What a Disillusionment

What a Disillusionment!

Unit 4 Written Assignment

Being a CEO entails a tremendous amount of responsibility. It also means being the go-to person that others look to when the management or profitability of a company comes under fire. Chief executive officers often find themselves in the public eye and not always for the right reasons. From financial scandals to concerns over a lack of diversity, CEOs, and the corporate world, in general, is consistently under scrutiny (Lake 2015). This definition comes with such statistics as there are 248, 760 CEOs in the US. The average incoming age of a CEO is 53, and the average outgoing age is 63 with an average tenure of 9.7 years. In the article, 97% of US CEOs have a bachelor’s degree, but only 29 of the top 100 have an MBA (Lake 2015). These facts and others come from websites, books, articles, and clippings. Even this plethora of information doesn’t equate to my current perception of how I feel a CEO should perform.

My prior experiences with a CEO has been up close and personal. I have friends who were my co-workers that climbed the ladder of experience and education to the success of CEO.

As I look into my prior experiences, I see that education is a real factor of consideration for me when thinking about my ideal CEO. It gives me a certain comfort level to know that the person has invested in himself by investing in knowledge. For me, it shows a willingness to be progressive, not be narrow-minded and not suffer from tunnel vision as I find so many CEOs do.

My perception of the importance of experience goes hand-in-hand with education. Yes, I know. Every journey starts with a single step, but I prefer a CEO to have taken a couple of laps around the block before stepping up to such an important post because it is an outstanding job. So seeing the statistics that most CEOs are between 53-63 years of age is of some value to me. Also, having a track record of dealings with difficult subjects like unions, EEOC (EEOC, n.d.), Joint Commission (Joint Commission, n.d.), etc. proves to me that this CEO is a reliable one who takes an active role in the management of his company.

A person’s ethical characteristics and moral fiber will show through regardless of your station as a CEO or a CNA. If you’re a pre-conventional leader and you rest on the laurels of being only charismatic, if you entertain corrupt actions which in turn model for your employees, and if you don’t organizationally socialize yourself with the people who are the backbone of your company, you run the risk of running them away, just like the CEO of my comparison.

Having met the new CEO under less than desirable conditions (we filed federal papers citing a hostile work environment and more), I was skeptical about his performance in the new role. He was not just CEO, but recently handed the title of president