Hi {{ subscriber.first_name }}, Up to half of new CEOs derail within the first eighteen months. Not because they lack the skills. Not because they can't execute. But because they never stop being the person who got the job — and never start being the person the job actually requires. Psychologists who study CEO transitions have a term for this. They call it identity foreclosure. It's what happens when a new CEO retreats into the expert identity that earned them the promotion rather than embracing the broader demands of the role. In plain language: You keep doing the job that got you here instead of doing the job you're in now. What this looks like in practice I started working with a CEO who'd been promoted from Chief Commercial Officer. Outstanding track record. The board promoted him because they believed he could drive revenue at the enterprise level. Within weeks, the pattern was obvious. He wasn't leading the company. He was still running the sales department. Pipeline reviews. Key accounts. Micromanaging his former team. All over the commercial function, almost completely absent from everything else. And it worked — for a while. Revenue went up. The board was happy. From the outside, it looked like a successful transition. But underneath, his sales team never stepped up because he never let go. The rest of the leadership team felt like passengers. The company started to drift — not dramatically, quietly. The kind of drift you don't notice until it's already cost you six months. By month six, the organisation had distanced itself from him. Not with conflict — with silence. People stopped bringing him problems outside of sales. They stopped expecting vision. And he had no idea, because he was too busy doing the job he was comfortable in to notice the job he wasn't doing. Why it's so dangerous Identity foreclosure doesn't feel like failure. It feels like contribution. Rolling up your sleeves. Adding value. And the people around you can't name the problem either — the CEO is clearly working hard. Just on the wrong things. Meanwhile, the three things only the CEO can do — setting the vision, aligning the leadership team, shaping the culture — go unattended. Those gaps don't show up in quarterly numbers. They show up twelve months later when your best people leave and the board starts asking questions you can't answer. I see this pattern in almost every CEO transition I work with.
The function changes. The pattern is always the same. The shift The research describes the successful transition as moving from expert to integrator. From performer to architect. In my experience, that's exactly right — but it's an identity problem, not a skill problem. You're not learning something new. You're letting go of who you were. Three shifts define the transition: From doing to deciding what gets done. Your value is no longer in execution. It's in allocation — of attention, resources, and talent. The question becomes: should I be the one doing this? From performing to architecting. Your highest-value work becomes invisible. Building the system that allows other people to perform. The feedback loop on that is months, not days. Deeply uncomfortable for someone whose identity was built on visible results. From holding authority to distributing it. Your job is to make yourself unnecessary in every room except the ones where only you can be. The CEO I mentioned made one decision that started the shift. He pulled himself out of the weekly pipeline review. Told his sales leader: "This is yours. I trust you." Within three months, the entire dynamic had changed. He later told me the hardest part wasn't letting go of sales. It was letting go of the version of himself that was great at sales. Your question this week If you're a CEO or a Senior Leader — new or not — ask yourself honestly: Are you still doing the job that got you here? Or have you started doing the job you're actually in? Andrea Three more things:
|