How to start a top job: lessons for new CEOs

Executive overview

When you become CEO, you see more but hear less. Every layer of the organisation filters information upward — and the C-suite filters it most. New CEOs who don't accept this are blindsided.

The antidote is deliberate access: spend disproportionate time with middle managers and frontline employees, ask unusual questions, and share what you're learning publicly.

The biggest risk in the first 90 days is making irreversible decisions without enough context.

Information access as a new CEO

• The C-suite is usually the thickest filter — they package the narrative and iron out the wrinkles before it reaches you
• Internally promoted CEOs are more at risk: they assume existing relationships mean continued transparency
• People don't deceive you deliberately — they want to please, protect you from bad news, and solve problems before escalating
• Identify the rare people who will tell you the blunt truth regardless of consequences, and actively protect that access
• Doing front-line listening tours, CEO lunches, and skip-level meetings consistently — not just early on — sustains information flow

Questions that surface what you don't know

• Ask "What didn't I ask about but should have?" — this surfaces the unconscious incompetence the CEO can't know to probe for
• Ask "Tell me some of the workarounds you have in place" — workarounds reveal where processes, systems, or structures are failing people
• Ask "If you were CEO, what would you do to make roles here better?" or "What are the things that really annoy?"
• Second and third-time CEOs spend their first one to two months almost entirely with people, not in reports and decks — that's where the real picture lives

Why speaking last matters

• When CEOs frame a discussion first, they lead the witness — they will mostly hear their own framing reflected back
• Nelson Mandela's principle: leaders should speak last
• Unlike C-suite executives, who are rewarded for lobbying and influencing, the CEO's words carry disproportionate weight and can close a discussion before it opens

The 90-day myth

• The "first 90 days" emphasis is overstated for top roles — by day 90 you are still in an exponential learning curve
• The information you have at week four is not double week two — it's exponential; the curve hasn't flattened by day 90
• The pressure to act quickly often comes from the CEO themselves, not from the board — boards typically expect six to nine months
• Rushing to satisfy your own anxiety about performance is not a win
• Use the Amazon framing: avoid one-way door decisions without full context early on

Early wins vs. early moves

Early wins are small, employee-facing actions that signal listening and care:

• Fix the broken shower pressure (Ted Lasso's suggestion box); move split teams to the same floor
• These don't need to be large — they need to be deliberate and visible
• Removing everyday demotivators before asking people to change behaviour dramatically increases willingness to follow

Early moves are bigger decisions sitting just below the surface — typically in the three-to-nine-month window:

• Projects that were stalled because the political reward was too far out for the previous CEO
• Settling long-running legal disputes, divesting businesses everyone knows should be gone, finally deciding on the CRM or IT infrastructure
• These require enough context to identify — rarely available inside the first 90 days

Navigating bias and lobbying

• Expect to be heavily lobbied from day one — everyone's urgent becomes your urgent
• Availability bias: the more people push a topic, the more you trust it — be aware of this
• Confirmation bias: finding what you expected to find feels validating but can send you down the wrong path early
• "Inspect what you expect" — test your assumptions rather than accepting them as confirmation

Sharing what you are learning

• One UK CEO emailed the entire organisation weekly for 10 weeks: "Here's where I went, here's what I'm hearing, here's what I'm starting to understand"
• This created a two-way information flow — people corrected her understanding and added the next layer of context
• The organisation felt they knew her far faster than is typical
• Transparency about your learning signals genuine commitment, not weakness

The loneliness of the top role

• CEOs consistently describe the role as being alone in a crowd — rarely physically alone, but profoundly isolated
• This is underappreciated even by experienced advisors working closely with CEOs
• Build peer CEO networks early — this is a network most new CEOs don't have in place
• Boards should actively support this, not assume it will happen organically