1: When Mary Barra became CEO of General Motors in 2014, she immediately faced a crisis that would shape her leadership philosophy.
At least 124 people were dead because of a faulty ignition issue with General Motors’s cars. The company had been aware of the problem for more than a decade.
Mary responded quickly. More than 29 million cars were ultimately recalled.
There was, however, a more significant learning for Mary and her team: “Had we understood the situation when we first had symptoms, it would have been a much smaller problem,” she reflects in Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, and Vikram Malhotra book CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest.
“By the time we were done with it, it was a multi-billon-dollar problem with a tragic outcome for some of our customers.”
The tragedy impacted Mary and her approach to leadership. “I ask my team, ‘When is the best time to solve a problem?’ I always say, “‘The minute you know you have one.’ Problems don’t get smaller on their own.”
2: One of the most important roles of the CEO is to ensure open lines of communication throughout the company. Doing so begins with creating an operating rhythm that creates conversation and transparency.
The best CEOs have a weekly check-in with their senior leadership team.
JPMC CEO Jamie Dimon explains: “In that meeting, there’s no agenda because it’s my team’s responsibility to bring their issues to the table. Everything’s got to be on the table. It could be a client issue; it could be someone wants permission to do something; it could be they want a bunch of people to interview someone for a job; it could be a risk issue.
“If you work for me, you can’t say, ‘Well, you didn’t bring it up.’ I walk in with my list every Monday and I expect others to have theirs.”
Dupont CEO Ed Breen leads a one-hour Monday morning meeting. The goal is for everyone to be on the same page. Ed uses a red flag (challenges)/green flag (things to celebrate) system.
“It’s a very quick around-the-horn sharing of what your red flags and your green flags are,” he notes. “The only time I’ll ever get upset with you is if you’re not telling me the red flags. If there’s something we need to hear: It’s not going well, you’re not going to meet your forecast, you have a legal issue, or there’s a factory you’re concerned about–whatever it is, we need to hear it. Usually someone on the team can help.”
McKinsey consultants Carolyn, Scott, and Vikram observe: “It may seem odd to some that the best CEOs hold weekly meetings based primarily on an ‘around the horn’ update regarding what’s working and what’s not. Such a check-in, however, plays a vital role, and sometimes can be even a matter of life or death.”
The best CEOs also conduct a more formal monthly senior team meeting.
Valeo CEO Jacques Aschenbroich leads a monthly meeting that takes four or five hours. “The agenda reviews progress against strategic, operational, and organizational issues,” the authors write, “as well as trends in the external environment.”
Former Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson would hold a full-day monthly meeting with her leadership team. “I brought everybody in, and we generally would have a dinner, so there was team-building time together as well,” she shares.
“The primary focus was on the strategy of the business, but the topics would vary based on what we needed to address—M&A targets, cross-functional initiatives, diversity and inclusion, or taking cost out, driving margin improvement… it was about the top-of-the-house kinds of things.”
Other CEOs conduct quarterly day-long sessions, including a dinner. For JPMC’s Jamie Dimon, the objective of these meetings is to tackle the “big issues that don’t tend to change monthly—like cybersecurity.” He organizes relevant subgroups to investigate the issues in advance to help guide the conversation.
3: The final element of the operating rhythm is a multiday offsite for the top team. In Jamie’s case, he leads a four-day strategy offsite for the JPMC top team.
The agenda? “What are the most important questions facing the company?” he explains. Topics include everything from “business expansion plans to technology strategies to HR policies to leadership training,” the authors note.
“It’s a big deal for us,” he notes, “A whole bunch of to-do’s come out of it that we then follow up on in the other meetings during the year.”
The team also analyzes the effectiveness of the operating rhythm itself. “What do we think is a waste of time, what is not; we really lay it all out on the table,” Jamie says.
Former American Express CEO Ken Chenault led a recurring annual meeting for two hundred leaders. He would articulate the “headlines:” What he wanted to read about the company in twelve months.
“Part of what you want to do is manage constructive tension between the short term and the long term and be clear on the trade-offs that need to be made.” he explains.
“It’s very important early on for a new CEO to dive into getting various pieces of the organization to sync. Don’t just leave it to chance,” Westpac CEO Gail Kelly recommends.
“You have to get into that level of detail,” she continues. “You can’t just hope it happens—it won’t. You have to ensure the charters are right for each forum and be clear where the decision-making lies. The effectiveness of the strategy depends on these things being clear and aligned.”
The rhythm of leadership communication—from weekly check-ins to annual strategic offsites—creates the foundation for organizational success. As these CEOs demonstrate, it’s not just about having meetings, but about creating the right cadence and psychological safety for surfacing both problems and opportunities. Mary Barra’s early experience at GM underscores what can happen when issues don’t surface quickly enough. The solution, as leaders like Jamie Dimon, Ed Breen, and Ken Chenault show us, is a deliberate communication architecture that scales from tactical weekly updates to long-term strategic planning.
It’s an ever-evolving process, Itaú Unibanco CEO Roberto Setúbal explains: “As we grew, I started creating more processes to better organize the way decisions were made so that actions were driven in a way that felt natural,” he shares. “Importantly, all this process must evolve with the times.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: What are the weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual meetings my organization has in place to address organizational, operational, and strategic issues?
Action: Implement one best practice as outlined above.
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