Whether You Are The Leader Your Company Needs Right Now?

Every CEO I have ever worked with will regularly assess their market position, their product roadmap, their team capability, and their financial runway. Almost none of them will reflect on whether they are still the right leader for the company, or whether fresh legs and ideas are needed.

This is not because they lack self-awareness. Most of the CEOs I work with are highly intelligent and have strong emotional intelligence. But the question carries a risk most leaders are not ready to face. Because the honest answer might require them to make a decision they are not yet ready to make.

It is, in my experience, the most important question a CEO can ask. And often the most avoided.

You Do Not Know What You Do Not Know

There are lots of similarities between sports and business. The best sports people in the world often retire one or two seasons too late. Not because they have lost their love of competing, but because the gap between how they see their own performance and how others experience it quietly widens. CEOs face the same risk.

The difference is that a declining athlete’s performance shows up quickly on a scoreboard. A CEO’s blind spots show up in employee turnover, missed opportunities, dysfunctional board dynamics, and cultural erosion: signals that are harder to read, easier to rationalise and not quick indicators that it is time for the CEO to go.

There is also a harder truth underneath the blind spot problem, and it is one that almost nobody talks about honestly. Many leaders stay too long not because they genuinely believe they are still the right person for the role, but because stepping away is a confronting thing to do.

When you are a CEO, people return your calls quickly. Doors open. You are relevant, you are in the room where decisions are made. The moment you step away, you become what I call a PIP: a Previously Important Person. People don’t return your calls as quickly. The invitations are fewer. Your relevance, or at least your perceived relevance, shifts overnight. I have been through this, and it was difficult for me, initially.

That is a significant psychological adjustment, and the leaders who have not prepared for it often avoid the decision entirely by simply not making it. They stay in the role past the point where it is good for them or the business, not out of conviction, but out of a reluctance to find out who they are without the title. That is ego at work.

I know this from personal experience. There were periods in my career when my role defined me. I would find myself telling people I ran a business with 200,000 people. My wife Melinda would often look at me and say, “Why are you telling them that?” She was right. On the surface I told myself it sparked conversation, that people found it interesting. But if I am honest, it was validation. That is a bad place to be as a leader, and I know I am not alone in it. When the title becomes the point, it is worth asking what you are optimising for.

The Question Nobody Wants to Answer

Let me raise a concept that few leadership articles talk about.

Enjoyment matters, and when the job stops being fun it is time to reflect on your next step.

I have been a CEO five times, across five different industries. I love change. That appetite for change has driven most of my major decisions, including moving country eleven times. But not every leader is wired that way, and nor should they be. Some of the best leaders I know have built extraordinary organisations by staying in one company for ten or twenty years, building something that endures.

The question is not which path is right in general. The question is which path is right for you. And more specifically: are you still genuinely energised by the role you are in right now?

A CEO who loved building a ten-person startup and is quietly miserable running a two-hundred-person organisation will underperform. Their team will feel it. Their board will sense it. Energy and engagement by the CEO is reflected in their leadership shadow which the organisation is watching constantly.

So, ask yourself honestly: what gets you out of bed? Is it because you love the challenge and can see the positive impact you are having every day? Or is it a sense of obligation to your team and investors or you are scared of what comes next?

The Chapter You Did Not Anticipate

I want to share something personal, because I think it is relevant to every CEO reading this.

After over 20 years as a CEO, I made the decision to step away from corporate leadership and focus on mentoring the next generation of CEOs. I did not expect to love it as much as I do. I did not anticipate that this chapter would energise me more than any that came before it.

That was not something I could have planned. It emerged from honest reflection on what I actually found meaningful, combined with the willingness to imagine a version of myself I had not previously considered.

I tell you this not to suggest you follow the same path. Most of the CEOs I work with are in the right role and simply need to grow into a bigger version of it. But some of them, when we get beneath the surface, are carrying a version of the question I eventually asked myself: am I still enjoying this role and having a positive impact, or is there something else out there to discover?

Am I the Leader My Company Needs Right Now?

Here is how I would encourage you to approach the question.

Start with the honest self-assessment. Not the version you would present to your board, but the version you would write alone at the end of a difficult week. Where are you genuinely weakest as a leader right now? Is there an area where you have been avoiding investing in your own leadership development? If so, why? Is there a deeper truth as to why you have stopped investing in your personal leadership growth?

Then ask the people around you. Not your closest allies, who tell you what they think you want to hear. Find a mentor, a peer CEO, or a board member who will tell you what you do not want to hear. Give them explicit permission to do so.

And finally, ask yourself the question most leaders skip entirely. Am I enjoying this? Not every day, because no CEO enjoys every day. But in aggregate, does this role give you energy, or does it consume it?

Your company needs a leader with the discipline to assess themselves honestly, the humility to seek out what they cannot see, and the self-awareness to know whether they are the person to take the business forward.

Vision gets a company started. Discipline is what scales it. And the most disciplined act a CEO can perform is the honest answer to the question most of them never ask.

Am I the leader my company needs, right now? If not, what will you do differently, starting Monday.

First published in CEOWORLD Magazine. Read it there →