Kim Powell is a Principal at ghSMART. She serves leading Fortune 500 senior executives, private equity firms and non-profit leaders in the areas of management assessment, leadership coaching and organizational change. She co-leads ghSMART’s research on first time CEO’s and is passionate about supporting leaders in accelerating their effectiveness in new roles. She is the co-author of the new book, The CEO Next Door (March 2018, Crown Business), which received a pre-release starred review from Booklist.
Prior to joining ghSMART, Kim spent fifteen years with The Boston Consulting Group advising CEOs and senior managers of Fortune 500 companies in the areas of driving transformational change and corporate strategy. Kim had global oversight for the firm’s Change Management practice, which spanned topic strategy creation and execution, expert cadre development, intellectual capital creation, training program creation and delivery, and knowledge management and dissemination.
She is the author of several publications related to leading during change and change management on BCG Perspectives. Before taking on this global role, Kimberly was a Principal at The Boston Consulting Group in the Atlanta and Chicago offices.
Kim earned a B.A. in History and French from the University of Notre Dame and earned an MBA as a F.C. Austin Scholar at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. She lives in Atlanta with her husband and two exuberant kids.
Sneak Peek Into What You’ll Learn…
02:46 – Kim tells us about supporting boards and CEO’s through her work at ghSmart.
06:04 – Kim shares more about the career that she built at BCG and extends now doing leadership advisory.
10:36 – Kim discusses how she decided to remain at BCG after returning to work post maternity leave and what she tried to do to make part-time work.
17:13 – Kim tells us more about her new book, the CEO Next Door.
22:10 – We learn about the results and behaviors that drive strong performance in CEO’s, what helps get CEO’s hired, and what experiences they had that accelerated them to the CEO position.
23:57 – Kim dives deep in the four behaviors that characterize successful CEO’s.
29:36 – Kim shares what we’d be surprised to know about what it takes to be a successful CEO.
34:11 – Kim discusses the role of biases in the CEO hiring process and what organizations and individuals can do to overcome them.
42:18 – We learn what young, up and coming leaders should understand about CEO’s and the encouragement they should take from these lessons.
48:01 – Kim talks about the main challenges she faces in juggling work and family life.
50:45 – Kim discusses how she and her husband manage two jobs with heavy travel while raising their family.
53:38 – Kim tells us about the secret sauce that allows her to keep perspective.
57:25 – Kim shares where she feels she consistently fails.
59:52 – Brass Tacks – The lightning round of concrete advice and tips.
Quotable Quotes:
- “…[I] decided to make a jump to focus specifically on the leadership dimension…realizing, if you have the right people and the right capabilities, and you train and develop them well you can really do anything you want.”
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Links to Resources
The CEO Next Door – The 4 Behaviors That Transform Ordinary People into World-Class Leaders
CEO Genome – Data driven insights into what makes successful CEO’s
