What Companies Expect from Senior Leaders to Survive and Grow in the Next 5 Years

In order to understand what companies expect from senior leaders to grow and reach their 5-year goals, it is imperative to first understand why. A plan, whether short-term or long-term, provides a clear image of the future and the path the company should follow to achieve that future. A 5-year plan helps identify the challenges the company might face and have to overcome, the skills it needs to gain, and the kind of experience it needs to have in the coming years. It provides a certain amount of control over the journey of the company through the years to come. It also provides a deadline to achieve those goals. Planning for the next 5 years is difficult, and companies need to consider all the factors that will make a 5-year plan effective for the growth and survival of the company. This is what companies are looking for in their senior leaders. Someone with the expertise, ability, and know-how to facilitate the company’s aim to fulfill its goals. As a senior leader, you can provide the organization with several skills that will help the company achieve its goals.

Here is what companies expect from senior leaders;

Vision, strategy and goal-setting

The primary decision in a 5-year planning is the vision. This is where you see the progress and path of the company in the coming years. It is crucial to have a clear vision with a proper direction. The vision of any company bases itself on its aspirations for the future. The vision can inspire the company and its employees to reach their goals. It also helps any company to have a proper strategy to achieve its goals and aspirations.

Goals are also based on the company’s vision, and they’re always achieved with a proper strategy. Without any kind of strategy, everything becomes chaotic. Any company can lose sight of its goals if a carved-out strategy is not thought upon to achieve the goals. Company goals need to be realistic and achievable in the given time frame. The workforce will get demotivated if the goals are impossible to achieve. Having quantifiable goals allows the company to track its progress with time. This reveals whether the strategies are working and provides a window of opportunity to make the strategies better with time in order to achieve more goals.

The company’s strategies should be based on the strength, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in the market. This is also known as the SWOT analysis. It is crucial for the leaders of the company to analyze these aspects of the company when deciding on the goals and strategies. While the company strategies should involve strengths, the company leaders should work on the weaknesses. They should make sure the weaknesses don’t interfere with the efficiency and progress of the company. The leaders should also craft goals based on the opportunities and threats in the markets.

Experience

The experience that you bring along with your varied knowledge can make things the planning and execution sail smoothly. In 5-10 years the company might go through a lot of transformations, which will be effortless if there is a team of senior leaders behind it. There are a lot of departments, and they need to be handled by senior leaders with a lot of expertise and experience. What companies expect from senior leaders is to have clarity about the company and its goals. This clarity comes with your experience. Employees look to you for guidance when they are met with challenges. Your experience and mentorship can help them resolve problems that otherwise would not be possible. Due to your experience with the employees, the company expects you to handle the distribution of work so that there are no kinks in the workflow. The company expects you to be at the helm to forge strategies, set goals, distribute work and guide your team.

Communication skills

Refined and professional communication is one of the important skills that a company expects you to have as a senior leader. Companies expect you to be transparent, honest, and tactful when communicating with your team, other leaders, clients, partners and possibly shareholders. Whether you need to provide constructive criticism to your team, discuss goals and strategies with other leaders or shareholders, you need the skills to be able to hold your own.

It is a widely understood fact that communication must always reflect the perspectives of everyone involved. Two-way communication is of the utmost importance. As a senior leader, you should be open to suggestions and keep your team in the loop for planning things. This will make the workforce feel important and convey to them that they are valued, thereby increasing their commitment. Having suggestions from other people is also pivotal for the company as it gives the company several points of view. It plays an integral part in having great strategies and ideas.

Conflict resolution skills

No team is without conflict. There are always different opinions when many people are working together. These conflicts of interest can take on a negative or positive direction, depending on the leader’s direction. If these discords are not worked on properly, it will disrupt the functioning of the whole team. Disagreements often lead to new and interesting ideas to do things, and these can happen only when there is an open and direct discussion about things facilitated by the leader. You, as a senior leader, are expected to speak candidly and create an environment of respect and support among co-workers to ensure workplace harmony.

Soft skills

What companies expect from senior leaders is to be the support system or the backbone of any company. The company expects you to be the guiding light for other employees. You are expected to have soft skills such as a great personality, a positive attitude, honesty, and have a high sense of integrity and morals. Leaders are usually under a lot of pressure to ensure their company operates smoothly, so good stress and emotional management are also required.

Furthermore, companies also count on you to be very proficient in communication and also be good listeners. You are expected to have a high level of critical thinking to design and innovate when things look bad. The company needs you to be flexible and think out of the box at times. The company also expects you to be good at conflict management and resolve issues among people, so it is important that you are compassionate and practice empathy. Empathy empowers you to understand your employees better and therefore improve their working environment, which will in turn, improve the quality of their output. Companies expect you, as a senior leader, to be able to adapt to any situation that you may come across and make your way out smoothly.

All these skills are very important for the successful management of any company. What companies expect from senior leaders is someone they can rely on to set an example for all employees by being productive, effective, and morally and ethically consistent.