What the climb actually costs

When somebody reaches a C-suite role here, the questions they get asked in public are all about method.

What was your path. What did you study. What would you tell your younger self. The answers are given generously and they are almost always true, and they are almost always incomplete, because there is a second set of questions that does not get asked in a hall with two hundred people in it.

What did it cost. What did you give up that you have not got back. Is there anybody who paid for this who did not choose to.

We want to spend this episode on the second set. Not to discourage anybody, because several of us would make the same climb again. But because the version of the story that circulates is sanitised, and people make life decisions against it, and then find themselves surprised by a bill nobody warned them about.

There is also a practical reason. If you do not know which costs are necessary and which are simply the ones you happened to pay, you will pay all of them again, and you will ask the people who work for you to pay them too.

So: what the climb actually costs, what the evidence says about how it actually happens, and which parts of it are worth paying.

Let us start with the finding that surprised us most, because it undoes the story almost everyone tells.

There is a body of research called the CEO Genome project, run out of the leadership advisory firm ghSMART. It draws on a database of around seventeen thousand executive assessments, with a detailed sample of more than two and a half thousand leaders, and thousands of hours of interviews. It is one of the larger attempts to ask, empirically, what the people who actually get these jobs have in common.

Here is the number we keep coming back to. Around forty-five per cent of the candidates studied had at least one major career blow-up behind them. Not a disappointing quarter. A blow-up: they were fired, or they lost a large deal, or they drove an acquisition that did not work.

Nearly half. Of the people who made it.

Sit with that for a moment, because of what it does to the narrative most of us grew up with. The story we are told is that the path upward is a clean sequence of successes and that one visible failure closes the door. On this evidence, that is simply not how it works. What separated people was not the absence of a serious failure. It was what happened afterwards: whether they owned it plainly, what they learned, and whether they stayed in the arena.

We would go further, from what we have watched here. In our market the fear of the visible failure is, if anything, stronger than elsewhere, because the professional community is small and everybody knows everybody. One collapsed project follows you around Kampala for years. And so people optimise for never being visibly wrong, which means they never take the assignment that would have made them.

The same research looked at what it called sprinters — people who reached the top faster than the average path would predict. The finding was that almost all of them, something like ninety-seven per cent, made deliberate bold career moves rather than waiting to be selected.

Two of those moves are worth describing, because both look like bad career decisions at the moment you make them.

The first is taking on the mess. More than thirty per cent of the fast movers had, at some point, led a team through a serious problem that nobody else wanted. The failing branch. The system migration three people have already resigned over. The regulatory finding that has to be answered in ninety days.

Nobody volunteers for these, because the downside is obvious and the upside is not. But consider what a mess actually gives you: full visibility from senior people, permission to act outside the normal constraints, and a clear before and after that you can point to for the rest of your career. It is the single fastest way to acquire a reputation for judgement, precisely because everyone can see the state you inherited.

The second is going smaller to get bigger. Leaving a narrow senior role in a large institution for a broader role in a smaller one. On paper, and to your relatives, this looks like a step down. In practice it is often the only way to get whole-business exposure before you are fifty — profit and loss you actually own, a board you actually sit in front of, decisions with no committee above you to absorb the risk.

Both moves have the same shape. You accept a real chance of visible failure in exchange for scope. That is the trade, and the research suggests that people who never make it tend to arrive later, or not at all.

Now the part that gets left out of the conference answer.

The costs of the climb are rarely the ones people expect. Nobody in our experience is actually broken by long hours in their thirties. What accumulates is subtler and it lands almost entirely outside work.

It lands on the people who did not choose your career. Your children have a version of you that is physically present and mentally in a meeting, and children read that accurately from about four years old. Your spouse absorbs a series of small unilateral decisions — the relocation, the weekend, the phone at dinner — that were each individually reasonable and were never negotiated as a package.

It lands on friendship, which is the first thing to go because it makes no demands. Nobody sends a calendar invitation for a friendship. It simply thins, and one day you notice that the people you would call at two in the morning are all relatives, and that the last five social occasions you attended were work.

And it lands on the part of you that had interests. Most senior people we know can tell you what they used to do — the instrument, the sport, the writing — in the past tense, and cannot say precisely when they stopped.

We are not saying any of this is avoidable in full. Ambition has a price and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What we are saying is that these costs get paid by default rather than by decision, and that people who pay them deliberately end up in a very different place from people who simply woke up one day having paid.

We should interrupt ourselves, because everything we have said so far has a flaw, and it is the flaw in every piece of advice given by people who succeeded.

