The CEO Role Does Not Reward Extremes
Happy New Year, readers.
If you are currently in a CEO role, I am offering a limited number of free 30-minute coaching calls this January. I am happy to speak with you about your goals for 2026 or any specific challenge you are facing in your business.
In the early stages of companies and careers, extremes are well-rewarded.
A founder’s monomaniacal passion creates a “reality distortion field” that gets the business off the ground.
A sales executive’s deep expertise in selling propels them to the C-suite, even if they don’t know much about finance or operations or HR.
These trajectories are driven by specialization and extreme focus, by applying a great deal of force to a small area.
Now let’s say you’ve spent your career capitalizing on these positive imbalances to get ahead. Then you become CEO of a mature company. You’ll quickly realize that extremes don’t work to your advantage in the same way anymore.
In fact, they handicap you.
As a non-CEO, you could lean into your sharpest strengths and go to oceanic depths in certain areas. Now what’s required isn’t depth but breadth.
From specialist to generalist
This reflects the unique nature of the CEO job: you’re leading an integrated set of specialist areas - your six core departments - and you can’t lead just one. You must become a generalist. You need to know just enough about a ton of different things, because you’re leading the entire company, not just the parts that interest you.
Don’t know anything about HR?
You’d better learn quick. Ignore any department and you’re not being an effective CEO.
Extremes in personality are also a bad fit for the professional CEO job. As a hard-driving product leader, you could maybe get away with being brusque and demanding and using tons of technical jargon, as long as you got results.
Bring that imbalance to the CEO role and you won’t be able to lead effectively.
As CEO, you need to enlist the full support of everyone in the company, and that’s a real kaleidoscope of personality types, working styles, and ways of seeing the world. Part of being CEO is becoming a chameleon, learning to craft messages that resonate broadly, and understanding how the extreme parts of your personality could cause negative fallout.
“Lead with Strengths” has limited application in the CEO job
This runs counter to one of the most influential pieces of career advice from the past two decades: focus on your strengths, not your weaknesses.
The StrengthsFinder philosophy argues that you’ll get further by doubling down on what you’re naturally good at rather than trying to shore up your deficiencies. Strengths godfather Don Clifton put it memorably:
Damage control can prevent failure, but it will never elevate you to excellence.
This is genuinely good advice for most of your career. Aiming to be “well rounded” or average is unlikely to put you on the fast-track.
But once you become CEO, the rules change. You actually DO need to start doing damage control. You do have to become more well-rounded, even if it means pulling back a bit from your areas of natural strength and patching up those areas where you struggle.
As CEO, you can’t afford to have glaring blind spots.
If you’re brilliant at product but terrible at finance, you’ll miss critical risks. If you’re amazing with customers but can’t manage internal politics, you won’t be able to execute your strategy. If you relate incredibly well to creative types but struggle to communicate with your CFO, you’ve created a dangerous gap in your leadership.
The tightrope
The tightrope walker is the metaphor for the CEO job that I keep coming back to across my body of writing on this topic.
The tightrope walker doesn’t find one point of balance and stand still. They make small, continuous corrections as they move forward. The better the tightrope walker, the more natural those corrections appear.
The same is true for CEOs. The best ones appear to be doing the least while moving the business forward. Their adjustments are subtle and their progress is smooth. They’re not lurching dramatically from one extreme to the other. They’re maintaining dynamic equilibrium across multiple dimensions at once.
This is why the transition from specialist to CEO is so difficult. Everything that got you here - your extreme focus, your deep expertise, your willingness to go all-in on your natural strengths - now works against you.
You have to learn a different game entirely.
Happy New Year and see you in 2026!
—Joel