Advice for Nice CEOs
Have you noticed any of the following in the last few months:
A problem reaches you later than you’d like, and then it's a scrabble to fix.
Someone capable leaves without checking what might have been possible.
A conversation around pay, promotion, or performance feels charged
Or something else happens with your team that's confusing, unexpected or painful?
What if I told you that nothing is necessarily going wrong and that these come with the power dynamics of being a CEO?
I don’t know exactly what’s happening or why. But there’s a very good chance this is in the mix.
Whatever the cause, power dynamics will certainly impact how and how well these issues get sorted. If you don't understand the situation correctly and they are indeed in play, it's very easy to create more stress, mess and drama you don't have the time and energy for.
See if you recognise yourself and your situation in what follows.
Introduction
The new Chief of MI6 had the same Director of Studies as me.
While we both studied at Pembroke College, Cambridge under Dr. Barbara Bodenhorn, Blaise has gone on to join the ranks of what one of my clients calls "Mega People."
If you've spent time in the company of those who've achieved something mind boggling - or even the stuff of movies - you'll immediately know what that term means. Even if it's the first time you've heard it.
So trust me, I understand you probably don’t think of yourself as intimidatingly high-achieving.
Not because you’re failing. But because the people you compare yourself to are also Mega People.
One of the problems with this, as a CEO, is that it makes it harder to see how your own team relates to "little old you". You might not be a Mega Person to them. But you do hold status and power.
So it doesn’t matter how kind you are when someone drops the ball. How much you invite challenge. How open you are to feedback on your leadership.
You're still operating inside an unequal power dynamic. Your words carry far more weight than theirs when it comes to pay, promotion, and staying employed at all.
And because of that — whether you intend it or not — you hold power over their sense of security. Their ability to put food on the table. To pay the mortgage. To protect the people they love.
I’ve worked with experienced, capable senior leaders who have savings, options, and solid networks. Even when they like, trust and have worked with their CEO for years, the power dynamics still play out for many of them.
It’s fascinating how they will hold back slightly from saying what they really think; spend ages working out the perfect way of presenting an idea; avoid being crystal clear when something’s going wrong; and even find another job instead of talking through their hopes, dreams and needs.
I’ve had them look at their finances. Think through a Plan B. Work out what they’d actually do if things went wrong. And still, the fear of being let go, judged or rejected by their CEO sits there.
So imagine how more junior staff feel in the presence of the Big Boss?
If this makes you uncomfortable, you’re probably not someone who thinks of themselves as frightening. Most thoughtful CEOs don’t.
They care. They try to be fair. They want others to feel safe enough to speak honestly.
And yet fear is often present around them anyway. Not fear of you as a person. Fear of getting it wrong, disappointing you, losing standing, or even security.
That leads to unhelpful, often unconscious, behaviours like quick agreement and saying what they think you want to hear.
And THAT has consequences. Like them telling you something is going wrong late in a project, when it would have been much easier to address earlier.
Issues surface only once they’re already costly — in time, stress, money, or reputation.
And you end up firefighting problems that didn’t need to become crises. Which makes it SO much harder to keep your own work-life boundaries.
They mostly likely weren’t lying to you. But the pressure to get things right can cloud their own honesty with themselves about what’s actually going on.
So the real question becomes this:
What reduces fear — without pretending power isn’t there, and without offering reassurance that feels kind but doesn’t help anyone do their job better?
There’s two major parts to this: The Inner Work and The Outer Behaviour.
Below you’ll find Part 1: The Inner Work. Part 2 will come later in January.
You can’t skip the five stages of the inner work:
Understand
Accept
Let Go
Anchor
Strengthen
Your team can unconsciously tell when you try new behaviours that aren’t genuinely reflective of your internal state. And I can spot it a mile off.
Humans seem to be hard wired to notice incongruence and it makes them uneasy. Why? Because the other person becomes unpredictable.
