Similarly, the CEO Life Cycle will help leaders play a better game by anticipating the evolving challenges of the CEO job and preparing for them. It will help CEOs recognize when they are heading into a new stage of their tenure and stay vigilant about avoiding common pitfalls made in that stage. Additionally, it will help them stay on the offense, proactively engaging in new learning and personal growth, ahead of the curve, as they progress through the stages. The findings can also help boards anticipate issues CEOs may face and engage with CEOs more vigorously to provide support at critical junctures.

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.

The inside demands of the role tend to dominate discussions in succession planning and interviews for the job. But management guru Peter Drucker wrote, “To define the meaningful Outside of the organization is the CEO’s first task,” and cautioned that “the definition is anything but easy, let alone obvious.” Although it may be clear that regulators and government officials are key stakeholders, politics that demand the CEO’s attention may bubble up unexpectedly from the full landscape of public issues.

Building strong relationships with your board members is another top priority of a new CEO. Yes, you’ve gone through an intensive interview process with them, and they’ve just selected you. But in the words of one CEO: “You won't know if you were selected by an inch or a mile.” Some directors may disagree with your vision and plans; some may even be dead set against you, but won’t share those sentiments with you.

In our work with executives, we’ve seen that joining another board early in a CEO’s tenure may be too large a demand on time, but after the CEO has achieved success, their middle to later years should afford more time for valuable external activities. The key is to make sure a board opportunity is truly valuable in terms of insights to bring back inside.