The traditional version of success is well understood: grow revenue, increase profit, scale the business, create enterprise value.
In the initial coaching/chemistry conversation with my CEO clients, this territory is almost always front and centre at the inception of our engagement.
They are all worthwhile pursuits. “I love profit” is a common refrain of mine, and it always will be because profit is the best measure of a businesses’ quality.
None of what I’ve written in this series is an argument against performance or profit. Quite the opposite, in fact.
The issue is that many leaders have inherited a narrow view of what high performance actually requires. When the earlier signals emerge — the heaviness, the repetition, the sense that something isn’t quite working in the way it should — many CEOs assume they simply need better execution, greater resilience, or sharper strategy.
Sometimes they do, but often something else is being asked: which is to recognise that businesses are not static organisational charts but living systems, shaped by the quality of decisions made within them and the energy people bring to them.
When those upstream elements improve, interesting things begin to happen downstream. Performance often (if not always) improves, but so does the quality of that performance.
Revenue becomes healthier, and decision-making becomes wiser. Teams become more energised, and the business becomes more adaptive. And in some cases, something even more meaningful starts to emerge: a business that creates economic value without unnecessarily diminishing the humans within it.
This is what interests me most. Not simply helping leaders build bigger businesses, but helping them build better ones.
This requires a different type of CEO – not softer or less ambitious. Just more capable of seeing what others often miss.
This is the real hero’s journey for a CEO: not building something bigger for the sake of it but building something more intelligent, more alive, and ultimately, more enduring.
Most CEOs won’t choose that path because it asks more of them. But those who do often find the rewards greater than expected. Not only economically, but personally too.
The business starts to feel like a more honest expression of what they are capable of building, and leadership becomes a more meaningful craft.
That seems like a worthwhile trade.
If you’ve made it through all 5 parts of this ‘CEO Hero’s Journey’ series, thank you for sticking with it. I hope that the time you’ve invested in this longer-form content format has been worth your while.
This series describes a pattern I’ve repeatedly seen among CEOs navigating moments of transition. It’s the foundation of the work we do at Lockstep — helping leaders build businesses that perform exceptionally well while becoming beacons of what modern business can be.