So, if you’re the kind of down-to-earth CEO who gets a bit suspicious of fluffy personal growth stuff, I can promise you this isn’t that. And it is essential.
Let’s crack on.
1. Understand
You need to understand how power dynamics play out. Otherwise it’s easy to misread what you’re seeing, or think something has gone wrong, when it’s a normal consequence of workplace hierarchies.
The opening of this article touched on that. I want to push it further.
Some people won't like this next part. So let's get it over with.
And remember: just because you don't like something, doesn't make it any less true.
You are not their friend, no matter how friendly you are. You might know the names of each other’s partners and children. Go to weddings, birthdays and funerals. Celebrate big wins and get each other through grim periods.
You may grow through the relationship in ways that are deeper than some friendships, and you will almost certainly spend more time with each other than you do with many of the people you love.
You can and do genuinely love your team too. If anything happened to them, you'd be devastated. That's not inappropriate.
And yet.
One day you may have to:
start a disciplinary process for behaviour that is understandable but still not acceptable
deny them a promotion or pay rise they wanted, and may even deserve
choose someone else’s idea, or someone else’s application, over theirs
make their role, and even them, redundant
deal with them raising concerns, or even a complaint, about you
That isn’t a failure of kindness. It’s built into the role.
Your relationship is underpinned by a contract. That doesn’t make it hollow or transactional. Some of the most meaningful relationships people ever have are formed through work. But the contract changes how both of you experience what happens between you.
Your job, as CEO, is to deliver on the mission and objectives of the organisation. That’s what you are paid to do. It doesn’t give you license to treat people as expendable or a pawn in a big game. That's not a problem I have with any of my clients.
It does mean you have to make hard choices that may negatively impact one or more people.
Take this as an example: if someone senior stops being right for their role — after you’ve done your best to help them adapt — you are responsible for putting someone else in place. Especially when they can't see things clearly themselves and, at least on the surface, don't want to leave.
You can still say yes to the person without saying yes to them staying in a job they can no longer do. You can help them find something else. You can support them to leave well. You can do it with care, honesty and generosity.
You can say, in effect, “I care about you, and the answer is still no.”
If you don’t see this clearly, you start unconsciously expecting the relationship to behave like a friendship. And when it doesn’t, you either feel confused, or you start compensating — with extra reassurance, extra closeness, extra niceness — in ways that ends up causing problems for everyone.
Do not underestimate how damaging it can be to allow relationships and responsibilities to become blurred.
2. Accept
Once you really take in the reality of power, some CEOs notice a kind of loss they didn’t expect.
You’re still yourself, but since stepping into this level of leadership, you’re no longer part of a team in the same way. You’re the person whose decisions carry consequences. Even in warm, functional cultures like yours, that changes how you’re met.
Most of your team won't only see you as the role you’re in. But they can’t see you simply as a person either. And in some ways this invisibility leaves you lonely and… well it's tiring isn't it?
I'd be interested to know how you reacted when I said, somewhat provocatively, that you aren't their friend. Perhaps there’s resistance because a deeper part of you already knows this is true, and doesn’t want to feel what that brings up.
It's easy to lose touch with yourself too. Even if you're having an amazing impact in the world, on some level this leaves you existentially off kilter.
If no one sees you as you, are you even able to do that? You might have lost all sense of who you really are now. We can become so distant from ourselves that we have no idea how to find our way back home. Even when you believe in your work, life can start feeling oddly hollow or performative and you may start wondering if this is even worth it anymore.
Sometimes the impact on your body and sense of self isn't clear until you're in a space where you're not The Boss.
I see this in the Buddhist spaces I’m part of. People with demanding jobs turn up, take their shoes off, and sit down next to everyone else to meditate. Nobody asks what they do. For a while, they’re just another person in the room. With more or less interesting socks.
My CEO clients describe how rare it is to be somewhere they aren’t “on”. How different it feels to be part of a group rather than the one who affects it: like when they go to a yoga or fitness class anonymously, or hang out with old friends.
The relief they feel and I see is so clear. That's what we mean by a weight being lifted off your shoulders - you literally can relax and let go in ways you can't most of the time.
That’s the loss. Not of connection, because you do have good relationships with your team, but of a certain kind of ease.
In your nervous system, your work interactions and in the very fibres of your being.
If you don’t let yourself acknowledge this loss, it doesn’t disappear. It shows up sideways: in how long things take, in how draining certain situations become, how snappy you are at home.
The acceptance step isn’t about fixing anything.
It's simply about acknowledging what's been lost, before we move on to letting go.
So tell me, what have you’ve lost since becoming a CEO?
Write a list of 10-20 things.
“Since becoming CEO I've lost….”
3. Let Go
You have to let go of the version of yourself who belonged to a different working life.
That isn’t something you think through. It’s something you mark.
In my Buddhist training, spiritual death and spiritual rebirth are two essential stages in our growth. You can drop the word spiritual if it doesn’t work for you. Think about what you need to let go of, what must die or has already, in order for a wiser, braver, stronger version of yourself to come into being.
When something has ended, it needs acknowledging in a way that's meaningful and symbolic for the people participating.
Whether someone has actually died, a colleague is leaving, or you're going through a significant period of transition, two things help us move on healthily.
Reflection. Ritual.
Reflection: the three Rs
When someone dies, we recognise what has ended, we face what we regret, and we rejoice in what mattered. You’re doing the same here in letting go of the pre-CEO version of you and your life.
1. Recognition
What has changed and what have you lost?
Expanding on the Accept stage, write for 5-10 minutes with a few lines that begin with:
I miss…
I remember when…
It used to be easier to…
I didn’t realise I’d lost… until…
What’s different now is…
2. Regrets
This is where you name what didn’t get said, done, or handled.
Write from:
I wish I had…
I didn’t say…
I stayed quiet when…
I let go of… before I was ready
I kept trying to… even though it wasn’t working
3. Rejoicings
Acknowledge what that earlier version of you has given you:
I’m glad that…
That version of me was good at…
I wouldn’t be here without…
What I learned in that chapter was…
What I’m grateful for from that time is…
Ritual
Once you’ve written, do something with it.
Ritual is how you transition from one state of being to another, in a way that has meaning for you.
Weddings. Birthdays. Funerals. These are all shifts from one state to another.
Powerful rituals will include an element of letting go. Hen Dos and Stag Nights, for example, seem to get wildly out of hand at times, but in essence they are marking the death of singleton life.
Rituals involve symbols — an object, an action, words of significance. Even music. Special clothing.
So what could you do, that would symbolically mark letting go of your previous life and self?
You might...
Burn what you’ve written. Wrap it up beautifully and place it somewhere special.
Or use something else to stand in for what you're letting go of:
Bury some seeds or bulbs.
Burn some incense.
Let the sea wash away a handful of sand.
When in doubt, I usually burn something.
If nothing comes easily, try this question:
How would a six-year-old you do it?
Children don’t need much explanation. They choose something and make a small ritual or ceremony because it feels right.
Give yourself time with this. It might come quickly. It might need a few days. You could decide over a weekend and do it the next.
What matters is that it means something to you.
It's not woo. Just as we've been making art for as long as humans have been human, we've also been leading rituals for ourselves and each other.
(Re)discovering and reclaiming your natural capacity for ritual is like discovering a pair of wings at your back and realising you could fly all along.
It may be clunky at first. Feel weird. But it IS a normal part of being human.
4. Anchor
Next you must learn to fill yourself up from the inside, so you don’t get blown about by what we call the Eight Worldly Winds in Buddhism. They show up all the time in leadership:
Gain and loss. Praise and blame. Fame and infamy. Pleasure and pain.
When you hold power, you can’t afford to be emotionally fed by any of these.
