Here’s what CEOs want to see in your talent strategy

CEOs suddenly have a lot of thoughts about talent management and HR. The problem: CHROs can’t read their minds. 

So McKinsey surveyed chief executives, asking what trends they believe will greatly impact how they’ll lead in 2023. The responses offer a helpful glimpse into what CEOs really want to see in people leaders’ talent strategies. 

Employee performance, renegotiating working methods, and reducing operating expenses all topped the CEO talent priorities in McKinsey’s latest CEO Excellence Survey. Here are the highlights:

Surveyed CEOs say they’d like to refocus attention on employee performance. Call it compassion fatigue, but chief executives are eager to move beyond helping employees weather the pandemic and are ready to settle into the “new normal.” They want workers operating at peak productivity, especially as they enter an economic downturn. 

“The best CEOs believe that talented employees are by and large welcoming of such a stance,” write the report’s authors. Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, and Salesforce’s CEO, Marc Benioff, have perhaps been the most vocal about this shift in focus. Last July, Zuckerberg told employees to expect higher intensity and to prepare to have their performance graded on a steeper curve. Benioff recently told employees that “wellness culture overpowered high-performance culture” during the pandemic. 

Surveyed CEOs also expect employees to spend more time in the office or with clients this year. Many hold firm to the belief that an increased in-office presence better fosters mentorship, community, innovation, and purpose. CEOs like Goldman Sachs’s David Solomon, JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon, and Twitter’s Elon Musk are emblematic of this stance.

Lastly, and likely unsurprisingly, given the economic climate, CEOs want to reduce operating expenses—be it through headcount reduction or cutting perks and benefits. And despite some cuts, they want to see increased employee productivity.

For HR leaders, this means they’ll again be called to do more with less and must get creative in aligning talent strategy with their CEO’s business objectives.

Amber Burton
[email protected]
@amberbburton

Reporter's Notebook

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Last week, I spoke with Glassdoor’s chief people officer about the future of DEI within organizations.

“What is powerful about having somebody who's focused exclusively on diversity is that there's somebody there to make sure that [DEI] is brought up all the time and considered when the muscle isn't built initially. I think there's still a place for that. But ideally, you'll start to have CPOs who don't even necessarily need diversity in their titles but just start to embed it into the work naturally.”

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Commuting is overrated. Allstate CEO Tom Wilson says the secret sauce to the company’s culture is its flexibility. “Nobody wants to drive to an office to do a Zoom call, and they don’t have to.” —Jane Thier

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