What New CEOs Get Wrong About the Job

Alison Beard (0:01)

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I'm Alison Beard.

Adi Ignatius (0:33)

And I'm Adi Ignatius. And this is the HBR IdeaCast.

Alison Beard (0:45)

Adi, today we're having a conversation about expectations versus reality in senior roles.

Adi Ignatius (0:51)

Yeah. Look, I think people sometimes say yes to opportunities without realizing what exactly they're getting involved in other than maybe a shiny new title.

Alison Beard (1:00)

Yes. And this happens at every level of your career. But today's guest, Nitin Nohria, former dean of Harvard Business School, has looked specifically at what happens when people move into the chief executive role. He spent more than three decades studying CEOs, including bringing new ones together each year to discuss the challenges they're facing. And he has a new book out that offers lessons and best practices on how to successfully prepare for the top job. And that includes lots of good advice for people who aspire to the C-suite too. So we'll talk about how executives can stay connected to what's really happening inside their organizations, why humility is a huge asset, and how to decide what not to do when you're being hit with a barrage of new developments each day. Here's my conversation with Nitin Nohria, author of The CEO, The Role, The Reality, The Responsibility.

So you have created a really thorough roadmap to help CEOs navigate all the issues that come up in the role. But I'd love to start with all the different ways that you've seen executives' expectations about the job collide with the realities of actually being in it. Even when these are people that have maybe already led very complex businesses within their organizations.

The first one that seemed really counterintuitive to me is the realization that as CEO, you can't run the company. So what exactly do you mean by that? And how have you seen it play out?

Nitin Nohria (2:34)

So when people become CEOs, they usually become CEOs because they've run something really well. You end up running a business or you end up running a function. But as soon as you become CEO, you realize that now your job is to have other people like yourself, like you used to be, actually run the company. And you have to create the conditions where they can run the company in a way that you can applaud and feel great about rather than running the company yourself.

Because if you start running the company, then you're actually doing the job of the people who are supposed to be in your senior management team. If a CEO intervenes, people feel disempowered, they feel like now have to check everything with the CEO. I think any executive who does that has some risk of doing that. When the CEO does that, it's such a loud megaphone, and everybody wants to be so sure that they're doing everything that the CEO wants them to do, that once the CEO starts to run the company, then the risk is that everybody feels that now the CEO is running the company, and I need to run everything by them, which just slows everything down to a grind.

Alison Beard (3:32)

You also point out the fact that CEOs are always in the spotlight, and that might seem obvious, but you found that a lot of leaders aren't quite prepared for the internal and external scrutiny that they're going to face. Why is that?

Nitin Nohria (3:46)

It's really remarkable. It comes from the very small things about someone who said that, my wife was walking through a grocery aisle, and all of a sudden, her friends would look at her differently.

So it's not just the CEO, it's even the CEO's family that ends up now being seen differently by people who were just friends. And CEOs find that all the time, that they say, and I'm just surprised by feeling like I'm constantly being watched. I'm being watched inside my company.

I'm being watched by outsiders. Every time I go any place, I represent the company. People are hanging on to every word that I say for clues. If you're an investor, you may find this surprising, but there are investors who hire CIA agents to listen to it. CEOs quarterly calls to see if there are tell signs. In fact, one of our colleagues at Harvard Business School has written a case about that, about someone who tried to get an edge by tracking how CEOs speak and the inflection in their voices to tell when they're telling the truth or not. So CEOs come under a remarkable level of scrutiny in every aspect of their lives.