The key takeaway: experiencing some fear and self-doubt along with the thrill of taking charge is not only perfectly normal but also a feature of success. It’s a sign that you’re your keeping a critical perspective about how well you’re doing, which is crucial in embracing the need for continuing development.
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Strong management of board and shareholder expectations and perceptions is critical. Indeed, often the core problem is the perception of performance, which makes powerful and highly persuasive communication with the board, shareholders, and analysts a CEO’s priority. One director told us, “Even when you think you’re communicating too much, you’re probably not communicating enough.
As Damien Faughnan said, the most successful CEOs are “the people who really work to understand who they are” and who have a great “capacity for deep reflection about themselves.” Failing to embrace this discipline of self-interrogation and relentless people skills development is a leading cause of executives stalling in their careers or failing in the early years of their CEO tenure.
Once leaders realize the necessity of change, they can begin to explore the possibilities of change. The second phase involves considerable discomfort and a good deal of frustration because new skills take more work to build than anticipated. Falling back into old habits is common, especially when dealing with high-pressure situations. Backsliding should be expected and not taken as an indication of failure. Progress unfolds through an iterative process of steps forward, lapses backward, and then steps forward again.
With perseverance, positive reinforcement kicks in, which provides sustaining fuel for continued effort through the third phase of leader evolution.
Although extremely clear and compelling communication about results is always imperative, it’s especially important as recalibration unfolds. Actual results are, of course, paramount in assessing performance. But the perception of those results and of whether the CEO and leadership team are on top of the situation is at least as important.
As former Intel CEO Andy Grove wrote in his influential book Only the Paranoid Survive, “Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction.” CEOs who make it to the Complacency Trap stage have navigated the rough-and-tumble of the Launch, Calibration, and Reinvention stages of the first few years. One unintended consequence of leading their firms adroitly can be an overly assured attitude about the course they’ve set and the organizational improvements they’ve made.