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When a leader reaches the top, the climb doesn’t stop, but it just changes shape. Getting to the corner office may not be the hardest part of leadership. Because today, it shows that what’s more challenging is learning how to stay relevant, resilient, and ready for what’s next.
That’s what I explored with Kurt Strovink, Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company and Global Head of McKinsey’s CEO Practice. Drawing on research from his book A CEO for All Seasons: Mastering the Cycles of Leadership, Kurt and his team studied 200 of the world’s top-performing CEOs to understand what makes them sustain excellence over time.
Our conversation revealed that great leadership is cyclical, not linear. Every leader goes through four seasons — stepping up, starting strong, staying ahead, and sending it forward. And in each phase, the question isn’t “How do I win?” but “How do I evolve?”
Here are the biggest takeaways for CHROs looking to help their leaders grow through every season of change.
Listen to the episode here on Apple Podcast & leave a review!
Step Up: Gut-Check Motivation Before Chasing the Title
Before top CEOs ever take the helm, they look inward. In the stepping up season, the best leaders ask hard questions: Why do I want this role? What kind of impact do I want to create?
Kurt shared that high-performing CEOs gut-check their motivation long before they’re handed the keys. They think like investors in their own journey, asking whether the role aligns with their purpose and whether they’re ready for the sacrifice, scrutiny, and pace that come with it. They also build their “left-hand skills,” developing the muscles they’re weakest in before the job exposes those gaps.
For CHROs, this means reshaping leadership development from a program to a preparation mindset. True readiness isn’t about confidence but clarity. Before promoting your next CEO or business leader, help them articulate their motivation, define their impact thesis, and strengthen the underdeveloped skills that will matter most when the stakes rise.
Start Strong: Make Transitions a Public Good, Not a Personal Project
When new CEOs take charge, the instinct is to make quick moves: to prove themselves and signal control. But the most successful leaders resist that urge. They treat their first years not as a personal branding exercise, but as a discovery process for the organization.
As Kurt explained, the best CEOs see the transition itself as a public good. They focus on helping the company discover what’s next, rather than projecting their personal preferences onto it. This is a deeply servant leadership mindset — one that turns the spotlight from “what I want” to “what the organization needs.”
For CHROs, onboarding and transitions should be redesigned around curiosity, not control. Equip new leaders with listening frameworks, teach them to balance questions and assertions, and encourage them to ask the one question Kurt says cuts through the “reality distortion field”:
“What are people not telling me that I need to hear?”
Stay Ahead: Fight Complacency Before It Creeps In
The middle of a leader’s tenure is the most dangerous time, when early wins breed comfort. Kurt and I talked about how staying ahead is about fighting complacency before it calcifies.
The best CEOs never coast. They constantly reinvent their companies and themselves, even when business is booming. Jamie Dimon once told his team, “Large organizations come to rest — you have to be the catalyst.” That idea of constant renewal showed up again and again in Kurt’s research.
For CHROs, this means embedding renewal into the organization’s operating system. Encourage your executives to ask “What’s the next S-curve?” and create deliberate forums where teams challenge the status quo. Renewal isn’t a reaction to crisis — it’s a discipline of reinvention that keeps leaders relevant long after the headlines fade.
Listen to the episode here on Apple Podcast & leave a review!
Send It Forward: Turn Your Company into a Leadership Factory
The last season — sending it forward — is about legacy, not longevity. Great CEOs know their final act of leadership is to make themselves replaceable.
As Kurt explained, the most effective leaders turn their organizations into leadership factories: companies that outlast any single personality. Jack Welch was controversial, but he created one of the most powerful academies of leadership in modern history. That’s what sustainable excellence looks like: developing leaders who will one day surpass you. After all, great leadership is about scalability, continuity, and impact that outlives the individual.
The ultimate test of a leader isn’t what happens while they’re in charge, but after they’re gone. This only calls for CHROs to make the shift from succession planning to succession engineering. Build pipelines that measure not just capability, but character. Teach leaders to give “the gift only they can give” — to prepare others to succeed without them. That’s how you build institutions that stay resilient through every transition.
Cognitive Diversity: The Constant That Strengthens Every Season
Across all four seasons, one insight from our conversation stood out: cognitive diversity is the invisible engine behind great leadership.
Kurt noted that the best CEOs surround themselves with people who challenge their thinking, not mirror it. They understand what Larry Fink once described as avoiding “replicants” — leaders who think, act, and decide just like you. Real innovation happens when teams bring different mental models to the table.
For CHROs, this is a call to build teams that debate, not echo. Rethink hiring and succession to reward varied cognitive profiles, not just impressive résumés. Make it safe for leaders to ask dissenting questions, and remind them that alignment doesn’t mean agreement — it means shared respect in pursuit of a common goal.
The Red Thread Across All Seasons
In the end, the red thread running through all great leadership is servant leadership. Whether stepping up, staying ahead, or sending it forward, the best CEOs don’t lead for personal glory. They lead for the betterment of their people and the institution they serve.
For CHROs, this is the moment to design leadership systems that reward humility as much as performance, renewal as much as results, and legacy as much as growth. Because relevance, resilience, and readiness aren’t destinations — they’re seasons. And the leaders who master those cycles are the ones who never stop growing.
If you want to dive deeper into how the best CEOs renew themselves and their organizations through every season of leadership, listen to my full conversation with McKinsey’s Kurt Strovink below. Stay relevant, resilient, and ready for what’s next.
