As you are evaluating whether or not your organization has a great leader, see if she does these 4 things:
A great leader has a clear vision and is constantly sharing and shaping it with the leadership team.
Once the vision is clear, has the CEO worked with the leadership team to create measurable, realistic goals? This might be sales targets for the quarter or product deadlines for new features.
Effective CEOs need to be exceptional at communication. That includes enthusiastically leading the team All Hands meeting, organizing the executive team meeting and reading/replying to each executive’s weekly written updates (I use the tool Weekly Update for this).
Finally, an important mark of whether or not the CEO is a good leader is if s/he is able to attract A players to the team, and quickly identify/remove B/C players. This is a tough part of the CEO role… it’s easy to leave a B player in place and not bother to make the change. Great leaders apply the extra effort needed.
