The Six Disciplines blog has moved!

You will be automatically redirected to our new home. If that does not occur, please visit:

Monday, December 14, 2009

How CEOs (Should) Spend Their Time

Dr. Theresa M. Welbourne from both the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan and eePulse, Inc. released research examining how leaders (CFO) spend their time and how that time spent is associated with firm performance.

The basis for the study is assessing manager and leader performance based on five roles. These roles have been found to be critical for understanding overall, individual and firm performance and include:

Job: Reflects the basic core job one is hired to perform and is often well described in the typical job description
Team: Reflects responsibilities for ongoing and project-based teams
Career: Includes responsibilities to enhance career and skills
Innovator: Covers work spent to develop new ideas, create new routines or improve on process
Organization Member: Reflects work done to support company overall, when it is not part of the other roles

The study indicated the average, overall percentages of time spent in each role, from high to low, as follows:

  • Job - 45%
  • Innovator 19%
  • Team 16%
  • Organization 12%
  • Career 8%

BOTTOMLINE: “The average time spent by CEOs in particular in the job role, within a high performing company, is 36% versus 46% for the low performing firms. This is not surprising in that we know long-term competitive advantage comes from a workforce that is spending time doing things other than the ‘core' job. If employees are focused only on the job, everything that your company does can be easily copied by your competitors and replicated easily. Long-term
competitive advantage comes from the right combination of core job and non-core-job roles
.”

No comments: