Why ‘Good’ Leaders Plateau — And How to Become a Better CEO

Most CEOs don’t fail dramatically. Big blowups are rare, as are strings of obviously bad decisions. Most executives keep working on how to become a better CEO, in the ways they know how.

But executives often stop growing in new ways. The market changes, technology changes, or society changes, while once-successful CEO relies on their past success. Slowly and often without realizing, they plateau. The company stagnates.

In his book “How the Mighty Fall,” Jim Collins studied Circuit City. At its peak, the company had grown to 600 stores and $12 billion in annual sales under strong leadership.

But Collins found that Circuit City’s decline followed a recognizable pattern: leadership stopped pushing the core business with the same intensity that built it, grew distracted by new ventures, and fell into what Collins called “arrogant neglect.” Circuit City filed for bankruptcy in 2008.

This is one of the more uncomfortable truths at the top of any organization. The same success that validates a CEO’s instincts can stunt their growth. And because CEOs receive less honest feedback than anyone else in their company, the plateau can go undetected for years.

Understanding why leaders plateau and how to prevent it is what separates CEOs who fade from those who keep getting better.

The Myth of Continuous Improvement

Before a leader is a leader, feedback is constant. Managers push back, mentors challenge decisions, and performance is measured in KPIs and metrics. Growth feels nearly automatic for people driven to work up to a leadership level.

But at the CEO level, that environment changes. Authority increases, and the natural friction that once forced development disappears. No one is above a CEO, and when business is going well, there’s little incentive to question the approach that got you there.

“Early success is the best thing that can happen to you and the worst thing that can happen to you,” says Irina Baranov, a Vistage Master Chair. “Success doesn’t teach you lessons. Failure is what teaches you lessons.”

When the business is on an upward trajectory, Baranov says, most CEOs aren’t looking for help. It’s only when the line flattens or drops that they start to wonder what’s wrong. By then, the plateau has often been in place for months, if not years. Often, it may present as burnout, she says, a deep sign from within the body that something simply isn’t working.

Leo Bottary, founder of Peernovation and author of The Power of Peers: How the Company You Keep Drives, Leadership, Growth & Success, sees the same pattern. When a CEO has been successful for a long time, he says, they tend to look at any suggestion to change and ask: why do I need to change?

When problems emerge, he says that the first instinct isn’t always to look in the mirror, it’s to look out the window at market conditions, at the team, or at anything external.

That instinct is understandable, but it’s also how plateaus turn into eventually stepping down, being replaced, or destroying a company’s share of the market.

Why Feedback Disappears as Authority Increases

For a CEO to keep growing, they need honest, accurate feedback. At the top of an organization, that feedback is almost impossible to get.

Baranov breaks the problem into two parts. First, there’s the question of psychological safety. For feedback to be real, the person giving it must feel safe doing so. That’s rarely the case inside a company.

“I can fire them,” Baranov says of the CEO. “How safe is it for someone one layer under me — or 15 layers under me — to walk into my office and say, ‘You’re not a good leader’?”

The second issue is expertise. Even if a direct report is willing to speak up, Baranov says that the feedback they can offer is limited by what they know. Someone who manages a department can offer a perspective on how a decision lands in their team, but they’re not positioned to evaluate the CEO’s overall leadership strategy, organizational thinking, or executive judgment.

“Even if that person feels psychologically safe, is it really expert feedback?” Baranov says.

Teams naturally filter what they share upward, Bottary says. People don’t want to be seen as negative, as difficult, or as the dissenter. Telling the unfiltered truth to an executive feels dangerous.

The result: The CEO gets a curated view of reality, allowing their blind spots to expand while their confidence stays high.

The Trap of the Proven Playbook

A CEO who has brought success to a company becomes harder to question, even if that success happened long ago.

Pattern recognition, one of the sharpest tools a leader develops, can begin to work against them. Hard-won instincts that once fueled growth can become a set of assumptions that lead an organization in the wrong direction.

Baranov asks CEOs she starts to work with a pointed question: “Were you really good, or were you really lucky?” Anyone who insists luck had nothing to do with their success, she says, probably isn’t self-aware enough to keep growing.

The leaders who thrive are the ones who can acknowledge both: They were good at some things, less good at others, and that they had a healthy dose of luck along the way.

Honest self-assessment is rare without external pressure. And for most CEOs, that pressure simply isn’t built into their daily environment.

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What Drives Growth

While there’s value in reading, podcasts, and conferences, learning itself rarely helps leaders grow. Leaders develop through applied challenges in the moment and through testing their thinking against people who will push back.

Bottary draws a distinction between what he calls intentional and collateral learning. Intentional learning comes from direct instruction, such as a speaker, a book, or a workshop.

Collateral learning, on the other hand, comes from what you absorb through the process of engagement itself: how to be present, how to listen carefully, and how to ask precise questions rather than jump to conclusions. And staying open through this process is a must, Bottary says.

“The moment we shut down, it’s all over,” he says.

At one of his presentations, Bottary met a CEO who came with a visceral dislike of the topic being covered. He had a near-physical reaction every time the subject of “psychological safety” came up.

But by the end of the session, the same CEO told Bottary he finally understood the concept, dropping his disdain, because it had been framed in a way that connected with his experience. This kind of openness to hear something differently was the skill of growth at work, Bottary says, and it always impresses him to see.

For CEOs, the skill of growing should be practiced deliberately. Without an environment that invites challenge, most leaders default to what they already know.

Building a System for Growth

For CEOs who want to grow, awareness is a great start. But awareness alone isn’t enough.

A leader’s development can’t just be an intention, Baranov says, but must work as a system. And accountability is a core part of that system.

When Baranov works with CEOs, there’s a consistent process for tracking growth: making commitments, checking in, and following up on month after month. Without that structure, the intellectual acknowledgment of a need to change rarely translates into actual behavior change.

“Left to your own devices, it’s almost impossible to hold yourself accountable,” Baranov says. “But a company will only grow as much as its leader grows.”

Peer-level accountability feels different from other forms of development because it combines safety and expertise, Baranov says. In a group of fellow CEOs, the feedback is honest — no one’s livelihood depends on the relationship. The feedback is also credible because the people in the room have faced similar decisions, led similar organizations, and made similar mistakes.

“I can’t tell you how many times during a meeting I hear the words ‘I’ve been there,’” Baranov says. “That validation from another CEO is huge.”

Once that kind of experience is felt, a CEO can bring it back to their own organizations, Bottary says. The best CEOs don’t position themselves as the all-knowing authority in the room, he says, but instead model curiosity, invite dissent, and create the conditions where the people around them feel safe enough to share what they’re seeing.

The CEOs Who Keep Getting Better

Top-performing CEOs haven’t figured it all out. But they have figured out that the more often they force themselves to learn by putting themselves in new and uncomfortable situations, the more they grow.

Bottary describes these leaders as people who internalize discomfort and realize it’s not something to be managed, but as the conditions under which growth happens. Once a CEO has experienced that pattern enough times, being challenged stops feeling threatening and starts feeling productive.

How long does it take to shift from stuck to growing? Less time than most CEOs expect, says Baranov.

Given the right environment, she says, the change can begin in a single day.

“You watch them at eight o’clock in the morning when they come in, holding their breath and stressed,” she says. “Eight hours later, their shoulders have dropped. They’ve exhaled. They have this feeling of: They get me, they understand me, and I can see what the path forward looks like.”

Getting Better on Purpose

The assumption that growth happens automatically is one of the most common and costly mistakes a CEO can make.

The feedback loops that once drove development have largely disappeared, the strategies that produced early success have become defaults, and the environment most CEOs operate in is not designed to challenge them.

Improvement is never out of reach, even for CEOs suffering from burnout or a plateau. But improvement doesn’t happen by accident.

To improve, CEOs must work to think differently, stay open to discomfort longer, and build systems that keep them honest, long after the natural pressure to improve has faded away.

Vistage can help CEOs break through plateaus by providing exactly that structure: peer advisory groups made up of experienced executives, one-to-one coaching, and a consistent process for accountability and growth. For leaders who are ready to keep getting better, Vistage offers a room full of people who’ve been there and are ready to tell you the truth.

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