After over two decades working in business, one thing has jumped out to me more than any other when dealing with CEOs, MDs and chairmen. It’s an uncomfortable truth about meritocracy, inherited advantage and the remarkable number of business leaders who just happened to be in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.
There’s a popular story about how people become successful, not just in business, but in all walks of life. They work hard. They take risks. They make sacrifices. They develop extraordinary leadership skills that they discuss endlessly in their LinkedIn echo chamber, using endless eye-roll-worthy clichés. They get up at 4:30 am, take cold showers and read twelve books a week.
Eventually, through sheer determination and an almost supernatural ability to understand EBITDA, they become Chief Executive. It’s an inspiring story. In nearly every instance, it’s also missing a significant number of key chapters.
If you spend enough time around business owners, managing directors and senior executives, you’ll begin to notice something interesting: An awful lot of them had a head start.
Some inherited businesses, or joined ones founded by their parents. Some had family connections that opened doors. Others were simply fortunate enough to find themselves in the right place at precisely the right moment. And some, despite occupying the most senior positions in their organisations, are frankly not very good at their jobs. Fortunately for them, other people are.
The self-made millionaire whose dad owned the factory
The phrase “self-made” is one of those endlessly repeated buzzwords that tends to become increasingly flexible as people’s bank balances increase.
Someone who starts a business using their own savings might reasonably consider themselves self-made. We could even stretch that to cover someone starting a business with a moderate loan from their parents. After all, it’s not just investment that makes a business successful.
When someone inherits a profitable company, changes the logo and subsequently describes themselves as a visionary entrepreneur, it’s probably fair to say that they are stretching the definition more than a little.
I’m not saying that inherited businesses are inherently badly run, far from it. Plenty of people take over family companies and do exceptional things with them. But there’s a considerable difference between building a business from nothing and being handed one that already has customers, employees, premises, suppliers and a finance department. It’s the difference between training a racehorse from foal to Grand National glory and buying a thoroughbred to hand to your experienced team of trainers.
The remarkable talent of employing talented people
This is something that doesn’t get discussed nearly enough. I have seen this in so many businesses that it’s almost comedic how few C-suite executives would recognise the truth of it: Some successful businesses are successful almost entirely because of the people working underneath their leadership.
The operations director who quietly prevents everything from falling apart. The finance manager who understands the numbers considerably better than the managing director. The sales team who think on their feet every hour of the day to maintain customer relationships, despite increasingly questionable decisions from upstairs.
In nearly every business I’ve ever worked with, there are experienced employees who know exactly which instructions to follow, which to reinterpret and which to quietly ignore until the person issuing them forgets. That’s right, there are lots of employees in many businesses who know that their MD’s newest idea is shit, and will actively protect the company by trying to brush it under the rug until it’s forgotten.
These people are often the actual reason a company functions. People who solve problems before senior management discovers they exist. People who compensate for bad decisions and protect customers from unnecessary disruption.
From time to time, they even spend substantial amounts of time finding diplomatic ways to explain why the CEO’s latest idea is completely unworkable, all while the CEO is working on an ego-massaging presentation about the importance of strong leadership.
Success has an excellent PR department
The difficulty is that business success is usually attributed upwards. Most often by the people attributing responsibility for that success.
When revenue increases, they present it as evidence of visionary leadership. When customer satisfaction improves, it’s the result of their strategic commitment to excellence. When the company wins an award, how often do you see someone other than the managing director, or some other executive collecting it?
But what about when something goes wrong?
But when sales decline? The sales team aren’t hungry enough. When a project runs over budget? The project manager clearly lacked oversight. How about when the CEO’s latest brilliant idea turns out to be an expensive disaster? Well, there were obviously some serious failures in execution.
It’s a remarkable system.
The people making the decisions receive credit for the outcomes they like, while the people implementing those decisions become responsible for the outcomes they don’t. In part, this is a direct result of executives who only ever deal with their immediate juniors. It’s super easy for a head of department to point downwards when they’re under pressure, and to embrace adulation when things are going well.
Of course, this isn’t universal. Good leaders recognise the contribution of their teams and accept responsibility when things go wrong. The best ones will even highlight their team members for praise and recognition and even shield them from criticism in the face of failure.
But anyone who’s worked in enough organisations will have encountered the alternative. The executive who proudly announces a successful project they clearly haven’t understood at any stage, and who was trying to change the direction of things right until the deadline. The director who describes an employee’s idea as something “we’ve been working on” or, even worse, presents it as entirely their own idea. The business owner who believes their company is thriving because of their exceptional judgement, apparently unaware that three exhausted department heads spend most of their working lives preventing that judgement from reaching customers.
