5 Lessons from 12 Prominent CEOs

Coco Brown & Suja Chandrasekaran

Year Review: Unexpected takeaways from CEOs – This year we - Suja Chandrasekaran , board member of 嘉德诺 , American Eagle Outfitters Inc. , Brenntag and others and Coco Brown (Founder and CEO of Athena Alliance and board member of ArcherPoint by Cherry Bekaert ) kicked off a monthly series of discussions with prominent CEOs (see photo).

The 60 minute discussions we lead are unlike any you’ve seen with prominent CEOs. Everyone, speakers and audience alike, are in the same space with the choice to be video on and visible. While we craft a thoughtful and consistent set of questions designed to tell the story of each CEO’s path, we also curate audience participation. We are casual, but respectful; down-to-earth, and at the same time serious.?

Above all else, these conversations illustrate one very important point; there is no ONE path to CEO, and there are a wide range of leadership styles and personalities that can take you to the top. That said, despite varied paths, 5 key findings were revealed to us in these conversations:?

1. You are the most accountable person in the business and so to rise to, and persist as a CEO you have to trust yourself, make bold moves, and very importantly, be willing to walk through the fire. The CEO of the company is responsible in a way no other leader of the business is. While other executives of the C-Suite have accountability for portions of the business, the CEO is the one person accountable for the entire business. The buck stops here. And while the CEO reports to the board of directors, the board entrusts the CEO to run things on a day-to-day basis. Key decisions often come to the CEO for a final say. And, the CEO is often in a position where time is not available; they must react now, decide now, and all eyes are on them.?Each CEO expressed this point in their own unique ways. The stories each of the CEOs told made it clear that jumping into the unknown, making bold moves, and taking accountability were not skills they developed. These were innate ways of being. “Going for it” was in their nature, and something illustrated throughout their careers.?These CEOs took on assignments they had very little traditional background for, rather knowing their knowledge of the business overall, and their personal just in time learning abilities and abilities to mobilize others around them would carry them forward. And when they didn’t know they could trust themselves to say “I can do this!” They listened to others more senior than them who said, if I’m willing to take a shot with you, you should be willing to take a shot at this too.Perhaps the most important point in this first lesson though, is that it is not enough to be bold and confident, it is also essential to be willing to commit to the worst outcome you can imagine, be willing to embrace it should it come and be committed to leading regardless of the outcome for as long as you are the right one to do so. These CEOs collectively have been very publicly fired, they have taken steps down, they have managed through potential bankruptcies, a variety of mergers and acquisitions, intense public scrutiny, and the consequences of making decisions everyone else thought were “crazy”. They managed themselves and led through many scary moments in the economy, in history, in their careers, and in their businesses. At some point every one of these experiences was a first for every one of these CEOs and for many of them it was harder than they’d imagined. Each of them talked about these experiences with humility, reflection, and an expression of deep commitment to what they led and lived through.?
2. Unless you start the company, there is no straight line to becoming a CEO. People who end up as CEOs not only expect a circuitous path, they embrace it. The twelve CEOs we talked with run notable organizations, from Fortune 10 companies to unicorn startups. They are ambitious, but what sets them apart is none of them were rigid about the path to the top. They made strategic career choices that did not make sense if one focused on a traditional ladder and titles. Instead, they willingly said yes to outlier assignments, took lateral moves, and sometimes even moves that seemed a step backward. They made themselves dynamic business assets.?Each CEO had developed a core area of expertise, but far more importantly they had developed competencies in multiple areas of the business. Most of them took overseas assignments, even having to learn new languages in order to succeed.?This is a very important point to consider not only if you wish to become a CEO, but with respect to any C-Suite opportunity. As you reach higher levels in the organization, opportunities to advance narrow, eventually to one - the CEO. As these CEOs reflected with us, the people who move from senior management into the C-Suite and ultimately into consideration to be a CEO are those who learn to look left and right in the organization. Long ago they let go of the idea of a “ladder”. They let go of a resume structured view of themselves and developed more of a portfolio view of themselves. And they look to surround themselves with others who have done the same. They can not, and do not think in terms of silos in the organization - marketing, sales, finance… - they think in terms of strategic business imperatives across the business, existential threats, game changing opportunities, and the like.?This view of the business doesn’t come once one reaches the top, it’s illustrated much farther down the chain as one climbs to the top. At Athena, we argue that this begins at the latest when one reaches a Sr. Director level; but honestly for these CEOs it was embedded in them from day one. This is a muscle one can develop and leads us to the third major lesson.
