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.

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.

Some of Ferguson’s personal drive came from having “a problem-solving mindset, so chomping down on a really intriguing problem is for me what the job’s all about.” This was a constant theme in our research and interviews with the highest-performing CEOs. Ferguson, using the analogy of being the architect of a building, was also energized by the challenge of championing his own strategy. “It was very exciting because it is a vision, and I will take all the time necessary to go from rough sketch to blueprint, to bringing in the team, the subcontractors, to actually seeing the building. There’s nothing like it, it’s so very rewarding.” Ferguson also shared that he is comfortable with a “gradually making progress mindset.” “The key to my success,” he shared, “is my ability to keep at it every day.” Sustaining his energy through the long haul of these years also was an appreciation for small wins. “There are small wins even in big marathons. You chunk up these big, long, journeys into steps. Sometimes it’s just a board meeting in which you finally got someone to agree.”

Creating awareness of small wins, and celebrating them, was also key to sustaining his team’s energy after initially exciting them with the vision. “First, they needed the belief that the goal was worth the journey. Why does it matter? Then it was celebrating the small victories. So getting the document ready, finishing the analysis, getting the vote, all those steps.” For the company as a whole, “there were some metrics that we could share about in every town hall, having to do with asset flows, client wins, and our win-loss ratio.

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.

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.