He got everyone together. Nineteen people. Mostly PhDs. Young, brilliant, building something nobody had built before.
He wanted to be honest with them. They had about three months of cash left. He was working on closing a round. Things looked promising. But he thought they deserved to know where things stood.
They thanked him for the transparency.
Then they went back to their desks and started looking for new jobs. Every single one.
John Bates has led five tech companies through five of the worst crises in modern business. Dot-com crash. 9/11. 2008. COVID. Now AI. He's a Cambridge PhD whose parents thought people in business were a bit dodgy. He never planned to be a CEO. And that moment, early in his career, is the one that rewired how he leads.
Because it taught him something that nobody tells you when you take the seat.
There are truths your team cannot carry.
We talk about transparency like it's a moral absolute. Open leadership. Bring people into the picture. Share the real numbers. And most of the time, that's right. I believe in it. I coach CEOs to practise it.
But John's story sits in the gap between principle and reality. Because the people in that room weren't weak. They were rational. They heard "three months of cash" and did what any rational person would do: protect themselves. They couldn't absorb that level of risk. It wasn't their risk to absorb.
And that's the part nobody prepares you for. The distance between what you know and what you can share. The weight of information that would help nobody if it left your mouth. The decisions you make alone at midnight because the people who work for you would panic if they knew what you were weighing.
I work with CEOs every day. And this is the thing that comes up more than strategy, more than execution, more than board dynamics.
The loneliness of carrying what others can't.
One CEO told me: "I have fifty people who think I have this figured out. I have zero people I can tell the truth to."
That gap is where the real work of leadership happens. Not in the meetings. Not in the town halls. In the space between what you know and what you say.
John has a word for it. He quoted Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men:
"You can't handle the truth."
He laughed when he said it. But he wasn't joking.
After twenty-five years of leading through crisis after crisis, his advice is simple. You need a CFO who is a real partner, not just a finance person. You need board members you trust enough to be honest with. And you need to accept that the role asks you to carry things that will never be shared, thanked, or understood by the people you're carrying them for.
That's the job. It's always been the job.
The question is whether you're carrying it alone or whether you've built the two or three relationships where the weight can be shared without the walls caving in.
Andrea
🎧 Full conversation with John Bates on The World Class Leaders Show:
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