CEO Scorecard for Remote Leadership

Today we are launching a CEO Scorecard for executives to evaluate and strengthen their leadership, visibility, and engagement strategies. Our CEO Scorecard evaluates multiple data sets from a leader’s public-facing profile, including business performance, visibility in the media, thought leadership, and social media engagement.

To demonstrate the power of the CEO Scorecard, we evaluated ten CEOs leading high-growth companies from Fortune’s 2019 40 Under 40 award to uncover their activities before and after the pandemic began. Highlights from CEO activities in 2019 include:

• 70% leveraged speaking engagements to set the tone in an industry or niche

• 60% used Instagram and none used LinkedIn or Facebook

• 50% employed Twitter occasionally to amplify their voice

• 40% used media for company news, industry trends, and new products/services

• 10% successfully shaped the conversations by leveraging video to explain new thinking about bias in the AI space

Once the pandemic hit, we found that all ten of the CEOs quickly embraced leading in virtual environments. They considered context, brevity, transparency, and relevancy when engaging in real-time. They have a digital mindset, are fluent in data, and hyper-visual. More importantly, they all adapt quickly to changes in the market.

• 50% of CEOs embraced virtual events

• 70% increased Twitter following, tweets and engagement

• 40% increased media mentions, with one CEO increasing mentions by 76%

• Surprisingly, none of the CEOs leveraged LinkedIn or Facebook to engage audiences directly

SutherlandGold’s CEO Scorecard for Remote Leadership

In addition to our CEO Scorecard research, we analyzed a new generation of digital-first CEOs who are defining what remote leadership might look like in the post-pandemic world. These CEOs are leading startup companies in the exploding fintech, biotech, AI, and healthcare sectors. We asked how much time they commit to visibility, what resources they use, and which metrics they value in measuring business success.

The startup company CEO responses were eye-opening:

• 75% say engagement is more important than ever

• 80% manage their own social media presence

• 40% believe social media is a top choice for visibility and engagement

• 61% say social media impacts a company’s bottom line

• 47% leverage Twitter to track trends

• 30% use LinkedIn for thought leadership

• 50% prefer Facebook for promoting their personal use

• 54% use LinkedIn to promote their professional brand

The result of our study and survey is a multidimensional picture into what CEOs leading high-growth and startup companies prioritize now and in the future when it comes to leading in a virtual business world.