How to get promoted & survive the leap in 2020 from C-Suite to CEO

The race to the C-suite has become one of the most rewarding and risky undertakings you can consider in your career.  While compensation is at record highs, the average tenure of C-level executives is the shortest in history. Since the year 2000, about a quarter of the CEO departures in the Fortune 500 were involuntary, according to the Conference Board. After 70 board and C-Suite engagements, I’ve seen a pattern emerge about how to prepare yourself for the challenge.

A Case History for Success and Failure of C-suite Executives 

When the World Bank named Dr. Kristalina Georgieva among several internal candidates for the future CEO role, a dramatic race to the corner office ensued among her peers on the leadership team. If that wasn’t competitive enough, the board asked recruiters to offer outside contenders as a comparison set. It’s not unusual for boards of both public and private organizations to launch a high-stakes internal and external championship for the top job. For Georgieva, she knew that there were many issues that would impact who would be selected as CEO, including many that appeared out of her control. While her overall credentials and technical qualifications were critical, there were five other key questions she had to address.

Each of these factors are critical to your success in seizing any C-Suite opportunity:

1.    Board Dynamics: Each director on your board can make or break your chances for promotion. As a CEO or a candidate for that role, you must be sensitive to the needs of each board member as if they each were your supervisor because, ultimately, they have that power. Most people don’t realize that no one else in an organization has as many bosses as a CEO. Georgieva had more than 80 directors at the World Bank!  She needed to learn about and address the political climate with each director, each of whom served on board committees around the world with differing charters, from audit to compensation to strategy.  

At the same time, the stakes have never been higher for directors, whose average tenure exceeds C-Suite executives, according to The Conference Board. That means that most directors last longer than CEOs and preside over the hiring and firing of more than one CEO during their time on the board. Succession planning today is a major preoccupation for the board (Lorsch and Khurana, 1999) as regulations increase each director’s fiduciary responsibility, requiring much higher independence and greater scrutiny of management.  

Most directors are former CEOs with strong expectations for the candidates’ development. Interestingly, there are always critical measures that board members will tell me as a coach in private that they are not willing to share directly with my candidate. 

As a C-Suite candidate, how will you build the necessary relationships and coalitions with individual board members? Do you have an advisor to help capture how each director is measuring each candidate’s viability? 

2.  Peer Dynamics: Are you the type of person that your peers would be willing to work for? Kristalina Georgieva realized that the final selection for the CEO’s job often comes down to realizing that your peers will play a part in evaluating whether you’re worthy of being their boss.  Your peers don’t have the biggest vote, but it’s difficult for a CEO, CHRO and the board to gain confidence in your candidacy if your colleagues think you’re an arrogant jerk jockeying for position.  Georgieva knew her peers would be asked by the committee charged with finding a successor. “You’re taking a serious shift in your role,” she observed. “You’re moving from peer and possible competitor to ‘likeable’ boss.” 

What criteria are your peers using to judge you? How are your current CEO and CHRO evaluating who they wish to recommend as successor?

3.  Bench Dynamics: You can't grow or scale your business quickly if you're making all the decisions. For Georgieva, she realized that the leader must resolve differences between team members, but most of the time a leader's job is putting together the right team, and putting the right questions in front of them to change their inherent internal built-in biases.

Have you built the capable, trusted bench needed to replace you? Have you invested in your leadership team and what cultural changes are required for the company’s next phase and your promotion?

4. Strategic Dynamics: Steve Jobs showed great counterintuitive courage with the iPhone at a price point back when ‘smart phones’ were a relatively new idea and critics thought it would be disastrous with no keyboard. Everybody wanted them to follow BlackBerry and Nokia, who at the time had 80% market share. What would have happened if Apple followed the market leaders? It's risky to just stick with what’s worked in the past.

What’s your strategy to respond to shifting market dynamics and disruptions in your industry?  

5. Personal Dynamics: “When you sit down Sunday night to look at your week, what percentage of your calendar is focused on being proactive?” Steve Covey prodded me during an interview at his home. "Are you just responding to one meeting request after another, or an emergency here or there? Crises must be managed, but the difference between being proactive rather than reactive is making the time to really decide where you want to lead and grow your organization without fear or anger.”

In Greek mythology, the difference between the quests of those leaders who were successful and those who failed was not whether they were flawed as individuals, but rather whether the hero had the courage to admit weakness, mistakes and ultimately become vulnerable to change. How will you learn to be resilient to setbacks and frustration, and remain focused on what matters?  

As Georgina planned her ascent, she realized she would face her own behavioral challenges. Every leader has coping mechanisms that hide beneath the waterline that undermine your chances for selection when you’re under the added pressure of “running for office” as CEO. C-suite candidates have impressive track records of achievements, but when they are just about to make the leap to the pinnacle of their career trajectory, why do so many of these talented corporate stars make fatal judgment calls, miss crucial market cues and developments, alienate key people and falter in their delivery of results?

Psychologists Robert and Joyce Hogan (2001) created an inventory of eleven“dark side” traits or derailers.  When under stress, leaders reflexively respond with a pattern that they may not even be aware of or have found ways to dismiss or excuse as they climbed the ladder. These include being too easily annoyed, hard to please; taking excessive credit and giving excessive blame. Under pressure, leaders can become disturbingly distrustful, cynical, sensitive to criticism, focused on the negative, slow to make decisions and indifferent to others’ feelings. Derailers are part of every leader’s personality (Chamorro-Premuzic, 2017). Even Georgieva felt that she, like most high achievers, had too many. It is important to recognize that some derailers are simply over-used strengths, or at least were identified as strengths in a previous role. 

Kristalina Georgieva embraced her faults. As a result, her insecurities vanished and the board saw she grew faster than her competitors for the job. “Nobody expects you to be perfect,” she observed, “but they do expect you to be responsive to the profound changes needed to succeed.” Georgieva also believed that recognizing her own derailers made her much more empathetic toward others and a vastly better coach in developing her team. 

In Built to Last and Good to Great, Prof. Jim Collins insisted that leaders like Georgieva share a paradoxical combination of “hubris and humility.” They exhibit the hubris to believe and convince the team they can lead a huge organization through uncharted territory—even though that vision can border on irrational exuberance.  But the best leaders also exhibit the humility to realize that no one ever does anything sustainable or scalable alone, nor does the success of a leader occur without humiliating and existential setbacks along the way. Those realizations are what sets successful C-suite candidates apart. 

In Success Built to Last: Creating a Life That Matters, (Prentice Hall, 2005), the sequel to Built to Last, I interviewed 200 leaders, many of whom related stories of their climb up the organizational ladder. Most were challenged by feeling they must suffer observation in a glass house; over-analyzed and yet also ironically faced with an acute sense of isolation. The network of trust they believed they built is complicated by the politics and power dynamics as colleagues compete for position. These leaders longed for a safe, private sounding board to bounce ideas around. Many found the support of an executive coach essential during the marathon.  As a C-suite candidate, your race to the top of an organization is fraught with peril and error, but what you’re doing is creating an opportunity to have a great positive impact on the lives of thousands of employees and customers that is built to last, and ultimately to become a better version of yourself as a leader.