Lessons on How to Be a Great CEO: What Glassdoor Rankings Tell Us About Leadership

By: Barry Sanders

Originally published at www.linkedin.com.

Recently, Glassdoor released its annual list of Highest Rated CEOs, compiled from a collection of anonymous employee reviews and feedback. The ranked leaders span industries, from consulting to tech to consumer product goods, demonstrating that a great leader can come from anywhere.

What’s notable about this list is that these leaders have gained the support and approval of those who matter most — their employees. These are the people who are tasked with executing the CEO’s vision, translating direction and strategies into realties on the ground.

A Glassdoor spokesperson commented on the list, saying:

“What we learn from these reviews is quite simple. A good CEO leads from the front, is dedicated to delivering the company mission, believes in transparency, and invests in their people.”

This past month, I’ve been reflecting upon my own experiences leading an organization, and I couldn’t agree more.

I became the President of Scotts Miracle-Gro in 2010. It was a challenging time — the recession had impacted our industry, which was already volatile due to the seasonality of the sector. The foundation of what had previously driven our growth came to an end; we had to reinvent ourselves shifting from a retail to a consumer focused company.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the experience would change me as a leader. I went from thinking about how to lead a company to thinking about how to build a company that has strategic leadership. I had to convince our customers and board of directors to believe in this new path forward, but most importantly, I had to convince our employees. Without their support and understanding of what I was trying to do, the new strategy would have never gotten off the ground.

Here are a few lessons I learned along the way:

• Clearly articulate the company’s vision and strategy: Senior leaders must establish clear vision, objectives, and metrics for their organization. While Scotts Miracle-Gro was developing goals and objectives, our employee surveys regularly revealed that both our strategy and what we were trying to accomplish was unclear to our employees. In order to turn this around, we increased the frequency of communication around goals, objectives, and performance. Employees can’t execute on something they are unaware of or unable to understand. Clarity, repetition, and reinforcement are key to driving execution and generating buy-in.
• Communicate transparently and broadly: Creating a common understanding across the entire business network, building relationships, and aligning the leadership team are all crucial ingredients for success. If we were going to develop collaborative, integrated plans and foster partnerships within the organization, then information sharing and knowledge exchange would be key. To achieve this, we created a weekly keystone forum and invited 400 of our top leaders to ensure greater transparency and open information flow.
• Build a strong team identity: My focus as a leader centered on how to create a cross-vertical sense of team, and a common understanding of our purpose. It became a matter of recalibrating our mindset. Employees needed to identify with the company instead of their individual business units — if everyone continued executing in their own self-interest, we wouldn’t have gotten anywhere. This effort also served to humanize the leadership and create one team.
• Invest in your people: I firmly believe in the importance of investing in your people. At the end of the day your greatest resource and asset is your talent. Without engaged, motivated, and capable employees, your strategies will sit on a shelf, never to be translated into reality. At Scotts Miracle-Gro, one of the ways we went about this was to invest heavily in leadership development. We put 400 of our top executives through leadership development courses at McChrystal Group, partnering with General Stan McChrystal to mold quality leaders. We also carried out a “train the trainer” program that reached another 2,000 employees. Our investment in building these leadership capabilities demonstrated that we were serious about the future of our organization and advancing the very people who made it all possible.

Barry Sanders is a managing partner at McChrystal Group, where he provides oversight for all client engagements to maintain consistent high quality in service delivery. Barry joined the leadership and management advisory firm in 2015 after nearly three decades of successful executive and general management experience in market-leading multinational corporations.

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