McKinsey studied the most successful Fortune 500 CEOs and found they share one similar trait

Their new book, CEO of all seasonsbreaks down the mindsets and approaches required to succeed in the role that 68% of current CEOs admitted they felt “ill-prepared” for when they applied for the role. While research by Struvinc, Dewar, and co-authors Scott Keller and Vikram Malhotra found that these elite artists possess unique habits for challenging complacency, promoting brutal honesty, and remaining humble enough to continue learning.

The high-performance leaders studied in the book differentiate themselves through a “curiosity and learning mindset” that is prevalent in “almost every interview,” Dewar said in an interview with the magazine. luck.

Senior leaders are the first to admit they don’t know everything, Struvink said luck. “It was not that they were superhuman. It was that they learned faster, were more adaptable and had institutional structures and methods that enabled them to neutralize their excesses and leverage their strength and superiority.”

One of the most notable mandates regarding a high-performance culture came from Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase. As Strovink recounts, Damon tells his team: “Don’t bring your best, bring your worst — put problems on the table.”

Dewar added that this is not intended to encourage bad behavior, but rather organizational candor. It means being “willing to share when things aren’t going well…so we can fix them.”

This level of discomfort is necessary, Strovinc added, as great leaders must create the conditions for “distinctive thinking, candor, and building trust over time… They put it in the room, they put it on the table, they create, and they do it in their most authentic ways.” Good leaders must find a way to have difficult conversations that might not have happened under another leader, “but not make those experiences painful and brutal,” Strovinc said.

Challenges of modern leadership

Strovink explained that advising CEOs, although the core of McKinsey’s mission stretches back nearly 100 years, has reached a new level within the CEO practice framework, which was established several years ago. This was partly a reflection “that the role of the CEO has become more important”. “We live in an age,” Strovinc added, “where people are taking away driving and saying it’s a bad thing and no one wants to drive.” But the truth is that if you have an enlightened leader who does it well, it is actually a glorious thing that is very relevant to this generation, and perhaps more important than ever before.”

Dewar turned to hard data, arguing that book and practice are vital now because it’s frankly hard to be a CEO. She alluded to the reports (some of which are on pages luck) about the ever-short CEO tenure, “but it turns out it’s actually quite bifurcated.” She explained that 30% of CEOs do not succeed in passing the first three years, and the odds of remaining in their positions for a long period increase significantly once this threshold is crossed. She noted that private equity firms are looking at this closely, and are talking about the cost of losing a CEO. ‘We don’t want people to be upset’ Dewar pointed to estimates that $1 trillion in value in the S&P 500 is destroyed each year due to a failed CEO transition.

Struvink added that their research has already put a number on good driving. “The CEOs in the top quintile that we studied, over time, create disproportionate value for their companies, for economies as a whole, and for the world,” he added, adding that McKinsey estimates that the top quintile generates more than 30 times the economic profits of the next three quintiles combined. He added that leadership — and CEO talent — is “unevenly distributed.”

Jim Rossman of Barclays, global head of shareholder advisory, has been tracking hedge fund activist campaigns against publicly traded companies for decades, including the firing of CEOs. It found in early October that CEO turnover resulting from activist campaigns is set to reach a record high in 2025, surpassing the record of 2024. He said luck In an interview, this makes the CEO’s role more fragile than ever. “It seems that’s basically what the activists did [to hold] Public companies by private equity standards,” and they view the CEO “as an operator, not someone who moves up the ranks.”

Shareholder activists have successfully imposed strict private equity ownership standards on public companies, according to Rossman, holding them to quarterly performance metrics that focus relentlessly on maximizing efficiency and value. This contrasts sharply with the historical view of the CEO as a “local hero” or “revered figure.” Activists realized they didn’t need to take a company private the way a private equity firm might to force that view, Rossman said. They could have simply bought a stake and put pressure on the board, making the organization immediately vulnerable to enormous external pressure. “I think the CEO [churn] “It is directly linked to the continued infiltration of the private equity model into public companies,” Rossman added.

This operational focus is accelerated by technology, which provides real-time information on a company’s performance relative to its peers, and by consolidating ownership among index funds, making it easier for activists to organize support among the top 10 shareholders, Rossman noted. As a result, new boards — adopting a more private equity mindset — have heightened brand awareness and are quick to replace underperforming executives.

Dewar agreed with this line of thinking, saying: “If you think about how much the economy has shifted toward private equity and privately owned companies, their volatility is much higher.” I recently shared an anecdote about talking to a board member at a private equity firm, who said that a 71% decline was average for them in terms of leadership turnover. She added that this central question is why she is so passionate about leading CEO practices: “How do we actually serve CEOs, boards, and organizations to help each of those stages go well?”

The power of candor and discomfort

To survive in this high-risk environment, McKinsey research finds that senior executives are adaptable, not necessarily ruthless. They succeed by adopting a “curiosity and learning mindset” and organizing discomfort into their operations.

Strovinc and Dewar again point to JP Morgan’s Dimon, who has a decisive approach to combating complacency in this harsh environment. The investment bank chief believes that every large organization has a tendency to “comfort,” Strovinc noted, and this requires the CEO to constantly “push and push” it. He added that the “sociology of large organizations” means that things turn around gradually if the leader is satisfied with himself.

This anticipatory discomfort is the necessary internal balance to external pressure. Michael Dell embodies this, Dewar noted, as he combatted complacency by forcing his team to imagine a striker who understood his customers better, and encouraged his company to “bother ourselves.” (She also notes that Dell has been disrupting itself since she became founding CEO at age 19.)

Dewar recalled how Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told her in the previous book CEO Practice, CEO Excellenceabout feeling lonely on the job, caused by an “information asymmetry problem” in which he cannot talk to many colleagues about what he knows. They can’t bear to realize that. “No one else in your organization or above you, like your board or investors, sees all the pieces you see.” She said she believes it’s essential for CEOs to have some trusted advisors, a “kitchen cupboard” of sorts.

Ultimately, the book suggests that the most successful leaders in this highly accelerated, private equity-influenced era are those who can navigate the fundamental duality of the role: making bold, confident decisions with incomplete information while maintaining the humility and continuous learning required to meet relentless performance demands.

The authors stress that the book’s goal is to trace “the development of leaders over time,” including the fourth season that establishes the next generation. Brad Smith, former CEO of Intuit, has been cited as an exceptional example of legacy building, having held succession discussions with his board 44 times over 11 years – every quarter. Smith is “really proud of the fact that a lot of the people who worked for him went on to become CEOs elsewhere,” Dewar said, calling him “kind of a leadership development engine. I think that’s really cool as a leader, as part of his legacy.”

Strovink said he was particularly surprised by one perhaps counterintuitive finding: At least for the 200 leaders profiled in the book, the authors did not find the famous “sophomore slump” in leadership. “At least for this group, they didn’t have a sophomore slump. They just kept getting better over time.”