Among many colleagues who specialize in helping pre-CEOs prepare and new CEOs outperform in the role, Janine Ames, Brett Clark-Bolt, Darleen DeRosa, Chris DeRose, Nick Falk, Cassandra Frangos, Adam Kling, Filomena Leonardi, David Metcalf, Michael Milad, Kathy Schnure, Levi Segal, Christopher Uhrinek, and Muthiah Venkateswaran have been generous with their time and wisdom.
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All the mythologizing is so unfortunate. It has popularized badly misguided notions about how a CEO can succeed in a job thatās not only crucial to the economic foundations of our society but also so cognitively, emotionally, and physically challenging that nearly a third of those appointed last fewer than three years in the role. The mythmaking has obscured so many important lessons we can learn from observing how CEOs struggle mightily with the changing challenges of the role. And overcome them, not only in the early going but also throughout their tenures.
2. Launch
Indeed, in a recent global survey of 422 CEOs, 68 percent shared that they believed they hadnāt 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 theyād had in ways that are profoundly disorienting in the early days.
The study analyzed the fortunes of nearly four hundred CEOs appointed to the helm of S&P 500 companies within the decade of 2004 to 2014. A set of the fifteen most effective early moves was identified. And out of those, the highest performers relied most on these five: operational improvements, launching new products, improving customer relationships, increasing employee engagement, and culture change.
In the past, primary emphasis was placed on financial and operations acumenā still, obviously, importantā but today the vanguard of innovators in the sector increasingly appreciate a CEOās people leadership skills for achieving the above-market returns investors expect.
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.