The strategic role of new leadership

Evidence from private equity portfolio companies’ management further reinforces the relevance of this challenge. A notable share of portfolio companies experience CEO turnover during the holding period, and a significant proportion of these transitions are unplanned. Many occur within the first year, underscoring how quickly boards and owners assess leadership fit, alignment, and early performance. The graph below illustrates just how exposed and fragile CEO transitions can be.

So, what are the challenges? 

When examining why otherwise capable and well-intentioned new CEOs struggle, a clear pattern emerges. Challenges are not only operational; they are also deeply cultural. Most organisations do not fail to transition their CEOs because of poor strategic insights, but because new CEOs fall into traps shaped by the organisation’s norms, expectations, and informal power structures. 

The graph below offers a structured view of the eight most common pitfalls that repeatedly derail new CEOs. While all eight are highly relevant, the feedback we gathered from a panel of 30 CEOs revealed that three of these traps consistently stand out as the most common. These three – highlighted in red – have a disproportionately strong influence on the early trajectory of a new CEO’s tenure. They accelerate momentum or derailment more rapidly; they shape trust more visibly and frequently determine whether the transition stabilises or begins to fracture.

The first is overconfidence combined with insufficient relationship building. Many new CEOs step into the role with a strong track record, yet past success does not automatically translate into trust or credibility in a new context. Without investing time in understanding the organisation’s informal networks, listening to perspectives across levels, and cultivating genuine relationships, even well-intentioned decisions can be misinterpreted or resisted. 

Trust is the defining currency during a leadership transition; without it, alignment erodes, resistance increases, and the CEO risks becoming isolated before gaining a full grasp of the dynamics they are expected to steer. In such an environment, even well-intentioned decisions can be misread or opposed. 

A second trap arises when CEOs overlook the importance of quick wins and existing positive initiatives. In the first months, stakeholders pay close attention to early signs of progress. When a leader focuses solely on long-term transformation and misses opportunities for simple, tangible improvements, energy and confidence can drop quickly. Valuable initiatives that already work may be deprioritised or dismissed before their potential is understood. Early wins do more than demonstrate competence, they create momentum, reinforce belief in the new direction, and assure the organisation that the CEO ‘gets’ the business. Without them, uncertainty grows and engagement weakens, making subsequent change significantly harder. 

The third and often most structurally challenging trap is initiating change programmes that are too complex. New CEOs can feel pressure to demonstrate ambition quickly, which can lead to launching multiple initiatives at once, adding layers of governance, or designing transformation portfolios that exceed the organisation’s capacity. When the change agenda becomes overloaded, execution slows, priorities blur, and fatigue builds across teams. Instead of accelerating impact, complexity fragments attention and undermines the very outcomes the CEO is trying to achieve. Sustainable progress requires disciplined simplicity – setting clear priorities, pacing initiatives, and ensuring the organisation’s capacity matches the ambition of the change. 

II. The tensions new CEOs must learn to navigate 

Beyond individual pitfalls, new CEOs encounter something even more complex: the reality that transformation requires navigating a series of competing demands. These demands are not problems to solve, but tensions to hold – and they sit at the heart of every major change effort. 

Every transformation introduces opposing forces that can feel mutually exclusive:

As shown above, these dualities span every dimension of leadership – from strategy to culture, from processes to stakeholder management. As such, they represent the universal paradoxes leaders must engage with when driving meaningful change. 

When competing demands trigger either/or thinking 

Feeling torn between two competing options is uncomfortable. To get out of that state, what most of us instinctively do is make an either/or choice. This instinct is understandable: choosing one option provides clarity, speed, and a sense of control. However, if you make an either/or choice when dealing with complex problems, it will lead to poor outcomes. The research is clear, either/or thinking in those situations gets leaders too far down an extreme, which eventually backlashes.⁵

Why both/and thinking is essential 

Successful CEOs distinguish themselves not by choosing between these opposing forces, but by learning to hold and integrate them. Instead of asking, “Which one should I prioritise?”, they ask, “How do we succeed with both?”. 

