Self-reliance got you here.
That is not a small thing. The ability to navigate complex situations alone, to make decisions with incomplete information, to project certainty when privately carrying enormous ambiguity, is genuinely rare. It is the reason you were appointed. It is the reason you have delivered.
And it is, in one specific and predictable situation, the belief most likely to cost you the role. Not because it is wrong. Because it is being applied to a category of problem it was never designed to solve.
The problem is category
Self-reliance works brilliantly for operational problems because operational problems have a feedback loop. You make a decision. Something happens. You adjust. The environment tells you whether you were right.
Authority and perception problems do not have that loop.
The board is not going to tell you that the informal view has shifted. The operating partner is not going to flag that the conversations after board meetings sound different to how they sounded six months ago. Your peer CEOs are performing the same stability to you that you are performing to them.
The absence of feedback feels like the absence of a problem, rather than the absence of a feedback loop.
The version I see most often
The CEO can feel something is slightly off. They name it to themselves. They increase preparation for board meetings, spend Sunday evenings reviewing the pack, over-deck to the point where the board has stopped asking about the numbers and is now watching how the CEO handles pressure.
The extra preparation solves the wrong problem. The board stopped worrying about the numbers six months ago. What the board is now watching is judgment. Composure. Whether this person has the authority and presence to lead the business through what is coming next. None of that is in the deck.
Where I learned it
In year three at Coryton, something felt slightly off. I named it to myself. Then I told myself what I had told myself in every difficult situation across thirty years of operating: I will figure it out. I just need to nail the next set of results.
The business was performing. EBITDA up 35% year on year. When COVID arrived and the PE firm needed to make a quick call, the performance did not protect me.
Every surgeon operates with oversight built into the system. Every F1 driver has a team watching data the driver cannot see from inside the car. The PE CEO is the only senior professional expected to perform at the highest level of their career, with the most significant financial outcome of their life on the table, and to treat the absence of an external perspective as a point of professional pride.
I did. I know what it cost.
The leaders who navigate this well are the ones who understood, early enough, that the feedback loop they needed did not exist inside the system they were operating in, and built it deliberately from outside. There was nothing weak about it. They were simply serious.
First published on LinkedIn, 9 June 2026. Adapted for this site.