Wait, Did I Write This?
A great new study on what makes super-performing PE CEOs different.
This article breaks down five disciplines linked to 6x CEO performance compared to peers. If you're ready to build these into how you run your business, consider joining us for an upcoming CEO Masterclass.
“Wait, did I write this?”
I kept having that thought as I read a recent HBR article on super-performing PE-backed CEOs. So many of its ideas and recommendations felt familiar to what I train CEOs on, and that’s a great thing.
The article — which I recommend you read in full — sums up the authors’ two-year study of private-equity-backed CEOs. These are CEOs with a hard job before them: make the business much more profitable, fast.
It can feel like one of the labors of Hercules. If the regular CEO role is a tightrope walk, the PE-backed version has a faster-fraying rope and a bigger canyon to cross. That makes it a particularly good laboratory for studying CEO behaviors and outcomes.
Many leaders are rightly wary before taking on PE CEO roles, and the data shows why: more than half of PE-backed CEOs fail to meet expectations and are replaced before the investment period ends.
After two years of research, the authors identified a cohort of 53 superperformers — CEOs who led businesses to an average 6.2x multiple on invested capital, more than double the typical industry target — then identified five behaviors that set them apart.
In fact, they aligned almost perfectly with the five key CEO responsibilities I’ve been writing books about and teaching for more than a decade.
Let’s take a quick tour of what they found.
The 5 Disciplines That Set Super-Performing CEOs Apart
1. Strategic Clarity
The article’s first behavior is that top-performing PE CEOs create strategic clarity:
“They excel at translating an investment thesis into a three-to-five-year strategic plan. They clearly define and communicate their organization’s most important objectives, priorities, and value creation drivers, and then ensure alignment and focus across the organization.”
This is analogous to my first CEO responsibility: Own the Vision. The CEO’s job is to create a motivating vision and propagate it through the whole organization. The basic idea is a simple one: people need to understand where they’re going.
The authors make a point I’d underline twice:
“[Super-performing CEOs] understand strategic clarity is not a quarterly conversation, it’s a drumbeat.”
The piece also describes one CEO who translated the investment thesis into a single-page, three-year plan within his first three months. In the CEO Operating System, we use a 1-Page Strategic Plan that does exactly this. (If you don’t have one yet, today’s a good day to create one. We can help.)
2. The Right Talent on Board
The second discipline of top PE CEOs is making sure they have the talent to match their growth ambitions.
“They rigorously assess current leaders and make difficult talent decisions quickly to avoid organizational drag. And they don’t just fill gaps; they raise the bar by bringing in proven scale leaders who ‘know what good looks like’ and can hit the ground running.”
This is essentially my second responsibility of the CEO: Provide the Resources. Of the two resources a CEO is primarily responsible for — capital and people — people is the harder one. Success as CEO will depend more on your ability to acquire and maximize human talent than any other skill.
What the researchers capture well is the cost of moving too slowly. Every CEO knows intellectually that they need A-players in critical seats. The practical failure mode is waiting — hoping someone grows into a role they’ve already outgrown, avoiding a hard conversation, giving someone a third chance at a standard they’ve missed twice. This is “organizational drag,” as the authors put it, and it’s a major performance killer.
The authors also note:
“These CEOs are constantly asking: Is this team built for the company we want to become?”
The capabilities that got your team here are often not the same ones that get you to the next stage. Good CEOs make clear-eyed assessments of the talent the future requires.
3. Relentless Focus
Third, high-performing CEOs maintain relentless focus on high-impact priorities. This and the following discipline mirror my CEO responsibility to Deliver Performance.
“[High-performing CEOs] resist the temptation to chase too many initiatives, instead ensuring that teams are executing against a few ‘big rocks’ that truly move the needle. They protect time, energy, and capital for what matters most.”
The article includes a line from one of the most successful CEOs in the study: “Every company I have looked at that has not been doing well has been because of a failure to focus.”
This speaks to another major CEO failure mode that can quickly spread to the rest of the organization: the seduction by activity. Organizations have a natural tendency to accumulate initiatives. Every quarter brings new ideas, new opportunities, new fires to put out. The CEOs who don’t actively counter this tendency end up running organizations where every priority carries the same urgency.
“[High-performing CEOs] limited active initiatives to three to five major priorities and made sure those were crystal clear throughout the organization. They created visual tools like dashboards and stop/start/continue lists to reinforce focus and communicate tradeoffs.”
Again, this stuff is foundational to what I teach CEOs. Small set of goals, reinforced continuously to the organization. It’s not rocket science, but it’s rarely done with discipline.
4. Agile Operating Rhythms
Fourth, top CEOs create agile operating rhythms that drive disciplined execution.
“These leaders implement weekly, monthly, and quarterly routines with intent. They don’t default to inherited operating models. They design new ones that match their company’s pace and goals, connecting long-term strategy with short-term action.”
Too many CEOs walk into a role and adopt whatever meeting cadences and review structures were already in place, and they’re usually piecemeal and suited to the former regimes assumptions and priorities.
One of the CEOs in their study created a visual showing how the company’s key meetings, reviews, and planning processes connected across the year: an annual kickoff, talent reviews, a strategy refresh, a board review, and a continuous cadence of daily, weekly, and monthly check-ins tying execution back to those priorities.
It’s a great, great practice for CEOs. You’re the drummer of your org, and you need a rhythm to help you keep the beat.
5. A Culture Grounded in Accountability
The fifth discipline is building a culture that balance trust and accountability, and a again it’s analogous to my CEO responsibility to Build the Culture.
“The high-performing CEOs in our study understand that culture is what they tolerate. They don’t rely on perks or slogans to drive it, and they’re intentional about the tone they set, the values and behaviors they reward, and the norms they allow to persist.”
The article describes one company that translated its values directly into executive job-description documents specifying what each role owns, how it collaborates, and where decision authority sits. It’s exactly what we help CEOs do in building Executive Performance Profiles for each of their direct reports.
I find this kind of research very encouraging (and not just because it piles on more empirical evidence to the disciplines I’ve been teaching).
This kind of work on the CEO role is a step toward the long overdue professionalization of the job. Since a true “CEO” concept emerged in the 20th century, there’s been little in the way of an established body of knowledge, an agreed-upon framework, or training infrastructure. Every other functional leader inherits decades of accumulated thinking about how to do their job. The CEO largely figures it out alone.
That’s changing, slowly. But it is changing.