If praise, success, or being liked are what sustain you, you end up leaning on the people who work for you to provide them. That makes things messy.
It's not that you're needy, overly emotional or anything else a bit extreme. My clients are exceptionally robust and resilient. These patterns often show up subtly, as we've already covered. You might not even realise how much you're affected by people's opinions of you until they're negative.
Filling yourself up from the inside gives you somewhere to draw from that isn’t your team, your reputation, or results.
Here are some of the practices that make that possible.
Regulate your nervous system
You need to be able to stay grounded and calm, even when times are very, very tough and you find someone else’s behaviour difficult.
My Less Stress, More Impact in 30 Days series can help. It gives you ways of working with stress and pressure so you’re not being driven by them. Click here.
Metta — loving-kindness towards yourself
In my Buddhist Order, the first stage of the metta bhavana — the loving-kindness meditation practice — is directed towards yourself. It’s a practice of wishing yourself well.
You must remain in solidarity with yourself at all times. You must be able to give yourself unconditional love. It doesn't matter how much you fuck up. You cannot subcontract this out to other people.
I recorded a version during COVID, before I was ordained and still called Charlotte.
The other brahma viharas
You need to be able to stay emotionally buoyant. This isn't about pretending everything is ok. It's about accessing energetic resources from a deep place and directing that energy appropriately, depending on the situation you're in.
Alongside metta, there are three other “brahma viharas” we talk about in Buddhism, that can help you through life's ups and downs: compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.
Day 5 of the Less Stress, More Impact series — Feel Alive Again — is a good way into joy.
Trust me, these are useful in the hardest of times. I drew on them constantly while my Dad was dying of cancer in 2025, when I led his funeral and in growing through grief afterwards.
Forgive yourself
Desmond and Mpho Tutu’s The Book of Forgiving is an excellent place to start. It’s written primarily about forgiving others - very useful in itself - and also helps you forgive yourself when others might not be able to.
Time on your own
Time on your own, just enjoying your own company without having to be helpful or “be someone”, makes a huge difference.
For a start, you'll be able to see your own mental states more clearly. It's so easy to distract yourself from yourself these days. Pausing and turning off your phone is incredibly revealing.
If you don't enjoy time on your own - off your phone and without making yourself busy - you can ask why that is and discover what needs addressing.
My Buddhist Order has a strong tradition of solitary retreat. The longest I've been on is two weeks. I have friends who've been away for months, even a year.
You don’t have to start there!
I love the look of Unplugged's cabins - they're set up so well for a weekend digital detox.
Even a bit of time on your own Sunday morning begins to shift things.
Or how about a warm drink, just doing nothing, first thing on a week day?
I often recommend this before clients take on meditation, so it doesn't become another item on their To Do list.
If it's uncomfortable or impossible, get in touch for some pointers.
5. Strengthen
Filling yourself up from the inside doesn’t mean you stop needing people.
It means you stop trying to get certain things from your team that your role makes impossible.
This part of the work is about being clear where your other needs get met and strengthening those relationships, so they also feed you.
Here’s three that matter most: Partners, Peers and Pokers.
Partners
For most of the people I work with, this means a partner in the usual sense: a long-term relationship, a marriage, someone you’re building a life with.
If that’s you, this relationship needs to be treated as central, not as the thing that gets whatever energy is left at the end of the day. I hear far too many versions of the same story: the “other-half” who feels less important than work, sometimes even less important than the dog — greeted with less warmth when you get home. It sounds small. It isn’t.
If you don’t have one of these, the question still stands: who would step in for you if your health went and you couldn’t run your own life for a while? A sibling. A friend. Someone who holds that place as next of kin in a very practical way.
Power and money give the illusion that you’re independent. You aren’t. None of us are.
Sort this relationship out immediately. Humans are social creatures and if you don’t have back-up, I guarantee it will be affecting you in some way at work.
Peers
These are people who get the level of responsibility you carry, but don’t have any stake in your decisions.
