The performance of certainty

There's a moment most CEOs will recognise, even if they've never said it out loud.

You're in front of the board, or the all-hands, or the leadership team, and you're being certain about something you're not actually certain about.

The plan needs a champion, so you champion it. The room needs conviction, so you supply it. And the doubt, the real, specific, three-in-the-morning version, goes back in the drawer where you keep it.

I've spent years working with CEOs and their teams, and I've come to think this is the most underrated part of the job. Not the hours. Not the pressure.

The performance of certainty.

The quiet, constant work of being sure in public when you're not sure in private.

The loneliness isn't the point

Everyone tells you the top is lonely. It's such a worn line that it's stopped meaning anything, and I think that's a problem, because the loneliness isn't really the point. The loneliness is just how it feels.

What actually costs you is something more practical, and harder to see.

It's that your decisions stop getting tested.

Think about how a good decision usually gets better. Someone who knows the terrain pushes back. They ask the question you'd been avoiding. They've made the same mistake and they tell you where the floor gives way. That friction is what turns a decent call into a sharp one.

It isn't comfort, it's correction.

Now take that away. Not all at once, but slowly, the way it actually happens. The bigger your role gets, the fewer people can push back on you honestly. Your team needs you to be right. Your board has its own agenda. Your competitors aren't going to help. So more and more of the consequential calls get made the same way: by you, in your own head, with no one to test them on.

It gets quietly worse

And here's the part that worries me most. It doesn't announce itself. Your decisions don't suddenly get worse. They get quietly worse. A little less tested, a little more certain than they should be, a little more shaped by the fact that you couldn't say the doubt out loud to anyone. And because you're the one making them, you're the last person who'd notice. Every call you make alone, you get a bit more practised at making alone.

The muscle you're building is the wrong one.

None of them is a peer

People offer solutions to this, and most of them miss. Get a board, they say, get advisers, a mentor. All useful.

A board governs you. Advisers advise you. But none of them is, is a peer. Someone with nothing to sell you, no stake in your answer, and the same weight on their own shoulders. Someone who sits where you sit, and can hear the doubt without flinching, because they've got their own version of it.

That's the rarest relationship a CEO has, and in my experience it's one of the most valuable. A problem that's felt stuck for months, that's been quietly eating at someone, gets named and moved in an afternoon. Not because anyone in the room was cleverer. Because someone carrying the same weight asked the question the people around them couldn't.

The CEO walks out and makes a call they'd been circling for half a year.

What changes

What changes in those rooms isn't really the calendar, or the access, or the contacts. It's the judgement. The decisions get sharper because they got tested. The perspective widens because someone outside the chair could see what you couldn't from inside it. And the blind spots, the ones that would have cost you later, get named while they're still cheap.

None of this is complicated. The hard part is that the isolation makes itself feel normal. You get used to deciding alone, and you stop noticing that you are.

So I'll leave you with this. The top doesn't have to be lonely, and your judgement doesn't have to pay for it. The CEOs who stay sharpest aren't the ones who carried it best alone. They're the ones who have somewhere to think with people who understand.

If any of this lands a little too close, it might be worth finding a room like that. We have one for a small group of CEOs, and you're welcome to look.

But what matters is, that you've got one at all.

Rex Wood