CEOs’ time and their open-door policies

CEOs are increasingly pressed for time, both for managing everyday business as well steering their companies towards a better future. This poses challenges in terms of how well they can manage their time with the right priorities and focus.

Worldwide, the organisational culture of open workplaces has evolved in the last two decades. CEOs of many large companies, along with their deputies and other senior executives, have also embraced the open workplace and open-door policies. Now, accessing a CEO for a business discussion is not that difficult for another executive such as a CFO, CPO or CIO.

However, such easy accessibility has also decreased the time available for CEOs to focus on and think about strategic issues in their firms.

In PwC's 26th Annual Global CEO Survey: Bangladesh perspective, one of the key factors for survey and analysis was the CEOs' time. CEOs from Bangladesh said they spent 24 per cent of their time on strategizing for the future of their business, 22 per cent on driving business performance on a day-to-day basis, and 20 per cent on mentoring or developing their human capital.

This aligns with the global survey responses, where CEOs indicated they spent most of their time in driving business performance (25 per cent). Moreover, they spent lesser time (22per cent) in strategizing for the future and even lesser time (18 per cent) on mentoring and developing their human capital.

Comparatively, this shows that Bangladeshi CEOs have been doing a better job in terms of allocating their time towards strategic thinking. However, the survey also revealed an interesting finding on the empowerment of various executives.

Asked whether their business leaders make important and functional decisions by themselves, 77 per cent of Bangladeshi CEOs responded that such decision making happens rarely. Business executives reporting to CEOs regularly consult them before making any important functional decision.

While open-door policies have made it easier for business executives to get access to their CEOs and consult them for business matters, it also highlights the need to empower the second line of leaders to enable faster decision making. To begin with, this would require more mentoring and coaching time by the CEOs. However, once CEOs are able to accomplish this, they will be able to free up more time to engage in matters that are necessary for the future of the organisation.

The good news is that such changes have already started happening. While conducting the CEO survey, PwC also interviewed a few CEOs from Bangladesh to understand their perspective in detail. Some of these CEOs indicated that they had already empowered their second line to make day-to-day business decisions so that they could spend more time on customer engagements and strategy formulation.

Therefore, though it is crucial for CEOs today to maintain an open-door policy in their workplaces to remain easily accessible to their people. They also must set aside some time to strategize for the future. Appropriate delegation to the second line of leaders will enable CEOs to achieve the same.

The writer is a partner with PwC. The views expressed here are his own.