Tag: transit CEO leadership
Your Mindset Can Make or Break Your Partnership With The Board
A staple of my one-on-one governance coaching sessions and educational workshops for transit CEOs and CEO-aspirants in recent years has been the critical role that what I call “Mindset” plays in building and maintaining a close, positive, productive and enduring board-CEO partnership. What am I talking about? In a nutshell, Mindset is how you, as your authority’s chief executive officer, picture yourself vis a vis your transit board. Experience has taught me that if you bring the wrong mindset to the relationship with your board, it probably won’t matter what other partnership building steps you take (for example, reaching agreement … Read the rest
4 Board-Savvy CEOs Discuss Preparing CEO-Aspirants to Take the Helm
When CEO-aspirants take the helm of a transit authority, among the stiffest challenges they face is building a solid partnership with their new board. There is wide agreement in the field of transit governance that the single most lethal threat to a newly minted CEO’s professional success and longevity in the C-Suite is a shaky working relationship with the board that can’t withstand the normal stresses and strains at the top. So our readers who are CEO-aspirants – along with CEOs who are interested in fine-tuning and strengthening the partnership with their board – will want to watch the video … Read the rest
CEO-Aspirants Need to Understand How to Protect the CEO Line of Credit
Over the course of my 30-plus years of work with public transit boards and their CEOs, I’ve learned that executives aspiring to take the helm of a transit authority are often woefully ill-prepared to build the kind of partnership with their new board that is critical to their success and to their longevity at the top. Dave Stackrow and I, in our book Building a Solid Board-CEO Partnership (Governance Edge 2019), discuss two major reasons for this often-professionally fatal shortcoming: the absence of detailed, practical, experience-based courses on governance generally and board-CEO relationship building particularly in graduate schools of management; … Read the rest
Top-Flight Performance Won’t Keep the Relationship With Your Board Healthy
When I walked in Rich’s office for our weekly project review meeting, I found him slumped at his desk looking distraught. When I asked him what’d happened, he just said “take a look,” handing me a form. It was the annual performance evaluation his board had performed a couple of days ago. Scanning the document, I couldn’t fathom his distress since his scores were uniformly high – in fact, superb. That is, until I reached the bottom and saw the conclusion, which said in so many words, “You do a great job, but we find working with you impossible.” He … Read the rest
Bagging Three Big Feathered Friends
Let me tell you a tale of two authorities’ very different approaches to presenting financial performance reports at their monthly board meetings. Authority A takes a pretty traditional approach. The authority’s CFO thoroughly reviews the multi-page financial report, consisting of rows and columns of numbers, with the board’s finance committee, which passes the report along to the full board in the monthly board meeting packet. The CFO presents highlights from the report at the full board meeting and answers any questions the board might have.
Authority B’s approach is dramatically different. The CFO takes the board’s performance monitoring committee through … Read the rest
A Rock-Solid Board President-CEO Leadership Team at Work at GCRTA
In the video interview we recently recorded, Rev. Charles Lucas, Board President, and India Birdsong, General Manager/CEO, of the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority describe the close, positive, and highly productive partnership they’ve developed. It is indicative of a striking development in the rapidly evolving field of public transit governance: the recognition that a really solid board chair-CEO leadership team is critical to the CEO’s success, to the authority’s performance, and to its image in the community. GCRTA is in the vanguard of the growing number of public transit authorities led by dynamic chair-CEO duos.
This recognition is a latecomer … Read the rest
Making the Annual Budget Preparation Process an Innovation Engine
I’ve never come across a CEO who wasn’t pretty much an expert in the art of annual budget preparation by the time she first takes the helm of an authority. This isn’t the least surprising when you think about it. Climbing the professional ladder, CEO-aspirants have typically devoted hundreds of hours to preparing, reviewing, revising, and – eventually, at a senior executive level – consolidating budget requests by the time they reach the top. These newly minted chief executive officers understand how to capitalize on the budget preparation process as a highly effective and reliable vehicle for exerting management control. … Read the rest
What’s in Your Board Chair’s Compensation Package?
I’ll never forget walking into a transit authority’s board room several years ago. I found the board chair – a highly influential attorney – fuming. When I asked what was wrong, he handed me a clipping from the community affairs section of the local paper, saying “read this and you’ll see.” The piece was a glowing review of the authority’s new agreement with the local three-campus community college system – providing frequent, convenient bus service to students. I couldn’t see what the problem was until I got near the end of the piece, when I read a long quote from … Read the rest
How Transit CEO-Aspirants Can Demonstrate Board-Savviness to Search Committees
A major ongoing theme of www.boardsavvytransitceo.com has been preparing executive team members who are what we call CEO-aspirants to build productive, enduring partnerships with their new board. As our readers well know, a shaky board-CEO working relationship is virtually certain to dramatically shorten a CEO’s tenure if it persists. Well-designed training programs can be helpful in preparing CEO-aspirants to meet the partnership building challenge once they take the helm. However. in my professional opinion no one is better positioned to transform executives into board-savvy CEO-aspirants than the CEO herself, wearing her mentoring hat. You’ll recall that our November 4 post … Read the rest
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