The CEO Mindset: The Secret to Being a Successful and Empowering Leader

By Hooman Yazhari

I’ll start with a story about leadership. 

In October 1911, two teams of explorers embarked on a journey that no one had ever successfully completed. The explorers left the Antarctic in an attempt to reach the South Pole. One team, led by Roald Amundsen, was Norwegian. The other, led by Robert Scott, was British.

The disparity between the teams’ success was immense. Amundsen and his team made it to the South Pole, and they returned to their base on the exact date that Amundsen had marked in his planning journals. It was a precise victory. Scott and his team had a different fate: They made it to the South Pole—more than a month after the Norwegians did—but they sadly perished on their return. 

How could two leaders, presumably with access to similar training, tools, and resources, produce such drastically different outcomes? The answer is in how they prepared.

Amundsen’s success was connected to his incremental approach. He advanced fifteen miles every day and built his system around that goal. In addition, he prepared—mentally and physically—for this particular moment his whole life. He ran miles, cycled from Norway to Spain instead of taking the train, lived with Eskimos to adapt to extreme temperatures, learned how to use dogs and sleds, figured out whether dolphins could be a food of last resort, and thoroughly tested all his equipment. He also packed significant extra supplies for the arduous trip. And finally: Amundsen and his team formed a camaraderie before they all set off on their expedition.

These methods are in stark contrast to how Scott ran his team. Scott took an aggressive, impetuous approach. He had no plan or marked target for progress, unlike the fifteen-mile mark favored by his rival. Scott bet his luck on unproven methods. He utilized motor sledges, which were cutting edge but also untested technology at the time. The motor sledges broke down, leaving Scott’s expedition to rely on horses, which were also unsuitable for the conditions and, ultimately, manpower. And, perhaps most telling, Scott’s teammates did not bond and form a fellowship before the expedition.

This story of two leaders is rich in lessons—of consistency, foresight, fortitude, of strategy, and ultimately of immutable leadership secrets.  

Great Leadership Equals Great Habits

The way Amundsen led his team directly corresponds to the way successful leaders guide their companies. It also speaks to a question that has intrigued me ever since I became the co-founder of Beyond Capital more than a decade ago: Do commonalities between successful CEOs exist or is leadership the calculated result of bold intelligence, strategic ambition, and a generous dose of luck? 

I have long been inspired by successful leaders who maintain a level of efficiency, creativity, positivity and charisma, even in the face of dire challenge. I have always wanted to know about the traits and strategies employed by CEOs so that we can all learn from them to achieve high performance in all areas of our lives. Amundsen's plans for tackling this history-making journey illustrates the difference between the kind of leader who reaches their goal and the kind of leader who is destined to fail. This all comes down to habits and behaviors. 

In his book, Great By Choice, author Jim Collins talks about leadership as a twenty-mile march, meaning that great leaders take strides in increments. This mirrors Amundsen’s successful method. What this tells us is that great leaders have high-performance habits in common. Unlocking your potential as a leader means developing these habits for success until they become second nature. It means consciously cultivating your leadership capabilities.  

In other words, leaders are made, not born. 

What We Get Wrong

We all have preconceived notions about what makes a successful CEO. First of all, CEOs are not that rare. We all have a one in fifty chance of becoming one. There are more than 2 million companies in the US alone that have at least five employees. That means there are 2 million CEOs in this country—and counting.

In their landmark book, The CEO Next Door: The 4 Behaviors That Transform Ordinary People Into World-Class Leaders, Elena L. Botelho and Kim R. Powell embarked on a ten-year study to identify the specific attributes that differentiate high-performing CEOs to quickly dispel outdated leadership concepts. It's common to think that business rock stars set their sights on the C-suite at an early age. But that is not true. More than 70 percent of today’s CEOs hit the big time later in their careers, according to Botelho and Powell's research. It's also common to believe that these high-level executives graduated from Ivy League schools. Also false: Botelho and Powell found that only 7 percent of those studied graduated from elite colleges, and 8 percent didn’t get a degree at all. Lastly, perhaps most tellingly, we often assume that successful business leaders have a flawless resume, when, in fact, 45 percent have had a major career blowup. Talk about humbling.

The point here is to illustrate that successful CEOs are like the rest of us with one differentiating point: They have a highly developed skill set, which you can consciously cultivate for your CEO success.  

My 9 Elements to Being a Successful CEO

1. Create a vision. The most useful thing a leader can do is to facilitate the creation of a vision which becomes the north star of an organization. Once the vision is created, a good leader doubles it. Thereafter, any and all actions lead towards the achievement of an ambitious and inspiring vision. A leader must communicate live and personify the vision. 

