For CEOs in the Launch stage, practicing the arts of observation and listening is crucial.

By establishing a set of ongoing listening practices in your first year, you build trust that you’re not just putting on a show of wanting input. Over time, as people see you acting on their input, you will encourage leading by listening throughout the organization.

In the year ahead, he surveyed the broader employee base as well as customers and learned that “we didn’t have that same emotional connectivity with our guests.” Or with Hyatt colleagues out on the front lines. Hoplamazian dedicated time to meeting with many of them. Through his own and others’ probing into the colleague experience, he realized that the company evaluated employees largely based on their compliance with an elaborate set of rules and that “we tracked success in our hotels by compliance with a list of brand standards, not guest feedback.

The story speaks to how even the most talented and experienced leaders, who’ve successfullly navigated through many challenges, may overlook or misinterpret arising threats or fail to perceive them at all. That may be true even when they’ve instituted good monitoring systems, with the best data gathering and analytics, and have crackerjack strategy and operations teams supporting them. Ironically, the more success they’ve driven, the more they may be given to misreadings and slackening of vigilance.

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.