Leadership Archives

Now that you have been introduced to what life as a first-time CEO has in store, here are three recommendations for emerging CEOs:

Build, develop and lead through your leadership team

Building their leadership team has always been an important part of the CEO job; but the composition and purpose of this team is changing as businesses themselves take on a wider understanding of their purpose.

Traditionally a CEO’s goal was to develop a “high performing team,” in which each member was responsible for a different function that created value for investors and customers. But thanks to a growing emphasis on Environmental, Social & Governance (ESG) considerations, today’s leadership team must now serve a wider caste of stakeholders than its predecessors. Employees, for example, are now considered primary and equal stakeholders to investors and customers. Similarly, many investors are now evaluating companies based on their social and environmental relationships with the communities in which they operate.

As a result, modern CEOs need to build “high value creating” teams, in which success is measured by the team’s ability to create simultaneous value for a broad array of stakeholders. A side effect of this widened imperative is that success is no longer measured by looking at how individual members of the leadership team execute their individual functions. Instead, a successful leadership team has to work interactively, across functions, to ensure that it represent the interests of (and creates value for) all stakeholders.

For first-time or new CEOs, building a value-creating leadership team—and making sure that you get the right people on it—is crucial to your ability to focus broadly across the needs of the organization and to increase value by steering company purpose and culture. But it is not easy to do. A Systemic Leadership Team coach can be invaluable in helping the CEO build, lead and motivate the perfect team.

Build informal relationships with individual board members

The board can be an excellent source of guidance for CEOs, and newly appointed CEOs should go out of their way to build informal relationships with individual board members who can provide the advice, feedback, and support that CEOs often fail to receive from other members of their organizations.

But building these relationships can be harder than it sounds. Your board members, after all, do not work in the office down the hall; they may not even live in the same country. This is why close relationships between CEOs and board members rarely just fall into place like they often do between CEOs and key members of the leadership team. Instead, building relationships with board members often requires conscious effort. New CEOs will need to go out of their way to creatively engage their directors on a regular basis outside of the formal strictures of the boardroom.

Work with a coach

Executive coaches are an excellent resource for first-time CEOs. As neutral third-party observers, coaches provide the kind of constructive feedback and skills training that CEOs, as bosses, often struggle to get from their team members. They also help CEOs improve their skills in conflict management, responsibility delegation, time management, and listening—all of which are necessary for new CEOs to successfully adapt to the role.

The purpose of executive coaching is to increase performance by improving emotional intelligence, which leads to a more empathic and self-aware leader. Even the best CEOs can get better at their jobs. Some of the most influential CEOs in the last decades—Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Alphabet’s Eric Schmidt among them—have benefited tremendously from executive coaching.

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The CEO job can be one of the most rewarding jobs in business. It is also unquestionably one of the most difficult. Incoming first-time CEOs should expect the role to bring a variety of changes to their lives, most of them positive, some of them negative, others downright confusing. By surrounding yourself with trusted advisors, by consulting mentors, and by hiring a coach, both new and seasoned CEOs can minimize their isolation and get the feedback they need for success.

If you are reading this, chances are you have encountered articles telling you that a good chief executive officer (CEO) needs to be a decisive, results-oriented leader who can simultaneously articulate a strategic vision for the company, embody its culture and values, and represent it to outside entities—all while driving growth.

You probably also know that CEOs walk a tightrope between the often-contradictory imperatives of their job. They must be optimistic, capable of seeing opportunities wherever they look, and at the same time be capable of assessing the risks that lie beneath those opportunities. They must be great listeners and team-builders, able to synthesize information and opinions from a variety of sources; but they must also be decisive, willing to make decisions without consensus in moments of informational uncertainty.

The CEO position is comprised of psychological and emotional complexities; knowing what a CEO does and knowing how being a CEO feels are very different, and making the leap to the lead executive chair is one of the single most challenging job changes of most CEOs’ careers.

So, here are eight things you should know when making the transition:

Being boss-less is not all fun and games

Most first-time CEOs come to the role after decades of hard work—decades during which they had peers with whom they could informally trade feedback and superiors to whom they could refer certain hard-to-make decisions. The fact that CEOs have neither bosses nor peers within the company constitutes a real and drastic change, one that requires adjustment and often drives the social isolation, lack of feedback, and fear of decisiveness that first-time CEOs frequently experience.

Responsibility can be isolating and painful

Almost by definition, when you have boss, you also have someone to whom you can defer responsibility for the most consequential or challenging decisions. But when you are the CEO, you are that boss. For many executives, this is something they have longed for: the moment when they get to give orders without having to run them by someone else. But with this authority comes an intense emotional burden: suddenly you are the person making decisions—often based on limited information—that can have serious ramifications for the company’s health and the quality of your people’s lives. Indeed, at times you will have to choose between those exact things. Even experienced CEOs can find the weight of authority incredibly taxing, especially in times of crisis.

People will treat you differently

CEOs hold an almost reverential position in many companies. There are several explanations for this fact, but one of them is that it is the simple consequence of power disparity. If you are an employee, the CEO of your company is not just in charge of what you do at your job every day, they are in charge of whether you have your job at all. And this fact understandably influences the ways in which employees interpret and behave around their CEO.

People will do what you say

One by-product of your authority as a CEO is that what you say—and how you look when you say it—matters more than it did earlier in your career. For this reason, experienced CEOs are often quite careful when they speak; they know that even a spur-of-the-moment idea or opinion can, if voiced, have lasting impacts on the company’s culture, behavior, and reputation. As a new CEO, you can’t bounce ideas off just anyone. You can’t have emotional reactions around just anyone. You must calculate the potential interpretations and ramifications of every idea and opinion before you voice them.

People will act as you act

As the CEO, you embody—whether you intend to or not—the culture you want to see in your company. The way you speak, the way you comport yourself, the kinds of financial decisions you make on and off the job—all of these things send a message to the people who work for you. You may be astonished to learn, as a new CEO, that your employees talk about the model of car you drive and how much you paid for your house. But they will; and they’ll infer things about you and your values from that information.

Culturally speaking, CEOs need to understand (and leverage) the fact that their behavior has a symbolic dimension. Getting rid of corporate jets, for example, may have a tiny impact on the bottom line in the greater scheme of things, but it can go a long way in revising the tone of the company’s culture.

You are the external face of the company

Your own employees are not the only ones hanging on your every word and deed. As most first-time CEOs know, chief executives spend a significant amount of time and energy representing the company to the public—that is, to the media, to investors, and to stakeholder communities. But it is important to note that as the CEO, you are always serving in this capacity. Your life is now a symbol for something larger, and there are certain penalties that come with being a symbol. You give up a significant amount of anonymity, for example, and you give up certain freedoms that come with that anonymity. For some new CEOs and their families, this takes some getting used to.

You are overseeing something that pre-exists you

If you are coming into the company as a CEO, you are inheriting years, even decades, of relationships, precedents, expectations, and practices—many of which will never be described to you.

You will not have total control over your success and failure

Our culture tends to credit an organization’s successes and failures to the person in charge. If the company performs well, the CEO is applauded. If it stumbles, the CEO is blamed. But factors beyond the CEO’s control can dictate both successes and failures. As a CEO, you will be blamed for things that you feel like you had no control over, things you feel like you inherited, just as you’ll be applauded for successes that may not be directly linked to your actions. Either way, you must understand that the core responsibility of your job is to focus on creating value in the space between these extremes.