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.

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.

Yet CEOs can't just demand that board members engage more closely with them. “You have to lead the board,” Piyush Gupta said, “and persuade them of the direction you want to take the company, but at the same time, they are the bosses. It’s not straightforward.” Further complicating the relationship is that the CEO generally does not know who on the board supported them for the job and who did not.

There are going to be surprises no matter how well you know a company. Learning about them early is challenging because employees, even at the highest levels, are reluctant to share troubling information. Learning what you need to know requires rigorous questioning while conveying in a compelling way that you absolutely want people to speak openly.

A CEO coming in from the outside needs to emphasize getting a good fix on the full range of business operations, the strengths and weaknesses of the leadership team, and the nature of the culture.

Boards are like a team of star performers. Directors are appointed because they’re highly accomplished. Most have been successful executives. All have a depth of leadership experience. Directors are also selected because they have expertise the company needs. They have strong views about where the company should be heading and what’s going well and what’s going wrong. They can be of enormous assistance. But they can also be agitators against the CEO. Or the CEO might have the opposite problem, a board that is far too passive, that does not engage deeply enough in company issues and strategy setting or that focuses too much on narrower governance functions of financial oversight.