We are only talking to the survivors.

The research we described studies people who reached the top. It cannot tell you about the person who took the mess, handled it competently, and was still passed over because the chief executive who sponsored them left three months later. That person made the same bold move, with the same judgement, and it did not catapult them anywhere.

Between us we can name a considerable number of people who were as capable as anyone now sitting in these chairs, and who are not sitting in them. Very few of those stories are about talent. They are about a restructure that removed a function, an owner who sold, a sponsor who died, a maternity leave that happened in the wrong quarter, a sector that contracted.

So when somebody stands up and describes the four principles that got them to the corner office, hold it lightly. The principles may well be sound. But the same four principles were being applied, at the same time, by people the audience will never hear from, and the difference between the two groups is not entirely composed of merit.

We think this matters for two practical reasons, beyond honesty.

The first is what it should do to your risk-taking. If outcomes are partly outside your control, then the correct response is not to become passive. It is to take more attempts, because you cannot control which one lands and you can control how many you make. People who understand the role of chance tend to place more bets, not fewer.

The second is what it should do to you when you get there. If you believe the position is entirely earned, then everyone below you who has not reached it must have failed to earn it, and that belief makes you a worse judge of people almost immediately. It also makes you brittle, because it leaves you no account of what is happening when things go badly other than personal inadequacy.

The people we most want to work with hold both things at once: they worked extremely hard, and they were fortunate. Those are not in tension. Almost everybody who is honest about their own path says some version of that in private, and almost nobody says it from a stage.

There is one cost that is specific to the seniority itself, and it is better documented than most people realise.

Research by Harvard Business Review with the firm RHR International found that around half of chief executives report experiencing loneliness in the role, and that roughly six in ten of those say it affects their performance. Among first-time chief executives the figure is higher still — close to seven in ten describe isolation as a significant challenge.

That is not a soft finding. Isolation degrades exactly the things a senior leader is paid for: reasoning under uncertainty, creative problem solving, the willingness to be corrected.

The mechanism is not mysterious. As you rise, the number of people who will tell you something you do not want to hear falls, and it falls fast. Your directs are managing upward, which is rational. Your peers are competing with you for the same two seats. Your board is evaluating you. Your family loves you and cannot judge whether the restructure is correct.

So the quality of information reaching you degrades at exactly the point where your decisions matter most. And the loneliness people describe is not really about company. It is about the disappearance of anyone who can look at your reasoning and say, plainly, that they think you are wrong.

We should be direct that this is a large part of why this group exists. Not for networking, which is available anywhere. For a room in which somebody can say to you: we have watched you talk yourself into this for twenty minutes, and we do not believe you.

So we want to end by drawing a line, because treating every cost as noble is how people wreck their lives on the way to a title.

Some costs buy something. Two years of genuinely punishing work to turn round a business, with an end date, is a cost that buys capability and standing you keep permanently. Moving your family once for a role that changes your trajectory is a cost with a return. Missing some things because you are doing something demanding and finite is the ordinary price of ambition.

Other costs buy nothing at all, and we see far more of the second kind.

Being visibly available at eleven at night buys nothing. It is a performance of commitment, and the main thing it produces is a team who believe they must perform it too. Answering every message within four minutes buys nothing; it trains the organisation to interrupt you and it removes the uninterrupted hours in which the only work that actually requires you gets done. Attending everything you are invited to buys nothing. Never taking leave buys nothing, and it usually conceals a leader who has not built anyone capable of covering them, which is a failure they are being praised for.

The test we would offer is simple to say and uncomfortable to apply. For each thing this is costing you: what am I buying, and is there a cheaper way to buy it. If the honest answer is that you are buying the appearance of commitment, you are paying with your health and your family for something with no resale value whatsoever.

Three things, briefly, for anybody in the middle of this climb.

Take the mess. Not every mess and not permanently, but at least once, deliberately, while you still have the energy for it. It is the highest-return move available to you and it is the one everybody else is avoiding.

Decide the costs out loud, with the people who will pay them. Not a general assurance that things will calm down, which is never true. A specific conversation: this role will take roughly this much for roughly this long, here is what I will protect regardless, and here is when we review it. Our experience is that people can carry an enormous amount when they know its shape, and very little when it is open-ended and was never discussed.

And build the room now. Two or three people, outside your reporting line and outside your organisation, who have stood where you are standing and who are not competing with you. Build it before you need it, because the moment you need it is the moment you are least able to go looking.

The climb is worth making. We would not be doing this otherwise. But it should be a set of decisions you made, and not a bill you discover you have already paid.