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Latest The competence that earned you the role is not the competence the role requires.
The Step Up

What Changes The Day You Become Accountable For All Of It

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.

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The Transition

Your Calendar Is The Only Strategy Anyone Can Actually Read

Whatever the plan says, the organisation will judge your priorities by where your hours go.

The First Hundred Days Are For Listening, Not For Proving

The pressure to demonstrate value early produces changes that later have to be unwound.

Decisions

Complete Information Always Arrives After The Moment Has Passed

Waiting for certainty is itself a decision, and usually the worse one.

Write Down What You Expected Before You Find Out

Without a record made in advance, you will remember having predicted whatever happened.

The Board

No Surprises Is The Whole Of The Relationship

A board can absorb almost any bad news, and almost never absorbs finding it out from someone else.

Bring Bad News Early, Complete And Without Decoration

How you deliver a problem is read as evidence of how you handle problems generally.

The Personal Reality

Nobody Will Tell You That You Did Well, Or That You Did Not

Praise and honest correction both dry up at the same time, and the second loss is the dangerous one.

Fatigue Arrives As Certainty, Which Is Why It Is Missed

The characteristic sign of a depleted chief executive is not indecision but unusual conviction.

About CEO Training

CEO Training is a publication about a single subject: the step from being accountable for a part of an organisation to being accountable for the whole of one. It is written for people taking that step for the first time in small and mid sized organisations, where the chief executive or general manager is close enough to the work to be tempted back into it and where there is rarely a layer of infrastructure to absorb an inexperienced start. It is also written for the boards who make these appointments, since a great deal of what goes wrong in a first tenure is a mismatch of expectations that was never discussed at the time of hiring.

The editorial approach is plain and deliberately unheroic. There is a large body of writing that treats organisational leadership as a matter of personal transformation, and this is not part of it. The concerns here are practical and mostly unglamorous: where the hours go, which decisions belong to whom, how information reaches the person at the top and how it is distorted on the way, what a board is entitled to and what it is not, and what the role does to the person holding it. Where a subject requires professional expertise, including anything touching directors' duties, employment, tax or health, the position taken is that those matters are serious and that qualified advisers and the relevant regulator's own guidance are where they should be resolved.

Sister publications in the same family deal separately with mentoring, with hiring and retention, with project management and with consulting. Those subjects are deliberately left to them. What remains here is the transition itself, the decision making that comes with it, the relationship with the board, and the personal reality of the chair, which is the part most often left out of the conversation and most often felt. The intention is not to make the first year easy, which is not available, but to make its difficulties recognisable, so that a new chief executive encountering them can identify what is happening rather than concluding that something is uniquely wrong with them.