At Rhythm Systems, we specialize in helping middle market companies achieve their dreams and goals.
In order to understand those obstacles better, we collected insights from over 900 CEOs about their biggest business challenges. We wanted to know what was keeping you up at night, and we found the results fascinating.
By far, the most common business challenge reported is related to growth. CEOs worry about managing growth and growing predictably.
Next, CEOs are concerned about hiring, employee engagement, accountability, leadership and performance management.
Maintaining profitability and healthy cash flow is another very common theme from our middle market CEOs.
Consistently delivering sales and marketing results came up frequently as a top challenge. How do you get the team to work cross-functionally?
Successfully executing new strategies, projects, and plans. How do you organize and lead the change initiatives across the company?
CEOs also report that aligning business units and people is a significant struggle. Getting on the same page is hard and staying on the same page in the fast paced business world is even harder. You need a system to keep the team aligned.
Developing the right strategic plan for future growth and effectively facilitating an effective planning meeting were among the top concerns.
CEOs additionally reported internal communication and collaboration as significant business challenges. This is even more challenging during the times of remote work, where communication and alignment also suffer if you don't have an operating system for your business.
Focusing on doing the right things to achieve clearly defined results. Priorities often change with changing business conditions, but management doesn't get their teams focused on the priorities for today, causing lots of re-work.
Developing and executing the right product, customer and growth strategies is also a top of mind as a challenge for CEOs. Many find extreme benefits in hiring a strategic planning facilitator for their expertise in getting an actionable strategy for the company and plans how to get there.
If you like this blog, be sure to visit our updated version of Biggest Business Challenges with fresh data.
In addition to these most familiar challenges, we also saw themes of consistency, scalability and innovation frequently come up in the responses. CEOs are bearing the brunt of the pressure to manage strategy, people and execution as well as keeping the company healthy, profitable, and growing. It's a tall order for anyone; even highly experienced and successful leaders have many of the same worries. If you are a CEO reading this list and nodding your head in agreement, know that you're not alone.
What's keeping you up at night? Is it on this list, or is it something entirely different? Please make a comment to share your biggest business challenge.
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Photo Credit: iStock by Getty Images
Photo Credit: iStock by Getty Images