I talked to them about their book and its lessons for leaders of all sorts. This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and continuity. A more complete version is available here.

Both of you work with executives and leaders all the time. What were some of the things you found through the research for this book and talking to former and current CEOs and board members that surprised you, or stood out as being more important than you had thought? 

Stark: The big initial surprise was from quantitative research. We all assume—I, too, had assumed, and most directors and CEOs we surveyed assumed—that once someone gets in the job, their growth, and therefore their performance, follow a linear trajectory. And the data totally upended that. It’s not linear at all. 

If you ask people today about CEO tenure and performance over time, they will paint a picture of an inverted U, where each year is better than the last, until around year eight to 10, when their energy wanes and the U starts to curve down. The big reveal of the initial research was that it’s not linear at all. There are headwinds and tailwinds and sharp ups and downs that are, for most people, completely unexpected. 

Hildebrand: It’s that cult of the charismatic leader. The idea is that because someone has been given a title, suddenly they know it all. They’re wiser, they’re funnier, they’re taller. This is the way we portray these leaders in the media. It’s also the way we as a society want to see these leaders. We don’t want to have a self-doubting leader. That’s not very reassuring. It’s also in the advice currently out there for leaders: This idea that you have to have these four traits, or these five behaviors and these six mindsets. What we find time and time again is when we work with executives and CEOs and advise and we [find there are some] who question their decisions, who have to rely just as much on gut as they have to rely on information. And to Bob’s point around this idea of continuous growth, we found there’s no model of leadership that focuses on a set of growth or development stages.

But at the same time, you never step into the same river twice. Just because someone is the leader doesn’t mean they don’t change over time. And that’s what we found. The challenges that leaders face might have similarities but they manifest themselves differently depending on where one is in their tenure and their psyche in those moments. The book’s not only about what CEOs do to be great, but it’s also how leaders feel along that journey. 

Going through the different stages of the CEO’s life cycle, as well as the before and after periods, is there any one area that you think CEOs or other leaders should be taking a closer look at and reassessing how they respond to challenges?

Stark: For most CEOs, before we started writing about this, a moment of reinvention that was really unknown is when they get to that year three through five, and they’re doing really well, they kind of have a sense that, ‘Oh, I’ve figured this out. I’m good at this now. My team is humming. People see the results that I’ve created in the moves that I’ve made earlier.’ It’s very easy at that point to settle in. 

I remember when we first talked to CEOs about our findings years ago, I was in front of a big group, and a CEO put up his hand and said, ‘Every role I’ve been in before CEO was three to five years, so I never had to reinvent in place. I’m in year five right now, and I’m trying to figure out how do I start over in this role?” That’s a huge moment because people are used to: I get a new role, I figure out how to do that, create some value, get the new team going. But if you’re going to go past five years, you’ve got to reinvent in-place without external stimulus. 

Hildebrand: There are so many different points in time to highlight that it’s really hard to single out any one of them. There’s a benefit for leaders who use the life cycle as a framework: to identify where, for you personally, you might see that challenge. It’s a lot about foreseeing the challenges. The key message of the book is preparedness beats preparation. This idea of anticipating what might be coming your way and then taking the appropriate actions and avoiding some of the pitfalls.

If there’s one lesson, story or example you would like readers to take from your book, what would it be?

Stark: The CEO job is interesting to study because it’s so complex. But the complexity of the role also reveals that for all of us, even in roles less complex, we shouldn’t assume that the role that we’re in is static. It actually unfolds over time around us. In any job that we have to do, our particular job is to develop and adapt as the job is unfolding, notice how it’s unfolding and be adaptive to that unfolding. That’s what happens to CEOs. Those who figure out how to adapt and grow in the role can thrive, and those who don’t struggle mightily.

Hildebrand: Challenges exist at every stage. What’s different is how they manifest themselves throughout the progression of tenure. If we think about our personal lives and the challenges we encounter in our 20s and 30s and 40s and 50s, they’re very different. 

For a new CEO stepping into the role, the amount of information that’s thrown at them, we all say it is like drinking from the firehose. You don’t know what is important and what is urgent. Everything seems to be important and urgent. How to deal with this? That’s a very different challenge than what some of the veteran CEOs might feel when they’ve been in that role for 12, 15 years, when they feel like they no longer have real access to information. Yes, they can get the information, but the board is, at this point, deferential to them. The team, at this point, thinks they know it all. They’re now in a sort of echo chamber, where it’s hard to peer through. 

What’s constant is the importance of information, but how the challenge manifests is very different. Understanding where one is on one’s journey, and how all these different challenges manifest themselves is hopefully the big contribution to anyone reading the book as they work on taking their game to a higher level.