2. Be inspiring. Once you have a vision, inspire and engage all your stakeholders to work together to achieve it with you. As a leader, you must constantly engage with employees, investors, customers, suppliers and other stakeholders, all with maximum impact. How do you unite these disparate groups around a common purpose? It is essential to know your different audiences well and be able to translate that common purpose into a strategy that aligns with their expectations and goals. Learn the native language of your groups. Hang out with them, grasp what they want, learn about their needs and interests. Speaking the language of different groups can involve some detective work to understand their perspective, so be observant and empathetic in all of your interactions with these constituencies. 

3. Create the right culture. Be vulnerable and transparent, but avoid being too nice. 

Peter Drucker is attributed with stating that “culture eats strategy for breakfast.”  The energy, momentum, competence, dedication, enthusiasm, moral compass, and ambition of an organization, as well as anything that cannot be systematized or subjected to a process, is determined by culture. 

According to Daniel Coyle, author of The Culture Code, CEO candidates who talk about a blowup as a failure are half as likely to be a strong performer as compared to leaders who see setbacks as learning opportunities. While it may seem counterintuitive, a big part of making excellence a habit is making mistakes. A great culture makes mistakes safe, not a matter of personal embarrassment or potential punishment. Coyle summarizes the three essential elements of a culture of success as follows: nurturing safety, sharing risk, and uniting around a common purpose. 

In addition, think of yourself as an orchestra conductor. You’re not directly producing music. You’re depending entirely on those you’re conducting to create the sound. Managing all of these stakeholders, and their often-conflicting agendas, means you must retain some degree of distance. That’s right. Be nice, but don’t be too nice and too agreeable. A recent study revealed there’s a bell-shaped curve to the impact of likability on business performance. Being amenable is helpful—up to a point. Being too nice can backfire, as overly agreeable leaders may hesitate to make tough calls and upset people. Great leaders manage to hit that sweet spot of being relatable without seeming weak or pandering.

4. Be decisive. This is imperative. In order to be an effective leader, you must be resolute in your opinions, ideas, and actions. Your job as a CEO is to decide what is most important to the success of your company and act on that first. In addition, resist the urge to step in when decisions can and should be made by your colleagues. Whilst proper process must be followed and the right analysis undertaken, speed is key. It can be better to make a decision which needs refining later than to do nothing and let opportunities slip away.

5. Be adaptable. A modern CEO is met with a constantly evolving landscape. Welcome change or get left behind. You and your organization should never stop learning, and you can never assume that you know everything. This means you have to seek out novelty, new skills, and learning opportunities for yourself and all who you lead.  And don’t get discouraged when you fail. This bias towards newness helps build an awareness of developing trends and how to align your business goals with them. 

6. Be reliable. Reliability is a fundamental part of success. Things as small as being on time to meetings and checking items off your to-do list are as monumental as upholding organizational values. While it may seem like the most basic rule in the book, do what you say you’re going to do. It can go a surprisingly long way: CEOs who are known for being reliable are fifteen times more likely to be high-performing and their odds of getting hired are twice that of others, according to Botelho and Kim R. Powell in The CEO Next Door.

7. Be measured.  Let's go back to the South Pole story: Amundsen set fifteen-mile increments and a target date for arrival. This illustrates how essential clear goals are. If you do not set clear goals: How do you expect to get there? And how will your team know what to do?: Be systematic and set concise KPIs and let them be your guiding principle. What you measure is ultimately what you achieve. 

8. Surround yourself with a high vibe tribe.  Everyone says it, surround yourself with the best, with people who are smarter than you. I agree one hundred percent. Surround yourself with the greatest and do everything in your power to make sure they succeed and shine as brightly as they can. In determining what makes the “best” go beyond intellectual and technical capability, and consider a person’s motivation and purpose. What drives them, and are they joining your team with an attitude of service or from a place of ego? Are they coachable, self aware, empathetic, adaptable, resilient, and willing to do whatever it takes? Do they smile a lot and keep their composure under pressure? 

9. Contribute beyond yourself. And now we come to the true secret to success: We are all happiest when we are giving. I believe this is the ultimate goal in any role and in any endeavor. Those who are not ultimately focused on giving are usually purely motivated by personal advancement, persuaded that the world owes them a living, and convinced that they are indispensable to the fortunes of their team. This brand of CEO stands in sharp contrast to leaders who seek to understand the diverse perspectives of others, see the needs of people around them, and realize that success means sowing seeds that benefit others. It means being a servant leader. 

This is why, in addition to my role in the business world, my wife and I founded Beyond Capital, an impact investment fund that partners with early-stage social enterprises seeking to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems. Together, these entrepreneurs, our dedicated team, and our investors discover ways to make a true difference while marrying money with meaning. Our desire to give back fuels our high-performance lifestyle in ways that no other activity, idea, or endeavor could ever replicate.

To reiterate: Leaders are not born. Leaders are made. All successful leaders intentionally inculcate the necessary habits to better themselves. In doing so, the men and women like those whom I have mentioned above teach us in immeasurable ways—in business and in life.