And while some of the specific do’s and don'ts for CEOs are unique to their role, most essential things like setting expectations, developing a vision, establishing a management process, creating priorities, building your management team, and doing an exceptional job on your earliest projects apply equally to anyone in a new leadership role.

When Ron Daniel was the managing partner of McKinsey & Company from 1976 to 1988, he sent a memo to new recruits when they started, entitled, “On Becoming an Associate.” His advice is still memorable all these years later: “Recognize the necessity of getting off to a good start in the firm. Your first few engagements are critical. During these studies, you can establish an internal clientele for yourself - that is, by performing in an outstanding way, your reputation will be quickly established in your office and even the firm.” (We’ve incorporated Ron’s memo in the Appendix of the book.)

This is especially important because whenever you assume a new role, you’re in what Max DePree, former CEO of furniture company Herman Miller and author of Leadership Is an Art, calls “a temporary state of incompetence.” Even if you think you know a company - or a department or a division - before you take over its leadership, think again. As GE’s Immelt reminisces, “I worked for this place for twenty-one years before I got the CEO job and there were still things that shocked me when I took over.”

The knowledge gap is even wider for outsiders. “Anyone coming into a new situation is faced with the fact that they often have to do the most at a point they know the least. You may have previous experience and you may be smart and have insight into how things work, but you know the least about the actual company you’re engaged in at the same time you have to set things in motion,” says AOL chairman and CEO Jonathan F. Miller, himself recruited into the company from the outside.

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The Life Cycle of a CEO— Claudius A. Hildebrand & Robert J. Stark

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Introduction

In fact, Dave hadn’t been the first choice for the CEO position, or even the second or third choice. Word was five others had been offered the job before him. What’s more, a couple of years earlier he’d been unceremoniously fired from his position as divisional president at a leading competitor. No one would have suggested from his educational background, either, that he was CEO material. Not only did he not have a degree from an elite school, but it also took him six years to graduate. He hated college and he’d dropped out for a time.

As Dave’s first year in the CEO seat progressed, the sneering assessments of that Florida night prevailed on the Street; the company’s stock slid 40 percent.

All the mythologizing is so unfortunate. It has popularized badly misguided notions about how a CEO can succeed in a job that’s not only crucial to the economic foundations of our society but also so cognitively, emotionally, and physically challenging that nearly a third of those appointed last fewer than three years in the role. The mythmaking has obscured so many important lessons we can learn from observing how CEOs struggle mightily with the changing challenges of the role. And overcome them, not only in the early going but also throughout their tenures.

Alternating between internal and external demands is only one way CEOs must learn to divide their time and energy. They also have to focus on the urgent here and now and on longer-term plans. In addition, they must be in command of the “hard stuff” of numbers and devote considerable time to the “soft stuff” of people management. Also crucial is striking a balance between taking decisive charge by quickly making some moves and engaging in learning more about the company. All require both/and thinking rather than either/or thinking. As skilled as leaders may have become in this over the course of their careers, the challenges of the Launch stage greatly up the ante on getting the balance right. Carol Tomé pulled off this balancing act with aplomb.

Acknowledgments

We were fortunate to be surrounded by some of the best leadership advisers on the planet. We tapped into the wisdom of our colleagues Cathy Anterasian, Ellen Kumata, Tony Byers, Julie Daum, Ann Yerger, Sabine Vinck, Colin Graham, Jordan Brugg, and many others to gain additional context of the inner game that CEOs face day in and day out. Many of them connected us to exceptional CEOs we were keen to include in our research.