The 3 most common leadership myths

Today, leaders are typically put into one of two buckets: superhero or supervillain.

The myth of the superhero CEO is ever-present in today’s discourse on leadership—as is its counterpart, the corporate villain whose failings are all too clear. This mythologizing is not only flawed, but also popularizes misguided notions about how leaders succeed.

As advisers to both new and long-serving CEOs, we’ve seen this reality first-hand: Even the best leaders start out with serious weaknesses they need to overcome. And many successful leaders struggle mightily with the evolving challenges of the role, not only in the early going but throughout their tenures.

We saw an opportunity to challenge other common narratives about superior leadership performance. For our new book, “The Life Cycle of a CEO,” analyzed the individual performance of every 21st century CEO of the S&P 500. Then, we conducted in-depth conversations with more than 100 CEOs and board directors around the world.

Through this research, we began to see a common thread in how leaders succeed, and were able to put some lingering myths to rest. These insights have significant value not only for those in the CEO role but also for boards of directors, analysts assessing company prospects, and all of us who are leaders in our workplaces and communities.

Here are the most common leadership myths we need to dispel:

The myth of the omnipotent leader

Central to the flawed depictions is the notion that CEOs succeed because they are the rare leaders who “have what it takes.” In our own work helping CEOs build their skills and engage in personal development, we have seen just how flawed that perception of omnipotence is.

As Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, founder of the Chief Executive Leadership Institute and an expert on corporate leadership, laments: “CEOs are worshipped as rock stars, if not nearly deified.” So often they are depicted as highly charismatic corporate saviors who parachute in with superhuman strategic vision and unshakable confidence and work immediate wonders. Alternatively, they’re demonized as greedy villains, heartlessly sacrificing workers’ livelihoods to secure their exorbitant pay, if not scheming to destroy the planet.

It’s high time to take leaders off their pedestals and adjust our expectations.

One reason the hero mythology has rooted so firmly is that coverage of CEOs focuses intensively on particular dramatic moments in their tenure. A CEO may make a splash when they’re appointed, as was true for Mary Barra when she was named General Motors chief and became the first woman at the helm of a major US automaker. Coverage is also concentrated on a handful of CEOs who achieve virtual celebrity status.

Even for these most heavily covered leaders, we hear so little about the many other challenges they face, including the difficult steady grind of executing a long-term strategy. Such coverage reinforces the myth of omnipotence. This perspective often ignores the years of in-depth analysis and testing done before a big new product hits the market; instead, wins are often portrayed as springing from a CEO’s mind in a flash of insight. What we’re left with are disjointed snapshots, akin to a set of photos marking particular moments throughout one’s lifetime with no story of what happened in the intervening years.

The myth of the fully formed leader

Even the strongest leaders, who achieved successful, long tenures as CEO, didn’t start the job as the fully formed forces of nature described in the prevailing mythology.

It is simply not the case that successful leaders are born with all of the necessary leadership traits. Many have serious deficits they worked hard to correct once in a leadership role. Then, even after successfully navigating the intense challenges of the first couple of years, they had to continue to put themselves through difficult processes of growth.

We don’t often hear about how those who eventually succeeded struggled in their early years and then again later in their tenure. The early years of a leadership role, past the first ninety days, can be difficult. And there are particularly trying challenges that occur in the middle years of a leaders’ tenure, which require them to reignite their passion or engage in personal reinvention.

Understanding how leaders succeed requires understanding how the challenges of the role evolve and how leaders who thrive adapt to meet them.

The myth of an optimal leadership tenure

One of the myths about the CEO job that our study puts to rest is that there is an optimal length of tenure. For example, ten years has become conventional wisdom. That was the overwhelming consensus in a survey of board directors we conducted. The common view is that, past that duration, a CEO loses steam in driving performance and that results tail off.

However, our research suggests sometimes shorter is better and sometimes longer is better. It greatly depends on the business context and the individual. We found a disproportionate number of the most successful leaders exit the job after year six or remain in the role for ten years or more. They are either sprinters or marathoners.

In the case of the sprinter, their greatest excitement in stepping into the job is typically about righting the ship. They are especially energized by fixing problems that they can see a clear route to correcting. Their passion might also be about a particular strategic challenge, such as executing a big acquisition or managing the integration or the launch of a new product line. The challenges involved in longer-term strategic transformation aren’t as appealing to them.

Our data shows that sprinters’ success results from a focus in their approach to business improvements that is strikingly different from successful marathoners’ approach. From the start, sprinters rely more on efficiency gains and increases in profitability to create value.

In contrast, marathoners focus on revenue growth and innovation for the long term. Our analysis showed that, from 2000 to 2022, 26% of CEOs were in the role for over ten years. We attribute the strong performance in part to the wisdom they build through dealing with ever-evolving challenges. They’ve gained mastery over the complex demands of the job. After ten years, CEOs often make more moderate investments in innovation and slow the pace of acquisitions, but that doesn’t mean they are slacking off. Rather, they’ve developed more precision in allocation of resources and calibration of the moves they make.

Depicting CEOs as omnipotent corporate saviors may make for compelling reading. But these accounts fail to reflect the reality of corporate life at its highest levels. A CEO’s tenure is actually a series of up-and-down stages—a life cycle — that the most successful executives learn to manage.