Why CEOs wont step aside

New horizons

It’s the end of my second session with this CEO as his coach. He runs a FTSE listed company. We have looked at the general health of his organization, his team and, just glancingly, at his personal life. Innocently I ask, ‘And what about you? What’s your own next move?’

Silence. He looks at the floor and mumbles a non-committal reply.

That was the last time I saw him. He fired me as his coach. Later I heard why, from one of his close colleagues. I had asked an unbearable question. He had started in this company as a naive sixteen year old. Forty years later he was its CEO, a job he had occupied for some years. His identity had become fatally entangled with his role. Only a year later he was tipped out in a Boardroom coup.

President Biden has now been forced to step down from his candidacy and even now he sounds defensive and resentful. Reading of the intense pressure to persuade him, his dilemma seemed very familiar. Over the thirty years I have worked as an executive coach I have seen countless examples of CEOs who simply can’t give up.

How does this happen?

For a start there are the external symbols of the role. You get the office with the best view, the shiniest desk, the fiercest PA, the deferential chauffeur and maybe the private jet. You no longer have to do your own shopping. You have a salary far bigger than you can ever possibly spend, but it’s not about the money, it’s what you think it means about your value.

The more of this you have, the less likely you are to view your performance realistically. People submit to you. Sometimes they blush and stammer. You are invited to ceremonial events and treated with deference. People address you by your role name. You confuse the trappings of office with how well you are doing your job. Human beings are herd animals and we have to have a leader. A self-managing group is not a long term option. That’s why we boost the leader with flattery, lies and half truths.

However sensible and mature the leader is, and many are admirably sensible and mature, modern leadership is supremely demanding. You have to excel: the long term overview, the day to day detail, the culture of the organization as well as its financial results. Everything you do is scrutinized. People betray you with snatched recordings of a minor indiscretion, they leak documents, they gossip about you, you routinely do sixteen hours days seven days a week because your business is global and you have to accommodate other countries’ time zones and work patterns. You may neglect your family because work is more exciting and no one sees you in your underwear or asks you to empty the dishwasher and pick up the kids.

No wonder, then, that you appoint people you know you can trust. This must be especially true in US politics where you are not choosing from a cadre of elected representatives. You offer privilege in return for loyalty. The unspoken deal is that they do not disagree, even when they should.

‘Groupthink’ can be the result, the phenomenon first identified by the American sociologist Whilliam H Whyte in 1952. A tightly-knit group refuses to consider even the most powerful evidence that their judgements are wrong. If you’re not for, then you must be against. Groupthink will appear in an emergency and when there is confusion and complexity. It is most likely to happen at exactly at the point where it is most dangerous.

I offer my CEO clients the chance to get a truthful view of how people see them. They choose twelve people willing to give feedback and I interview them under conditions of non-attributable confidentiality. The messages that others do not know how to give, or refuse to give, can be conveyed through me. However self-aware the client believes themselves to be, my report virtually always has some unwelcome surprises.

One such client was a brilliant campaigner for social justice, a charismatic leader who could demolish a challenging journalist on the Today programme with fierce charm and devastating wit. This CEO sincerely believed that everyone in his team unequivocally admired and loved him. Yes, ‘love’ was his word. He was stunned to discover that this was untrue. His team admired his chutzpah and were in awe of his campaigning skills. But they disliked what they saw as his tendency to favouritism, his frequent moodiness and his indifference to the operational side of the business.

Another client ran the consultancy where she had been the founder. She had lost interest in the job, finding that the excitement she needed was now sorely lacking. She wanted out. The barrier? Her profound belief that she was irreplaceable. She saw it as her duty to stay. She clung to the idea that her lacklustre performance was invisible to the team around her when the fact was that it was glaringly clear. We subjected these beliefs to rigorous questioning in our coaching. She resigned; a competent successor was quickly found. Today, ten years later, I doubt if many people could identify the founder of what is still a thriving enterprise.

CEOs will often say, ‘no one is irreplaceable’ but do they believe it? My experience is that they do not.

When a CEO does not address the reality of what is happening around them, including the health issues that may be all too visible to others, the ending can be brutal. The tight protective shield dissolves as it did around the President, often at terrifying speed. Someone more powerful steps in. It is humiliating. The shock is overwhelming when you have done nothing to prepare yourself.

The idea of leaving a job that they have outgrown or that has outgrown them, will present a CEO with what we might call an existential crisis. They are mortal. They will die. They have refused to develop a successor maybe out of a superstitious belief that this may hasten their own exit. What has it been all about? What is their legacy? How can they leave with dignity? What have they neglected in their search for achievement or power?

I hope President Biden has someone outside his immediate circle who can help him cope with the aftermath of his decision to step down and to do so with tenderness, respect and challenge. But it looks like this is the one role that is currently missing.

Photo by Harrison Haines