3. Great CEOs carry a degree of humility that is rooted in a love of learning and curiosity. Society is excited about CEOs that illustrate humility these days. But what we discovered about these 12 CEOs is that their humility is very much tied to an earnest curiosity and a desire to learn. Part of the reason these very successful CEOs are so capable of surrounding themselves with the right people is because they have honed incredible listening skills. Listening skills are hard to nurture if one is not genuinely interested. Imagine climbing through an organization, or an industry to the point of leading a workforce of hundreds of thousands. It would be impossible to do so without truly understanding on a number of levels - the business fundamentals - the economic model, the operational model, etc, the business ecosystem and industry, the micro and macro elements that do and might impact the business and so on. A CEO is “made” in this sense. In our first lesson we see something innate. But in this lesson one can absolutely become a CEO both through the choices one makes (the second lesson) and through the attention one puts in to really understanding across the business. In this lesson it’s not enough to “listen and learn”, you do also have to combine lesson two and three, meaning - take the crazy overseas assignment, take the step down or latter move because you’ll learn more and become more valuable, volunteer for cross departmental or corporate wide endeavors, and know how what you are doing line up to the top most strategies and imperatives of the business.?These curious, humble CEOs also illustrated how important it is to surround yourself with the right people.
4. You must know where to seek advice and how to take counsel. Excellent CEOs know how to reach out to the right people and learn how to thread the needle between connections and build the right network around them. They have a keenly developed and nurtured interest in seeking counsel and advice from a wide range of individuals - from layers down into the business, from peers in the industry, lifelong friends, and so on.?As one CEO put it “Good leadership is imagining the last person in the chain and how they are going to be impacted”. Responsible for over 100,000 employees, he pointed out that on a daily and weekly basis he personally engages with very few people and that as a result it is very important to know that those few are not just great counsel, but also very connected throughout the chain to help ensure he is not out of touch. And another shared with us that she interviewed 100 employees in her first days as the new CEO of a multi-billion dollar business before committing to a transformative strategy.When you take this fourth lesson and pair it back up with the first we come full circle. Great CEOs know how and where to seek guidance, they listen with curiosity to learn, they jump into the unknown, and they are able to turn what they hear and see around them inward, to make decisions with conviction.??
5. Having Purpose is the essential shield as CEOs lead and sustain through the hard stuff. Finally, again coming full circle, it is extremely difficult (perhaps impossible) to persist and succeed through the hardest times, the most difficult moments, the toughest decisions without a clear sense of purpose. Each of these incredible CEOs have something bigger than the business that they lead with. They aren’t just bankers, software service providers, scientists and so on. They are humans who very much wish to build and lead in a way that represents their core values and cares as humans responsible for the fates of many others. They think about the human capital of their businesses in all ways - the workforce, the partners and suppliers, the customers, the communities around them. They are not academic in their application of their role. They are human centered and purposeful with every action they take and this is part of what shields them as they go into the toughest business battles they face.?

We are excited for the conversations we had in 2023, and look forward to how our findings will continue to evolve and deepen as we go into our second year of this CEO Perspectives series. We launch with a conversation with Toni Townes-Whitley on February 1st. Toni is an African American women at the helm (as CEO) of SAIC , a $7b market cap public company!