So You Want to Be the CEO: Proven Principles For Aspiring CEOs Based On Over Twenty Years Of Experience

Introduction

In writing this book, I offer a guide for anyone who wants to transition to senior levels of management and to become a CEO. There are practical tips, exercises, stories and examples that will be supportive, and perhaps challenging, as your journey to CEO progresses. My aim is to share the knowledge I have gained in my 25 years of coaching and advisory experience, the last 12 of those specialising in the CEO transition.

The business world these days is interested in the CEO as a person. With the resume taken largely as read, a key expectation is how much self-leadership the CEO and members of a company’s leadership team have. Do they know their strengths and how to work with them? How well do they connect with people and manage the tension between the leader as authority figure and the leader as human being? Do they recognise the triggers that derail them, that might throw them off track? And if they do, how do they handle them? Do they have the confidence to be vulnerable, and give others permission to do the same? Only those who have explored their own inner makeup and its impact on habits and behaviours are truly equipped to do this.

Discovering who you are as leader is an inspiring and sometimes challenging journey.

Boards are nervous about CEOs who could potentially damage the reputation of the company if they have derailing personality traits. And with social and other media, traits, behaviours and the impact of leaders are under more microscopes than ever before. The stakeholders’ attention is turning to the question of what drives these traits and behaviours. It is turning to the leader as a person – their character, ethos, principles, and values. Are they in sync with the organisation? With society? With other stakeholders?

Stakeholders now want to know what the CEO holds as their values; they want a leader who stands for something beyond themselves, beyond their own self-interest. There is an expectation that the leader’s values are consistent with industry, stakeholder groups and society, and that this is consistent with healthy financial results – in fact, it contributes to them. Leaders whose true values are in sync with the organisation they lead will be less likely, in my experience, to derail.

Alongside changing expectations for leaders, we have the changing role of leaders. Knowledge increases at a rapid pace, and it can quickly become superseded. This environment changes the way leaders add value. As a leader today, you are unlikely to be the expert or the problem solver, but you can work successfully with those who do have the expertise. The emphasis in leadership today is on adding value in other ways, playing different roles. The leader as facilitator, as synthesiser of different approaches into a new way of doing something or addressing an issue, as capability developer, rather than the leader being the expert in solving problems.

How can leaders navigate the contemporary landscape?

The nature of the leadership role is to move from experiment to experiment, testing, learning and developing. The steadier and more self-aware the leader, the more they are willing to step out of the way and work with those who have the most current knowledge and skills. They are adaptive to new ways of leading because they have the humility to see that their professional goal is about the progress of the organisation, a bigger purpose, and lead from that place. It is a very old-fashioned leader who clings to being the expert in an age where expertise takes you only part of the way.

Leadership is about bringing authenticity and clarity to situations and responding to what the context demands. This requirement is served by leaders developing themselves as people.

When I started to coach and advise people on their path to becoming CEOs, 25 years ago, my philosophy was that objectivity, self-governance and staying authentic to your true values are foundational to leadership. Those who know and govern themselves can lead people and sustainably govern systems, whatever the size. This is still my core philosophy today.

Recently, I coached a newly appointed divisional CEO. My client was an experienced senior executive who, through an organisational restructuring, had been promoted two levels at once. She was in a male-dominated industry and in a leadership team with powerful individuals who had presence, had confidence. The CEO to whom she reported had an unpredictable leadership style, regularly demanding one thing then changing his mind about what he needed and the strategies to get there. Working in this environment, my client had lost confidence. When we started to work together, she was unclear about how to successfully represent the interests of her division at the leadership table. She was being outmanoeuvred in the allocation of resources and in the focus of her colleagues on her business as well as theirs. More powerful voices were trampling her.

We looked at her typical way of operating, what had made her successful to that point. She was great at facilitating harmony among her team and valued good relationships above all else. The problem was, she was working for someone who liked to look good above all else. He didn’t care about relationship as long as targets were achieved, and he’d often listen to the loudest voice at the table.

My client saw herself as having a completely different style. I saw someone who was suppressing her powerful traits in favour of a softer, more harmonious presentation. After some work identifying her strengths and style to date and what she was faced with, we agreed that the situation needed her to own her presence and power. I gave her an exercise to do called Owning the Traits (this name is reproduced by permission of its creator, Dr John Demartini), in which she identified where she had the presence and power that she saw in others, in equal measure to them, just in different contexts. Once an executive identifies their traits, in certain situations, they can demonstrate those traits in different situations where they would not normally do so.

We also explored the beliefs and assumptions she was making that fed her lack of certainty around the leadership team table. A need to do things right emerged as a strong theme. The challenges for my client were to experiment without needing to have a right or perfect strategy worked out in advance. I am a great believer in real-time feedback, or as close to that as possible. So on the day of the meeting or interaction, the client and I would discuss how she’d gone, progress made, and anything that appeared as a misstep. We would then work with those reflections, ensuring that she progressed at a steady level, rather than overreaching early on. It worked. She became more confident and was able to put her case powerfully and get the resources her department needed. This was a classic case of what made her successful in the past wasn’t going to take her the next level in her career. This type of situation is one example of why the ongoing work of self-development for leaders is so important.

