The CEO Test: Master the Challenges That Make or Break All Leaders
Adam Bryant and Kevin Sharer
Harvard Business Review Press (March 2021)

 “Champions get up when they can’t.” Jack Dempsey

With rare exception, crises do not develop character but often reveal it. Moreover, major crises tend to consist of a cluster of separate but interdependent tests for both an organization and its leaders.

I agree with Adam Bryant and Kevin Sharer that leaders’  behavior and, especially, the decisions they must make usually depend on three factors:

o Leaders’ experience, capabilities, temperament, and personality
o The individual experience and collective capabilities and personalities of those they lead
o The context in which they are leading (e.g. small or big team? startup or legacy organization? turnaround or hypergrowth?)

“Right out of the gate, these three variables create an finite number of permutations that make leading feel like like an ever-shifting, multilevel chessboard. And because leadership is so contextual, we are not going to traffic in shortcuts or fill-in-the-blank templates. Becoming a leader takes introspection and work, and the simplest questions of leadership — What is your strategy? What does success look like for your leadership team? — are the most difficult to answer.”

Bryant and Sharer have wide and deep prior experience with countless C-level executives. Bryant interviewed more than 600 of them for his “Corner Office” column in The New York Times. Sharer is the former CEO of Amgen, the largest biotech company in the world. Based on their own experience as well as experience shared with them, they have formulated a covey of “tests” and devote a separate chapter to each. I think they are best viewed as both a mirror and a window. Those who read the material with appropriate care can gain a much clearer, more specific sense of where their leadership development has taken them thus far; they can also see new, previously unrevealed opportunities to accelerate that process.

Bryant and Sharer devote a separate chapter to each of these seven “tests,” accompanied by a relevant quotation I have added:

1. Develop a Simple Plan for Your Strategy
“Make everything as simple possible but no simpler.” Albert Einstein

2. Make the Culture Real — and Matter
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Peter Drucker

3. Build Teams That Are True Teams
“Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.” Michael Jordan

4. Lead the Transformation
“Transformation is a process, and as life happens there are tons of ups and downs. It’s a journey of discovery – there are moments on mountaintops and moments in deep valleys of despair.” Rick Warren

5. Listen…Really Listen
“Deep listening is the kind of listening that can help relieve the suffering of another person. You can call it compassionate listening. You listen with only one purpose: to help him or her to empty his heart.” Tich Nhat Hanh

6. Handle a Crisis
“Never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean is that it’s an opportunity to do what you thought you could not do before.” Rahm Emanuel

7. Master the Inner Game
“People won’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Theodore Roosevelt

Whatever their size and nature may be, all organizations need effective leadership at all levels and in all areas of the given enterprise. The make-or-break challenges that leaders face today are more volatile, more uncertain, more complex, and more ambiguous than at any prior time that I can recall.

This book’s subtitle refers to challenges “that make or break all leaders.” Adam Bryant and Kevin Sharer provide the information, insights, and counsel that leaders need to master skills in order  to respond effectively to those challenges.

With all due respect to the importance of having effective C-level leaders, however, here is a  passage to keep in mind, from Lao-tse’s Tao Te Ching:

“Learn from the people
Plan with the people
Begin with what they have
Build on what they know
Of the best leaders
When the task is accomplished
The people will remark
We have done it ourselves.”

Ultimately, the most serious challenges really can “make or break” organizations if their leaders do not have a “green thumb” for “growing” others who support their efforts during an especially severe crisis. The material in this book can be of incalculable value to C-level executives, of course, but also to those who are now preparing for a career in business or have only recently embarked upon one.