4 unconventional leadership strategies from top CEOs

“The CEO role isn’t necessarily what people think it is,” says Carolyn Dewar, a senior partner at McKinsey who co-leads the firm’s CEO and board excellence work and coaches Fortune 100 CEOs. “There’s a lot of mystique around it, and so when people get into the role, they realize there’s a whole other world—the board management, the external management, the integrating piece—that’s very different from just being a good leader of the business.”

Illuminating what the CEO role entails and how to get there were the catalysts for the research behind CEO Excellence, a book she co-authored with fellow McKinsey partners Scott Keller and Vikram Malhotra. “How do we demystify this role so that people aren’t surprised when they get there? Because, in some ways, it’s a superhuman job,” says Dewar.

The three consultants analyzed more than 20 years’ worth of data on 7,800 CEOs from 3,500 public companies across 70 countries and 24 industries to identify high-performing CEOs whose companies grew healthier during their tenures. They then conducted detailed interviews with a sample of 67 CEOs, synthesizing the skills and practices that have driven their success. Interviewees included JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon; Ken Chenault, formerly of American Express; Microsoft’s Satya Nadella; and GM’s Mary Barra.

Malhotra, McKinsey’s chairman of the Americas, says four seemingly counterintuitive findings emerged from the research.

“First, excellent CEOs don’t just define that next level of aspiration, but in many ways, they reframe what winning means.”

Ajay Banga, ex-Mastercard CEO and now president of the World Bank, took the payments company from a roughly $27 billion market cap to a $325 billion market cap in about 10 years, Malhotra says. “He comes in and finds that all the talk is about beating Visa, beating American Express. But when he really looked at the world, 92% of all payments at the time were in cash, and so he switched the narrative to kill cash.” Mastercard shifted its business strategy to focus on debit and credit cards, and it paid off massively, Malhotra says.

Henrik Poulsen employed a similar strategy as the CEO of Orsted, once a sleepy utility company, and transformed it into one of the world’s largest renewables companies. “He reframed what winning means,”.

The second counterintuitive finding, he says, is that high-performing CEOs focus on one thing and “drive the heck out of it.” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella focused squarely on scaling the cloud business for years, Dewar says. With that North Star, he restructured the company to invest in capabilities that would support it and remove barriers that would get in the way, such as long-existing cross-team siloes.

At Sony, ex-CEO Kazuo Hirai zeroed in on reigniting the “wow factor,” whether it was in entertainment, electronics, or professional services, Malhotra says. “That was his one thing, and he defined it, measured it, and really made it come alive.”