On a more macro level, Covid 19 has created economic insecurity in some employees, and workforces who expect flexibility in being able to work from home and office in a combination that fits with the rest of their lives. This adds complexity to leadership, as leaders must find a steady path through needs and expectations, while staying true to the strategic intent of the enterprise. Leaders can’t please everyone, yet they must truly consider many perspectives and then communicate decisions in a manner that enrols and engages.

My journey to working with CEOs

I have been privileged to help guide dozens of executives into the CEO role, over several continents and industries, including financial services, healthcare, technology, professional services, pharmaceuticals, peak industry bodies, and fast-moving consumer goods. Clients have ranged from large organisations to start-up entrepreneurs. And I have assisted several hundred more with their transitions to new roles in the senior executive levels. This work involves advising and coaching clients as they transition through challenges, prepare for new roles and learn to function at peak levels in new environments.

I value my role as a coach for prospective CEOs, yet it took a while to gain the expertise I have today. In the late 1990s, I began what I thought would be a dream job. As Marketing Director, I would reposition and upskill the marketing effort of one of Australia’s largest media companies. Seven weeks after I joined, the CEO who’d hired me was ousted. The best practice emphasis that I brought to the role was resisted by my colleagues and those to whom I reported, and I realised that my job description had been poorly defined. I left the following year, sensing somehow that there were intangible skills and approaches that I could have applied in this role that I had not yet learned.

I was undecided about taking another marketing role, feeling somewhat jaundiced after leaving the position. Instead, I took project-management roles, including running a project jointly funded by several Australasian companies, investigating this new thing called the internet and its implications for their retail presence.

Convinced that there was more to life than I had previously realised, I embarked on an intense period of study. Studying internationally, I learnt ways to work with people one on one and in groups, and I explored the dynamics of people, teams and organisations – where spirit (energy, intention, values and purpose) and matter (behaviours and results) intersect. I saw how much there was to learn, how much I didn’t know. The pursuit of insight and wisdom in service of others and my own growth, were climbing to the top of my values list.

After two years of study, I knew I had something to offer clients. The problem was how to articulate that value. I sat at my dining table in the small flat we lived in at the time and rang each of my contacts. Most of them were more confused about my new business by the end of the phone call than at the start!

Eventually, I got a lucky break. Through a contact, I was introduced to a partner and director of a global consultancy. This highly respected consultant had just founded a leadership practice in Australia, assisting companies to transform their culture, including working one to one with leaders. He hired me to coach and advise the leadership teams of those clients, and supporting the leaders in their own development, challenging them to lead by example. Challenging them to make sure their leadership was consistent with the changes in culture that the company was seeking. At the turn of the millennium, this was a new undertaking for McKinsey, as they had built their global reputation mainly through strategy work for large companies.

The partner told me later that he realised while he was interviewing me for the role that I had a unique combination of business experience as an executive and an ability to read and work with people at deep levels. He could see that I could help people gain insights into themselves that transformed their perspectives and behaviours. I admired his intuition and courage to hire someone who would work with his clients who were at the most senior levels of their organisations, in what was then a new field in Australia called leadership coaching. I had deep business experience but little experience in coaching senior executives. Now I see that experience isn’t always enough on its own. Also important is the desire to help people, to have the insights into what they need, and to work with them patiently. When you love the work, you’ll be inspired to continuously upskill, to do it well, and to keep getting better at it. I think the partner saw that in me.

Soon after this, I was sitting in front of a chief executive of a large Australian company. The company was about to embark on a program to help transform their culture. They had carried out a review that showed they were great on a strategic direction, their processes were effective and their technical standards were high – but their culture was wanting. The CEO’s long, highly polished meeting table gleamed. He sat at one end of this table, looking at me steely eyed; I sat at the other. I was so nervous that you could have bounced a football off my tangled, tied-up stomach. Luckily I had the training wheels on and my colleague, brought along to supervise the first meeting ever for me doing this work, stepped in.

What we are about today is debriefing your 360 results. This survey shows behaviours, both how you see yourself and how others see you… Her very professional presentation showed how often she had done this before. I untangled myself before the next meeting.

I went on to work with that CEO and his team as their leadership consultant and coach for several years. In that time, they went through many ups and downs where his certainty and the team’s cohesiveness was tested to the max. The CEO credited the work that he and the team and I did on their beliefs, behaviours and relationships as a key element of that success; it was the foundation of staying strong, connected and in sync in the face of commercial challenge.

The team realised that the first step to being in partnership together was for each of them to be in partnership with themselves. We’ll explore more about how to do this later in the book.

The opportunity to serve that client was a