the house, Dad’s home,” said his wife, Anu, in an interview with Good Housekeeping. “And Dad does homework with the kids, sits with us at the table. When we go to public places, he’s recognized, and the girls see that, but has it affected their everyday peace? I don’t think so. Our private lives are pretty private.”

Harvard’s soft skills are hard

HBS asked 1700 business leaders across 90 countries about what they thought makes a great leader in today’s world.

You might think that companies in an ever-changing world need a steady hand, with foresight and experience, who plots a sensible route to cautiously and competently travel. And, of course, to be digitally literate. Not crucial, they found.

71% of leaders said that adaptability was the most important leadership quality in these times.

They also ranked creativity, curiosity, and comfort with ambiguity as highly desirable traits. “It’s the soft skills that I argue are not soft anymore,” said the chairman of a major African retailer.

Less than half think that they or their colleagues have the right mindset and skills to lead in the digital era. “It’s about curiosity not coding” … Here are some of the other insights

• Be an explorer – get outside, be curious, listen, be humble

• Trust and let go – distribute authority, lean on others, curate talent

• Be a catalyst, not a planner – add new ideas, context and conditions

• Be courageous – experiment, iterate, and pivot yourself

• Be present – empathetic, vulnerable, storytellers, self aware

• Live values with conviction – share purpose, deliver on it

HBS’ research concluded “Leaders who set out to reshape their companies to compete in a fast-evolving digital world often come to a daunting realisation: To transform their organisations, they must first transform themselves.”

McKinsey’s 6 CEO mindsets

McKinsey’s Center for CEO Excellence recently analysed the behaviours of 67 of the highest performing CEOs around the world. They found no simple recipe for success, but they did find value in simplicity.

They concluded that, to an extent, all CEOs have the same responsibilities – working with the board, engaging stakeholders, setting direction, creating a positive culture. What separates the best from the rest is how they approach these tasks – all excelled at some, and were good at the rest. All  applied a distinctive set of 6 mindsets:

• Being bold: Uncertainty does not mean playing safe, which typically delivers mediocrity or decline. The best CEOs act boldly, smartly, seeking the best new opportunities. They raise ambition and aspirations. They become excellent futurists, enabling them to explore and choose the right vision. While they retain flexibility, they also have the resilience to stick with strategy. Focused on the mid to long-term, not to distracted by now.
• The soft stuff:  Change generates resistance, and people and culture failure points of change. McKinsey found that companies who solve the soft issues are more than twice as likely (79% to 30%) to execute strategy successfully. Leaders engage people by making a clear and strong case for change, and retain focus on performance.
• Team psychology: Building high-performing leadership teams starts with roles, not people – what are the most important jobs, and then who can do them. Leaders design for overall functionality, bringing in a wide range of expertise. The often surround themselves with people better than themselves, in different areas, and give them the space to perform.
• Board role: “The board is the CEO’s boss, but an awkward one—lots of people, infrequently seen” says McKinsey. Trust is key, which means being open, honest and prompt about plans and problems. The best CEOs  establish a strong relationship with the chairman or lead director and check in with other directors once or twice a year. They introduce the board to the company, by connecting them to managers. As Piyush Gupta, CEO of DBS says “the board, to me, is a partner, and they can talk to anyone in my management team. I believe the free flow of information is helpful for complete alignment.”
• Start with why: Purpose might sound simple, but is not easy to define. It should have the power to inspire people, simple to understand, and make sense. HBR found companies with a clear social purpose have significantly outperformed the S&P 500 over the past 20 years. The best CEOs ask themselves why their company exists, then make purpose an intrinsic part of the business model, knowing that testing strategy against purpose can open up new areas of growth.
• Do what only you can do: Being a CEO is a full time job. The best CEOs recognise the need for self-discipline, to manage themselves – their time, activity, and fitness. The best CEOs don’t have full schedules, but build in flexibility to think, engage and respond to unexpected. Many combine high-intensity and recovery periods – breaks, lunch, family.

My friends at PA Consulting have developed an excellent approach called positively different leadership.