CEO Training

About CEO Training

Promotion into the top job is usually treated as a reward for excellence in a narrower field. It is better understood as a change of occupation, and the sooner that is admitted the less it costs.

Almost everyone who becomes a chief executive or general manager of a small or mid sized organisation arrives by being unusually good at something specific. They ran operations well, or they were the best clinician, the best builder of the product, the person who could always be relied on to close the year. The board looks at that record and reasonably concludes that here is someone who delivers. What follows is a quiet and rarely explained change: the new role does not ask for more of that delivery. It asks for something else entirely, and it asks for it immediately, in front of an audience that is watching to see how you begin.

The change is not about seniority or status. It is structural. In a specialist role, your output is the thing you personally produce. In the top role, your output is the quality of the organisation that produces things without you. Those are different crafts. One rewards depth, speed and personal reliability. The other rewards judgement about people, clarity about priorities, and a tolerance for watching work be done to a standard you would not have chosen. Most of the discomfort of the first year comes from applying the first craft to a job that requires the second, and then concluding that you are simply not working hard enough.

Your deepest competence becomes, in the top role, the most reliable source of your worst habits.

Deciding something your team should have decided is expensive twice over, and the second cost is permanent.

Most friction between a chief executive and a board is a boundary problem wearing the costume of a personality problem.

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