Maintaining your A-game in the C-suite
Why are world-class athletes surrounded by a dedicated support team managing their food, sleep, fitness, mental health, PR and more, while world-class CEOs largely go it alone?
It’s odd, because, in many respects, CEOs are no different from elite sportsmen and women. They need to be excellent every time they step onto the turf and staying at the top requires a delicate balance - intellectual, emotional, social, physical and spiritual.
Talent is a given. But winning is about being constantly aware of the field you’re playing on and always alert to how you compete in that ever-changing landscape.
Three things set the CEO apart from the elite athlete, however, and make being a CEO one of the toughest games in the world:
CEOs are the linchpins of a business that many jobs and investors depend on - the responsibility is enormous;
CEOs must both lead and respond to an increasingly diverse ecosystem of interests - the complexity is huge; and
CEOs often find themselves acting in an information vacuum about their own performance, free from constructive feedback. The sense of isolation can be enormous, but also the risk of stagnation.
So, how do you maintain your A-game?
The uncomfortable truth is that you probably won’t.
It’s easy for proven leaders to become stale or depleted in a top job. You don’t have time to think about your impact as a leader, let alone to create the disciplines to ensure you keep your edge. And anyway, who can you meaningfully discuss your performance with? Where do you get the really insightful feedback or the challenge you need?
Without this foil to question your thought patterns or assumptions, your fastest and easiest response will probably be to do what you did last time. Autopilot kicks in, and that’s closely followed by system blindness – an inability to distinguish between when you’re leading the organisation and when it is leading you.
People around you will likely re-enforce this response, playing to your patterns and pandering to your biases. Inevitably, your A-game starts sliding to a B.
The effects may not be immediate. Talented business leaders don’t stop being brilliant overnight. It’s rare that a single event takes them out of the game, corporate misconduct cases aside. More likely, a gradual pattern of sub-optimal decisions, behaviour or self-management gradually takes hold and eventually takes its toll.
Continued leadership performance requires constant refinement
If you are serious about sustaining your impact in a C-suite role, then you need a performance partner.
To find one you need to look outside the confines of traditional executive support. Insanely busy leaders don’t need old-school coaching, business school programmes or more models.
What you need is light-touch tailormade support that allows you to stop flying solo, giving you the chance to review and recharge regularly while on the job. In other words, you need an inflight refuelling system.
Just imagine if you had a 30-minute pause this week, a moment to candidly replay and reflect on recent events with a trusted third party. How would that feel? And what could it do for your performance? In my 25 years of experience partnering with global leaders, a light touch exchange with an experienced independent adviser can help you recharge by
Ensuring your default thinking and reactions are constructively challenged
Revealing insights about how you are operating, as well as offering potential micro adjustments
Providing a confidential space to process the impact of your role on YOU.
This form of refuelling is a nimble way of both finetuning your leadership impact today and making practical, incremental steps to future proof your performance for tomorrow.
So, what does this look like in practice?
For one CEO, this type of exchange allowed him to resolve a particularly delicate issue with fellow board members, breaking a discussion doom loop they had been stuck in for months. By adjusting how he framed the challenge, he shifted the collective default response that had previously left them stalled. “I kept trying to change the dynamic by pushing the existing argument harder and throwing in more data. I was stuck,” he observed. “It took some external challenge to see alternative options.”
Another CEO decided to turn down a request to play a figurehead role on a major global AI project. Initially, she hadn’t thought twice about being a hands-off champion, until it was pointed out that this could be perceived as tokenistic. So, instead, she offered to be a hands-on part of the team carrying out quarterly reviews of the prototypes. “The real win here’, she commented, ‘is that I’m having debates with our top talent about our future operating options, rather than patting people on the back and handing out awards.”
Sustaining peak performance is never a solo endeavour
The first step to building your own sustainment practice is finding the right sparring partner. They must be outside your business, steadfastly on your side, but without any vested interest, personal or organisational.
Call it a trusted adviser, a coach or a performance partner – the name doesn’t matter. The bottom line is that you benefit from a regular confidential exchange that sharpens your leadership edge.
The quality of the relationship with your performance partner has a direct correlation to the quality of work you can achieve together. It’s only with trust, understanding and an ongoing relationship that you can step in and out of performance conversations, without them becoming superficial.
But let’s be honest. Even armed with these insights and a sackful of good intentions, the reality is you may still do nothing. Typically, there are three common excuses for continued inaction:
The Board isn’t raising an issue, so why not let sleeping dogs lie?
I listen to podcasts and talk to my partner. I’ve got this covered, right?
I’m doing ok. Won’t seeking external advice make me look weak?
Elite performers in any other field would find it incomprehensible to operate without a performance partner. They know a powerful alchemy occurs when you have the right counsel and support behind you.
So don’t fool yourself into going it alone. Your role has an outsized impact on the growth, reputation and success of your business. You need your own in-flight refuelling system if you want to maintain your A-game in the C-Suite, extend your time at the top and deliver a lasting legacy.
Kate Lye, Managing Partner, September 2024
