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The Life Cycle of a CEO— Claudius A. Hildebrand & Robert J. Stark

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Introduction

In fact, Dave hadn’t been the first choice for the CEO position, or even the second or third choice. Word was five others had been offered the job before him. What’s more, a couple of years earlier he’d been unceremoniously fired from his position as divisional president at a leading competitor. No one would have suggested from his educational background, either, that he was CEO material. Not only did he not have a degree from an elite school, but it also took him six years to graduate. He hated college and he’d dropped out for a time.

As Dave’s first year in the CEO seat progressed, the sneering assessments of that Florida night prevailed on the Street; the company’s stock slid 40 percent.

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.

Building on our study findings that CEOs who lead through influence were the most effective, we followed up by conducting interviews to learn about the development advice and training these leaders had received. We asked leaders to describe how they made the journey to becoming the highly effective leaders they were. What emerged is that a leader’s evolution generally proceeds in iterative cycles, with steps forward often followed by backsliding into old habits and then a renewed effort at change. It’s a process of trial and error, and often of fits and starts, as the daily grind of immediate demands diverts attention from one’s inner work. Those who continue to progress in the journey typically go through a three-phase cycle.

First, they are confronted with a necessity for change either because they took on a new challenge that reveals the shortfalls in their leadership or through feedback from their higher-up, colleagues, or mentor.

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.

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.