Most organizations would agree that hiring employees to fill open (and necessary) positions in the org chart is a no brainer.
The job has to be done, so the position needs to be filled.
What’s interesting, though, is that many times the most mission-critical activities (those high-level tasks that every organization needs to undertake to reach greater levels of success), do not fit so neatly on an org chart. While it would be easy to say that they fall under the purvey of the CEO or director, that person is often too consumed with the day-to-day to be able to adequately and effectively step back and focus on the big picture.
As a result, the most important activities for growing organizations often get overlooked at worse, and short-changed at best.
This business reality led us to a very interesting realization: There’s an important C-level position missing from the vast majority of org charts:
The Chief Action Officer or CAO
It’s missing because the tasks a CAO needs to perform require a unique perspective and skill set, in-depth and expansive real-world experience and an intimate knowledge of processes related to:
1. Finding Clarity – getting clear about what needs to happen.
2. Setting Strategy Direction – figuring out how it needs to happen.
3. Taking Action – developing a practical and actionable plan for making it happen.
4. Driving Results – measuring what happens, and making course corrections to ensure it does happen.
Because the skills of a CAO are so specialized, most organizations are far better off leveraging the expertise of an outside resource, rather than bringing on a full-time team member to take on this newly defined C-level position.
Here’s a little more about each high-level activity the CAO performs, and why having the support of your own outside CAO can truly mean the difference between creating serious forward movement and simply floundering:
Clarity
When the going gets tough, the tough get mired in the day-to-day.
It’s human nature to want to focus on the known and familiar, rather than on the ambiguous. In fact, the behavior of turning to the day-to-day in the face of tough challenges is exactly why most business owners say that no one knows their organization better than they do.
The question is this: Is knowing your organization, the same as knowing how to take it the next level?
A CAO is especially skilled at facilitating discussion in service of clarifying unique attributes, core competencies, growth opportunities and organizational challenges. Better still, the CAO will bring the objectivity and outside perspective to these discussions that result in far deeper clarity and understanding for everyone involved.
Strategy
In the same way a CAO brings the ideal perspective for helping organizations achieve deeper clarity, the person in this role is also ideally positioned to bring organizations more value during strategy development.
To be specific, a CAO is positioned on the outside – outside your company and outside your world.
This means they’re able to provide not only a fresh perspective, but also best practices and the market knowledge from their wider experience – something that can only add value as you can consider what will be the most effective strategy forward.
A good CAO also brings a proven methodology to the table, ensuring that your organization moves through the strategic process in an orderly, timely and thorough manner.
In other words, having a CAO means you’re exponentially more likely to come out on the other side of the process with a comprehensive strategic direction.
Action
It’s hard to work in your business and on your business at the same time.
In fact, strategies often fail because most of the effort is spent creating a focused and specific strategic plan, while little time is spent developing an equally specific plan for executing it.
As a result, you and your team know in broad strokes where you want the organization to be in three to five years, but you have nary a clue about what to do month to month and year to year to get there.
It’s not that you and your team are not smart, or that you don’t know how to create a plan. It’s simply that this type of plan development benefits more from the outsider perspective and broader experience of a CAO – a person skilled at breaking down a vision into the objectives and milestones that an organization will need to achieve to actually reach the big-picture goal.
Results
If you don’t measure any given effort, you miss out on understanding the factors that contributed to success or failure. Not to mention, missing the opportunity to understand, in real time, what’s working and what needs to be changed.
A good CAO can help your organization determine what metrics to monitor and how to track progress. This level of diligence will then enable you to make course corrections as you go, as well as to re-evaluate goals based on results.
So, when the strategy is completed, you’ll know for certain which drivers and actions made it possible – and that makes it possible to set even better goals and direction for the future.
