Research shows that CEOs spend over 60 working hours a week leading multiple teams, managing finances, and guiding their business crises. Other leading roles have similarly demanding schedules.
This relentless pace makes it easy for executives to overlook critical responsibilities. They miss out on significant growth opportunities and never learn from their mistakes.
To help executives avoid these pitfalls, here are three overlooked responsibilities executives must never undervalue.
- Employee well-being
Employees are often considered the most important stakeholders any business has. They execute work, create a positive environment, and ensure happy clients.
For the above reasons, it might seem obvious that employees command a considerable amount of executives’ time. However, this isn’t always the case.
From the initial hiring process to regular one-to-one meetings, many executives make the mistake of delegating employee relations to line managers, without ever taking the time to speak to staff themselves. In doing so, executives disconnect from the wider team, can’t assess employees’ mental health, or determine whether DEI initiatives are being properly upheld.
Although executives don’t necessarily neglect their staff out of malice, when employees feel isolated, productivity nearly always dwindles, management faces resentment, and staff turnover is high.
In the worst case, executives can face a reputational crisis with better employee legislation, staff unions, and social media now empowering staff to speak out more than they did in the past.
This is why the best executives always set aside the time to show their employees that they care by listening to feedback, celebrating achievements, and making positive improvements where possible. As a result, they are usually better respected and thereby become successful leaders.
- Risk management and compliance.
Some executives can be the best in their business. They care about their company and will do anything to help it expand and grow. Yet, they often make the mistake of being so passionate, and sometimes, overconfident, that they forget to manage risk.
Usually, this occurs when executives fail to consider the long-term ramifications of their decisions because of time pressures they face or when they wrongly believe that their business is invincible. However, the consequences of this oversight is usually severe, leading to safety risks, financial losses, and even legal disputes.
When you consider the scale of investment companies make and receive from stockholders, besides the obligations executives have to their employees, when costly decisions are made it’s not just their company’s reputation at stake but also their own.
This is why executives should never take any decision lightly, and allocate the right time, money, and personnel to risk management procedures, technology, and analysis. It’s always better to be safe than sorry, and this is without mentioning risks outside of an executive’s control.
- Executive thought leadership
Executive thought leadership isn’t strictly a requirement for executives. Yet, it’s possibly the best activity leaders can get involved in.
Essentially, it provides a platform for executives to act as ambassadors for their businesses by sharing engaging insights across blog posts, social media, and earned media coverage to build credibility among audiences, attract investors, and secure more clients.
Considering executive insights are in high demand means that people will always listen as long as what executives have to say is novel and interesting. As a result, executives can easily build a large following and cement themselves as industry experts.
Ultimately, though, executive thought leadership allows executives to campaign for any issues they care about – it doesn’t have to relate to their employer’s interests.
The fact that more people follow CEOs on social media than the companies they lead speaks volumes.