Leaders who adopt this integrative mindset consistently demonstrate four capabilities: 

1. They surface tensions rather than avoiding them.
   Surfacing tensions early is the best way to proactively manage tensions.
2. They reframe the issue from an either/or to a both/and 
   Instead of: “Should we prioritise speed or quality?” they ask “How might we get both speed and quality?”
3. They diligently explore options before making a choice
   Resisting the pull toward premature decision-making
4. They consciously design integrative solutions that allow them to get the best of both worlds.

This ability to operate in the ‘and’ – not the ‘or’ – is quickly becoming one of the defining differentiators of modern leadership. New CEOs who master this skill are able to leverage the potential that complexity and uncertainty bring to their advantage. 

Competing demands are not obstacles; they are the work 

Seen through this lens, the competing demands CEOs face are not obstacles; they are the work of transformation itself. 

Leading change means being able to succeed with both planned and emerging change, internal focus and external insight, top-down and bottom-up, maintaining stability and driving transformative change, etc. These tensions are not obstacles to transformation – they are the transformation. The leaders who excel are those who navigate these opposing forces with nuance, courage, and curiosity. When CEOs embrace this integrative mindset, they unlock a more balanced, resilient form of leadership – one capable of stewarding the organisation through uncertainty while building the foundations for long-term success. 

III. Tactical techniques to manage competing leadership demands 

Recognising competing demands is only the first step. The real question for any CEO is: how do you turn both/and thinking into practical leadership when attention, time, and bandwidth are limited? Transformation accelerates when tensions are translated into concrete choices that are embedded in routines, decision forums, and the daily operating routines. 

Across industries, successful CEOs show that integrating opposing forces is not an abstract ideal, but a discipline built through repeated actions. They rely on simple techniques, rituals, and decision practices that make the “both/and” explicit: staying internally aligned while listening externally, sharpening strategy without losing ambition, honouring loyalty while upgrading capabilities, protecting reliable operations while enabling innovation, sustaining performance while driving change, and strengthening collaboration while expanding external engagement. In other words, the ‘both/and hack’ depends on the situation, but it always requires a conscious, proactive choice, not a default reaction. 

The examples that follow are therefore not presented as a grand transformation model, but as a set of field-tested leadership moves that can help CEOs operationalise competing demands in practice. They are organised across six recurring arenas of the CEO agenda where awareness, strategic objectives, talent leadership, business processes, performance momentum, and relationship reinforcement, each illustrated through practical techniques that make the tension manageable in real time. 

Ultimately, the point is not to ‘apply all techniques,’ but to use them as prompts. For a new CEO especially, the invitation is to identify the few tensions that matter most right now – and to have the patience to understand the paradox beneath the surface. When leaders treat the tension as information (not noise), they make better choices: clearer trade-offs, stronger alignment, and greater momentum – because the organisation is no longer forced into either/or thinking when the reality is both/and.

Conclusion 

Stepping into a CEO role today means stepping into complexity. The failure rates can be high, the competing demands are relentless, and the transformational stakes are significant. Yet the path to success is clearer when leaders: 

• Recognise the traps of the CEO transition
• Embrace competing demands through integrative thinking
• Apply practical, tactical techniques to navigate the six dimensions of transformation

What differentiates successful CEOs is not perfection, but the willingness to hold tensions, make great choices, and talk about what truly matters. 

References: 

1. Survey Reveals More Interest Than Action in CEO Succession Planning Among Top Companies (2010), Korn/Ferry
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kornferry-survey-reveals-more-interest-than-action-in-ceo-succession-planning-among-top-companies-112237119.html?


2. CEO Succession (2024), Spencer Stuart
https://www.spencerstuart.com/research-and-insight/spencer-stuart-director-pulse-survey-ceo-succession-2024


3. Development Dimensions International. (2021). Leadership transitions report 2021. Development Dimensions International. https://www.ddiworld.com/research/leadership-transitions-report 

4. Rönkkö, M., Maheshwaree, P., & Schmidt, J. (2023). The CEO effect and performance variation over time. Leadership Quarterly, 34(5), Article 101733. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2023.101733


5. Smith, W. K. (2022). Both/and thinking: Embracing creative tensions to solve your toughest problems. Harvard Business Review Press.