They don’t work for you. They aren’t affected by your calls. They’re just people who know what it’s like to hold that much.
You don’t need many of these. What they give you is ease. You can talk about what’s going on without anyone needing anything from it.
Pokers
These are the people you explicitly and actively ask to find your blind spots; inspire and encourage you to step back or dig deeper when needed; teach you to improve your skills; help you stay true to your values and call you out on your own BS at times.
Not just to grow in your role but to grow as a whole person. One day that might even involve asking if you’re still the right person for this role, or if the role is right for you now.
They do that with love, but they don't mess around packaging it up so carefully that you miss the real message, as some of your team might.
Pokers can do this because 1) they're free of the power dynamic you're in with your team and 2) as I said already, you've asked (and may even have paid them).
They might have more experience in your sector. They might be strong in a skill you’re working on. They might simply be good at seeing patterns you can’t.
This doesn’t have to be a vertical relationship. They don’t have to be “above” you. They just have to be someone whose perspective you respect.
A coach can work like this. I don’t pretend to have been a CEO in the way my clients have. What I do bring is training and experience in emotional intelligence, grounded in Buddhist practice and years of working with leaders. It’s the same reason you’d listen to a yoga teacher even if they don’t do your job.
It's worth noting that other dynamics can come into play in these relationships. Mentors and coaches can see you in a different role: as The Helped, in relationship to themselves as The Helper.
It might be obvious, like them rushing to give advice before asking what you think. It can also be very subtle, as it often is with your team. When this is the case, usually you’ll just have a sense of being talked at instead of engaging in genuine communication.
Go with your gut. At this level, if it doesn't click straight away I'd be looking elsewhere.
So: You need at least one place where you can be honest, challenged, loved and encouraged as a whole person.
Who can you do that with?
And if you don't have the right person in place, how will you know if you've found them?
I proactively help my potential clients work out how they'd know I'm NOT the right person for them. I give them a set of reflection questions to work through before we meet on a free consultation call.
If you'd like those questions, without any expectation or pressure to work with me, DM me. You're welcome to use them to sniff out other coaches.
What now?
So there you have it.
Understand
Accept
Let Go
Anchor
Strengthen
All very interesting. But what are you actually going to do with this?
If something doesn't immediately spring to mind, here are ten concrete things you could choose from. Each one is small enough to do this week and significant enough to make a difference.
Pick one. Get clear on when you're going to do it. Block out the time in your diary. Set a reminder. DO IT.
1. Notice one moment where power-dynamics may be coming in at work.
Write down one recent situation where someone came to you later than you’d hoped, or something felt oddly charged. How might they see you differently to how you see yourself?
2. Try the Accept exercise.
Write a list of 10–20 things that start with: “Since becoming CEO I’ve lost…”
3. Do one of the three Rs.
Pick Recognition, Regrets, or Rejoicings from the Let Go section and spend ten minutes writing without stopping.
4. Choose a simple letting go ritual.
Decide how you’ll mark what you’ve written — burn it, keep it, bury it, plant something — and do it before next week.
5. Try one nervous-system regulation practice.
Choose from days 1, 2, 6, 7 or 8 from Less Stress, More Impact in 30 Days. Or another technique you know works.
6. Buy The Book of Forgiving
by Desmond and Mpho Tutu.
7. Fill yourself up with joy
Day 5 - Feel Alive Again. Use it once this week.
8. Book or protect some time on your own.
A Sunday morning, an evening without your phone, or — if it’s been calling you — look at Unplugged’s cabins and pick a date.
9. Strengthen your Partner relationship.
Book a proper date night. Or apologise for being short lately. Ask a sibling or friend for a catch-up you keep putting off.
10. Line up support that isn’t your team.
Email a mentor or coach you already have. Ask a peer for a recommendation. DM me for the reflection questions and have a look at what you want from that kind of relationship now. Or ask about working together.
