A chief executive I worked with in her first year in a new role had a director on her board with a habit. Nearly every piece of advice he gave her started the same way: “As a CEO, you should…”
As a CEO, you should be doing this. As a CEO, you should be across that. The subject kept changing. The opening never did. It made her feel like she couldn’t trust her own judgement.
Partway through a meeting, it started again. He was not letting her finish her sentences. He leant over and asked the CEO whether she would like him to tackle a tricky issue. The CEO said no. I will manage it my way. I am across it. I will pick when I address it. The CEO had realised it was more about the director than it was about her.
Many senior leaders have a version of the “you should” sentence arriving from somewhere. A director, a funder, a peer who knows how these things should be done.
A November 2025 Korn Ferry article reported that around three-quarters of newly selected CEOs were first-timers. Drawing on responses from 35 first-time CEOs, its research identified sudden visibility and the loss of control over their own narrative as one of the most jarring parts of the transition. As one chief executive put it, “Everyone has opinions about you that you can’t control, no matter what you do.”
The sentence underneath the advice
New parents get the same treatment. Everyone knows what a good parent should do. Sleep routines, feeding, immunisations. The advice is written for a baby in general, but you are the one up at three in the morning with this one, who won’t do what other people tell you always works. And parenting advice doesn’t arrive as information. It arrives as a verdict on you.
“As a CEO, you should” works the same way. It measures the person against CEOs in general, and the standard often belongs to someone else in a context different to yours. Whatever the subject is, the question being asked underneath the phrase is about whether you are up to it.
The CEO spotted this herself. He was the only person who talked to her that way. Everyone else talked about the outcome, the direction, the intent of a decision. That director always made it about her. Once she saw that, the phrase started telling her more about him than about herself.
The answer she landed on was one word wide. When the next “As a CEO, you should” arrived, she answered in the first person: as the CEO, this is what I do, and here is why. On one occasion the answer was no, followed by her reasoning. Her job was to delegate the piece of work to the right person and make sure it was delivered well, not to do it herself.
“A CEO” is a general standard. “The CEO” is a person in a seat, in an organisation in a specific context, who is accountable for the results. When you respond to the first phrase you are defending yourself against a measure set by someone else. The second puts your reasoning on the table and moves the conversation back to the issue. The judgement does not disappear but it’s no longer based on what the other person assumes.
Advice that arrives as a judgement on the person can be a test rather than a doubt. A test like a director probing whether the person in the seat has reasons, and an ability to express them. Answering in the first person is how the test gets passed. After a later board meeting, the same director messaged this CEO, complimenting her interjections and commentary. The relationship improved once she was clear about her reasons and pushed back, and the doubt about her own judgement went with it.
Pushing back like this takes backbone, and backbone is not a soft idea. Amazon publishes sixteen Leadership Principles describing how its leaders are expected to lead, and one of them is called Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit. The wording is blunt: leaders are “obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting”, and they “do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion”. Once a decision has been made, however, they are expected to support it fully.
Answering from the seat
Three parts of this are usable this week.
The first is the tell. In the conversations around you, notice who talks about the issue and who talks about you.
The second is the answer. Respond in the first person, with your reasoning attached: as the CEO, this is what I do, and here is why. If the reasoning holds, the conversation moves to the issue. If it does not hold, you have learned something you needed to know.
The third is the timing. It needs your judgement. The moment the irritation peaks is rarely the best moment to address the pattern.
The voices beyond your board
The director measuring you against a general standard is rarely the only one. Funders do it. Peak bodies do it. So do the government relationships your funding depends on. Answering from the seat, with your reasoning on the table, is positioning work, and it can be built deliberately rather than improvised in the moment.
Influence by Design is where CEOs and senior teams build that positioning. Participants work on the live relationships their organisations depend on, so the reasoning holds when a funder or director pushes back, and within the first few months one or two of those relationships are in active repositioning rather than being managed on someone else’s terms. I deliver it personally over six months, in a public program or in-house for organisations that want their senior team working on it together.
If a director, funder or government relationship is testing your reasoning right now, reach out and I will send you the details, including the in-house option.
