The CEO’s Dual Mandate: Leading Self, Leading Teams
In my article Your Two Teams, You and EQ, I explored the C-suite executive’s balance between leading a function and being a great teammate to the rest of the leadership team. Since then, I’ve frequently been asked a follow-up question: how should those ideas be applied to the CEO?
Technical skills and business competence are table stakes for CEOs. Two other capabilities separate the average CEO from the excellent. The first is how they lead the executive team, and the second is how they lead themselves. Leading the executive team is an external exercise, visible to everyone and measured by results. Leading yourself is sometimes hidden, but equally as important: managing your ego, identity, fear of failure, and self-worth. Together, these two leadership vectors form the “Dual Mandate” framework.
The first leadership framework is captured well in Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Temptations of a CEO, and the second in Marshall Goldsmith’s What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. What follows synthesizes both frameworks, translated into observable CEO behaviors. At their core, these frameworks share a common foundation: when you are leading each of these two teams, you must employ emotional intelligence and a willingness to put the organization ahead of self.
1. Company First: A Focus on Objective Results over Personal Status
Effective: The CEO subordinates personal reputation, ego, and the need to be right to achieving measurable business results. Their North Star is company-first, and they know they are not the company. This value is in their DNA.
Ineffective: The CEO optimizes for image or perceived competence. They often feel the need to be right or to tell the world how smart they are. Over time, these behaviors quietly displace results as the true operating objective.
Example of Effective Behavior: The CEO openly reverses a strategic position they previously championed after data shows it will not deliver the desired results.
Example of Ineffective Behavior: The CEO makes cutting, sarcastic remarks about the old strategy, blames someone else for its origins, and takes no accountability for making the decision to pursue it.
2. A Commitment to Collective Success
Effective: The CEO consistently reinforces that the executive team’s primary responsibility is the company's overall success, not individual functions, people, or historical structures. They don’t play favorites. They don’t worry about being popular with their team.
Ineffective: The CEO protects people, functions, or past decisions even when they conflict with enterprise needs or underperform. Silos harden, accountability weakens, and trade-offs are negotiated instead of decided. It's clear who the favorites are.
Example of Effective Behavior: The CEO reallocates headcount away from a historically powerful function to fund a cross-company initiative critical to overall success.
Example of Ineffective Behavior: The CEO is overly influenced by a single executive team member, takes credit for the team's success, or fails to hold favored executives accountable for failures.
3. A Commitment to Clarity, Brevity, and Alignment
Effective: They recognize that organizations more frequently fail due to ambiguity or misalignment, not from imperfect decisions. The CEO values clear, simple direction over exhaustive analysis and communicates decisions with brevity. They don’t put themselves at the center of every workstream.
Ineffective: They delay decisions or overload the organization with nuance in pursuit of perfect information. The result is confusion, stalled execution, and decision fatigue.
Example of Effective Behavior: After a contentious debate, the CEO summarizes the decision in two sentences that are committed to writing, assigns ownership, and sets a deadline, ending the meeting.
Example of Ineffective Behavior: The CEO either fails to meet regularly with the executive team as a whole or fails to have regular 1:1s. When they do meet, the CEO dominates the meeting, speaking more than listening and frequently “adding value” to otherwise great work. Constantly shifting goals and often adding “one more thing.”
4. Comfort with Healthy Conflict
Effective: They actively encourage disagreement and debate around ideas, assumptions, and priorities. Productive conflict is expected as part of sound decision-making, and once a decision is made, alignment replaces debate.
Ineffective: The CEO avoids tension to preserve collegiality or morale. Disagreement goes underground, reemerging as passive resistance, side conversations, or execution failure. Artificially harmonious meetings and the “meeting after the meeting” are common.
Example of Effective Behavior: The CEO skillfully invites dissenting views before making the decision, then shuts down further debate once the decision is made.
Example of Ineffective Behavior: The CEO is so attached to being right that anger and finger-pointing permeate the conflict, effectively shutting it down because it is now about people, not ideas.
5. A Willingness to Be Vulnerable
Effective: Great CEOs are comfortable admitting, fixing, and learning from mistakes. They own knowledge gaps and uncertainty. This vulnerability builds trust and invites candor, enabling the executive team to surface real issues rather than manage appearances.
Ineffective: They equate leadership with having all the answers and avoid showing doubt or fallibility. This suppresses honest dialogue and teaches others to manage up rather than surface reality. They might feel so threatened by making mistakes that they get angry. They prioritize winning arguments over solving problems.
Example of Effective Behavior: The CEO opens an executive meeting by acknowledging a decision they got wrong, proposing an alternative path forward, and asking for thoughts on the proposed solution.
Example of Ineffective Behavior: Claiming credit for the ideas of others, making excuses for their own mistakes, or blaming others. Self-deprecation replacing authentic vulnerability.
6. A Commitment to Maintaining Psychological Safety
Effective: Great CEOs know that trust is the foundation of all relationships and that, in addition to their own vulnerability, they must foster an environment of psychological safety. CEOs who create psychological safety make it possible for executives to speak up, take risks, and give and receive valuable feedback.
Ineffective: Those who express unpopular opinions, admit mistakes, or share bad news are punished.
Example of Effective Behavior: The CEO invites others to express their views frequently and candidly. They disagree in an agreeable manner, managing their emotions even when times are tough. They focus on fixing mistakes and learning from them rather than assigning blame.
Example of Ineffective Behavior: They speak when angry. They punish the messenger. They fail to take responsibility for their mistakes or for their impact on others.
7. A Commitment to Personal Growth
Effective: The CEO knows that as their company grows in size and scope, the greatest impact they can have on their leadership is to grow as a person and leader.
Ineffective: The CEO conflates technical expertise with the skills necessary to lead themselves and others. Everything is “easy” so long as everyone does what they say and in the manner they prescribe. The CEO is always right.
Example of Effective Behavior: A lifelong commitment to growth and learning, punctuated with a great deal of curiosity. Hiring a coach and doing the work. Going to therapy to process their own feelings so that they can process those of others.
Example of Ineffective Behavior: Noticing where everyone else is deficient and blaming them for the company’s troubles. Cycling through executive after executive and blaming the executive for their failures, when they were the ones who hired and led them.
Every CEO leads across two dimensions. One is external: the executive team, visible to everyone and measured by results. The other is internal: managing their ego, identity, fear of failure, and self-worth. Their self-awareness and self-management will impact every moment of their external leadership. Emotional intelligence is not a soft skill—it is the discipline required to keep that internal voice from hijacking the external one. When CEOs fail, it is often not because they chose the wrong strategy. It is because they did not invest in their self-leadership.
Strategy may determine direction, but self-leadership determines whether anyone follows.
So what now? Work on leading yourself.
1) Take the attached Self-Assessment. If you are curious to learn what your team thinks, you could share the assessment with your HR leader and have them anonymously collect results to share with you. You might even consider a more in-depth 360 review that a coach or HR leader can implement.
2) Read What Got You Here Won’t Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith and print out the list of the 20 behaviors listed there. Share the list with your team, and ask them to let you know which of those 20 behaviors they see. Then share your plan with them to grow from that feedback and reduce those limiting behaviors!
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