261 - Why 50% of New CEOs Fail in the First 18 Months (and What to Do About it)

Nobody tells you that the job you were promoted for is not the job you now have. You earned the corner office because you were excellent at something. Finance, operations, commercial, product. That excellence is real, and it is exactly what makes the next part so hard, because the instinct that got you here is to go back to it. When the pressure rises, you return to the function you know best, where you can still be the smartest person in the room and feel useful by lunchtime. It looks like diligence. It is actually avoidance. And it is why so many new CEOs come unstuck inside their first eighteen months, not for lack of capability, but because they are still occupying the role they left rather than the one they have taken. There is a space the job is asking you to step into, and most leaders never quite move into it. It is wider, less comfortable, and far less obvious about what good looks like on any given day. In this episode I break down three shifts that separate the CEOs who make that move from the ones who stay stuck: going from doing to deciding, from performing to architecting, and from holding authority yourself to distributing it across your leadership team. The hardest part is not learning anything new. It is giving up the thing you were best at. 📘 PRE-ORDER MY NEW BOOK Reinvention at the Top: The Playbook for CEOs to Lead Under Pressure (Wiley) is available for pre-order now. 👉 https://www.reinventionatthetop.com/preorder 🚀 JOIN WCL21 WCL21 is a private community for CEOs leading mid-market companies, featuring confidential peer roundtables, masterclasses, and leadership conversations. 👉 https://andreapetrone.com/wcl21 📩 NEWSLETTER Join 192,000+ leaders receiving Andrea Petrone's weekly leadership insights. 👉 https://www.andreapetrone.com/newsletter/ CONNECT WITH ANDREA PETRONE LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreapetrone/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreapetrone_x Subscribe for weekly conversations with researchers and executives on leadership, teams, and organizational change.