The expensive problem nobody can fire
In most organisations, incompetence eventually has consequences. If you’re consistently bad at your job, somebody will notice. You might receive additional training; your responsibilities could change, and your performance will be reviewed. Sooner or later, you’re likely to find yourself looking for another job.
But what happens when the incompetent person owns the company? Or when their father owns it? Or when they were appointed by a board whose members have spent the last fifteen years congratulating each other on their excellent decisions?
Suddenly, performance management becomes a bit fuzzier. The mechanisms for addressing incompetence in disposable staff (don’t kid yourself, it’s an accurate description) don’t work particularly well when the person causing the problems also has the authority to decide whether there’s a problem and who is responsible for it.
In a lot of instances, an organisation will adapt: capable employees develop workarounds; middle managers become experts in managing upwards; bad ideas are quietly modified into workable ones; decisions are delayed until someone can find a way to make them less damaging. And the person at the top remains blissfully unaware of how much effort goes into making them look competent.
In some businesses, the most important leadership skill isn’t leading people. It’s being led without noticing.
Sometimes the genius was just timing
While there is a lot of nepotism in business, not every questionable executive inherited their position. Some simply arrived at an extraordinarily fortunate moment. They joined a growing industry; took over a business just before a market boom; acquired a company whose previous management had already done the difficult work; or they happened to be in charge when a talented team delivered something exceptional.
None of these things automatically makes someone undeserving, but success and competence aren’t interchangeable.
It’s entirely possible for a rising market to disguise weak leadership for years. A strong management team can compensate for a mediocre CEO. An established brand can continue generating revenue long after the people running it have stopped making particularly good decisions.
And when everything is going well, there’s often very little incentive to question why. After all, the numbers look excellent, right? Why would anyone challenge the leadership?
The dangerous assumption that success proves competence
This is where the mythology becomes genuinely damaging.
It’s a natural assumption that people in senior positions must possess exceptional abilities.
If someone’s a CEO, they must understand business, right? Someone who’s run a successful company for twenty years must know something the rest of us don’t, surely?
Perhaps they do. Or perhaps they’ve spent twenty years surrounded by people who are considerably better at their jobs than they are.
The problem isn’t simply that incompetent people sometimes reach positions of authority; it’s that the authority itself can make their incompetence difficult to recognise.
Employees whose livelihoods rely on a regular salary become reluctant to challenge them. Their opinions receive disproportionate attention, while their mistakes are explained away as someone else’s failure and their successes, regardless of who actually produced them, reinforce the assumption that they deserve to be there.
Eventually, the job title becomes its own evidence.
The people who actually make it work
None of this is intended to suggest that leadership is easy or that senior executives contribute nothing. Running a business involves difficult decisions, considerable responsibility and genuine expertise.
Excellent leaders can make an enormous difference. But so can excellent employees.
And there’s something particularly frustrating about watching someone with limited ability enjoy the financial rewards, status and recognition generated by people whose contribution is far greater than their own.
Most businesses have people on the bottom rung who understand the customers better than anyone at the top. There’s almost certainly someone in every business who understands the systems better than anyone else. And I can guarantee you that person is not an executive. There will be someone in your business who is brilliant at keeping the staff motivated, and someone who spots the mistakes before they become expensive.
These people don’t necessarily want to be chief executives. Some would make excellent ones. Others are perfectly happy doing work they’re exceptionally good at. But their competence shouldn’t become invisible simply because somebody with a more impressive job title happens to benefit from it.
Perhaps a little humility wouldn’t hurt
Hard work matters, talent matters, good judgement matters. But so do family connections, inherited wealth, timing, opportunity and the people around you.
Genuinely good leaders recognise that acknowledging those things doesn’t diminish genuine achievement. They use them as part of their story and reward the talented people in their businesses that didn’t have the same head start as they did.
The best business leaders understand that their organisations succeed because of the collective efforts of people with different skills, experiences and responsibilities. They know that they don’t and can’t know everything, and actively listen to people who know more. They also don’t confuse having the final say with having the best ideas.
The worst ones?
They mistake the competence of everyone around them for proof of their own brilliance. And sometimes, through inheritance, connections or sheer good fortune, they get to spend an entire career doing exactly that. Some of them even manage to become the President of the United States of America.
So the next time a successful business leader explains how they built their empire through determination, courage and an unwavering belief in themselves, it’s worth considering what else might have contributed.
Perhaps they really are exceptional. Perhaps they were fortunate. Perhaps they inherited something valuable. Or perhaps, somewhere in their organisation, there’s an exhausted operations director who deserves a significantly larger bonus.