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| | Brought to you by Alex Panas, global leader of industries, & Axel Karlsson, global leader of functional practices and growth platforms
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| | | | | | To better serve you and combat inbox overload, we’re changing our email cadence from weekly to twice per month. We’ll be back on October 13 with more of the valuable insights you’ve come to expect from Leading Off. | | | | | The CEO’s role is a constant balancing act. While navigating the phases of their own journey as leaders—as detailed in McKinsey’s upcoming book, A CEO for All Seasons: Mastering the Cycles of Leadership—CEOs must also focus on satisfying a wide range of stakeholders. Maintaining consistent, thoughtful communication with employees, investors, customers, board members, and other important stakeholders is critical to their success, and that of their companies. This week, we look at how CEOs can embrace the responsibility of chief storyteller to lead their organizations through disruptive times. | | | | | | | |
| | | In the current business landscape, both internal and external stakeholders want to understand a company’s take on the opportunities and challenges presented by gen AI, geopolitical uncertainty, and other disruptive forces. That perspective must come from the CEO as the organization’s storyteller in chief, according to McKinsey’s Blair Epstein, Shelley Stewart III, and their coauthors. “It’s the CEO’s words and deeds that carry the most weight,” they say. The authors outline three steps a CEO can take to strengthen relationships with stakeholders, shape the organization’s image, and enhance its reputation. First is setting the tone for the company and empowering other leaders to manage critical relationships. Next is articulating and role modeling the company’s culture, purpose, and values. Third is being prepared to make decisions at pivotal moments and, as the team’s captain, speaking up or acting on behalf of the organization on the most important issues it faces. | | |
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| As AT&T CEO John Stankey considers the unpredictable nature of today’s business world, he takes the long-term view based on his company’s 150-year history. “This [moment] is big, but it’s one that will not be the be-all and end-all in the context of broader time. It will just be a moment that we have to adjust to,” he tells McKinsey Senior Partner and North America Chair Eric Kutcher in an episode of the Inside the Strategy Room podcast. Stankey says AT&T aims to act deliberately and judiciously amid uncertainty, even while pursuing future-looking strategies such as replacing its copper lines with fiber-optic technology. In this environment, getting AT&T’s 130,000 employees to embrace change means being clear about the company’s purpose and strategy. “We had 150 years of proud history but also 150 years of things that were never quite addressed. It was time to rip off the Band-Aid,” Stankey says. “Just like it’s hard to sell assets, we have to make those hard decisions in how we operate the business to have the agile, capable, fully engaged workforce that we know we’re going to need to be successful.”
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| If anyone can appreciate the challenges of the CEO role, it’s a head coach. In fact, the average tenure for coaches and managers in the three major US sports leagues is well below that of S&P 500 CEOs. Leaders who beat the odds to thrive in the hypercompetitive sports world can help their business counterparts win, too. Senior Partner Kevin Carmody and his coauthors interviewed more than 25 successful coaches, administrators, and players in US college and professional sports and revealed a winning formula for building—and, when needed, reinventing—teams. This approach calls for leaders to clearly outline the team’s objectives, bring together the right talent and skills, create a playbook for high performance, and build confidence. “The great teams that I have been on, it’s all about trust and accountability, with everyone working toward a common goal,” says former Notre Dame volleyball player Ella Sandt. | | | Lead by shaping your company’s story. | | | | | — Edited by Eric Quiñones, senior editor, New Jersey
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