For two out of three CEOs in our database, performance was lower in their years six to ten than it was in years one to five. Some gave up their gains of the first five years altogether. Results may not actually dive into negative territory, but if they do, they vacillate up and down around a mean, which only reinforces the sense that one can let up on the gas.

The danger is exacerbated when boards also become less energetic in pushing for vigorous changes in strategy or operations. As director Ann Hanley shared, “It’s easy to get into incremental mode.” A CEOs internal team may resist a continuous quick pace of change.

2. Launch

Indeed, in a recent global survey of 422 CEOs, 68 percent shared that they believed they hadn’t been fully prepared for the role. They believed they had the required strategy and operations skills, but the gap in their preparation lay in what they discovered is unique to the CEO role: how unexpectedly emotionally challenging it is and the great intellectual agility it requires. They had underestimated how different the job is from any other leadership role they’d had in ways that are profoundly disorienting in the early days.

Prior board experience can also be a great accelerator for incoming CEOs in developing relationships with their directors.

But these pulls on time can be siren calls, treacherous in their allure and taking too much time away from core responsibilities. Richard Anderson, former Delta and Amtrak CEO, warned that leaders can “easily go spend 20 to 25 percent of time on extracurriculars,” if they’re not vigilant. The cost versus benefits of these commitments must be weighed carefully. In the Launch stage, with such a press of competing priorities, setting strict limits is vital.

Ann Hackett advises really engaging directors in ongoing problem-solving. “A CEO should share the biggest challenges and want the board’s thinking about them.” She’s seen some make the mistake of thinking “they have to have solved everything, and they shouldn’t bring problems to the board.” But for the relationship to work optimally, “you have to be able to go to deep places and challenge one another.” You want to be doing all you can to ensure that the board is, as she put it, “a learning organism.” She recommends regularly providing them high-quality information about what the company, and the industry, is facing. Also help them “get close to the business and customers,” which a CEO can facilitate in many ways, such as by setting up factory visits or meetings with members of the management team. If you do this extra work, she advises, “then a board thinks differently about everything they’re doing. Governance becomes more strategic. Risk becomes more strategic.

Advice on combating the status quo bias by methodically rethinking business assessments and gaining perspective from outside the firm is not new. But the problem is that far too few leaders develop a rigorous and continuous discipline of doing so. And if CEOs don’t impose that discipline on themselves, nobody else will.

The imperative to challenge yourself becomes more difficult to achieve the longer you have been doing the job successfully. Nigel Travis said, “Being a CEO for longer is tougher because you have to find ways to keep improving.” Some CEOs recalled feeling less engaged in this stage, with boredom creeping in. “When you get into years six to ten, the intellectual stimulus is less,” one shared. “You come in with lots of ideas,” another commented, “and then run out of them.” Someone else said, “Years six to ten is a period of time when the luster is off the rose and what was new and exciting is no longer new and exciting.