Introduction
What makes a great leader? Not in theory, but in practice — day-to-day, high-stakes, under-pressure leadership? Most people think the title of CEO is reserved for those born with rare traits: vision, charisma, pedigree. But that belief is not only outdated — it’s counterintuitive.
World-class leadership isn’t a personality type. It’s a set of behaviors. And those behaviors can be learned.
In fact, according to a study featured in the bestselling book, The CEO Next Door, only 7% of high-performing CEOs attended Ivy League schools. Many didn’t have elite backgrounds. What they shared was behavioral consistency. They had internalized and executed four specific leadership behaviors time and time again.
I know this firsthand. When I was trying to transition from Founder to CEO of a fast-growing business, I wasn’t sure if I had what it took. I remember voicing these concerns to my coach, and he said: “Of course you do. All the skills are learnable. You just need a bit more practice. You just need to put some more effort into it.”
Then, he went on to make a suggestion that I thought was absolutely ridiculous at the time. He said, “You should go for the CEO of the Year award here in the UK.”
I thought that was too lofty an ambition, an overkill for simply wanting to improve as a leader. But sure enough, that massive goal inspired me to take action that I never would have dreamed of taking.
What changed? It wasn’t my title, it wasn’t my network, and it wasn’t my IQ. It was simply my behavior.
Below, I break down the four essential leadership behaviors that helped me transform from an overwhelmed operator to being recognized as the United Kingdom’s CEO of the Year at the 2019 Business Excellence Forum. You’ll also learn how to develop these same behaviors yourself — no matter where you’re starting from.
What Are the 4 Leadership Behaviors of Great CEOs?
Leadership isn’t about being the loudest voice in the room. It’s about modeling the behaviors that drive trust, execution, and growth.
Leadership Behavior #1: Decisiveness — Why Speed Beats Perfection
Great leaders make decisions quickly. Now, there is a difference between making decisions with urgency and making decisions recklessly. But the best CEOs understand a core truth: speed of execution creates competitive advantage.
I learned this early. At first, I agonized over choices. Then, I embraced Parkinson’s Law, which states that work expands to fill the amount of time that’s available for its completion. That means, if you decide to give yourself all day to complete a task that should take you an hour to finish, that’s how long it’s going to take. Conversely, if you give yourself 45 minutes to finish that same task, then you’re going to get it done in 45 minutes.
Once I understood this principle, I began giving myself tighter decision deadlines. I made faster calls and accelerated progress. When I was trying to build Chilango, the Mexican restaurant chain, for instance, I often had to make early morning sprints to the meat market to make sure we were stocking up on enough chicken, steak, pork, beef, and so on for our menu each and every day. This was something that had to be done early on, both because there was nobody else to do it and because I was trying to learn every aspect of the role.
However, that kind of firsthand exposure also helped me realize that I needed to become a more effective leader.
Decisiveness doesn’t mean being impulsive. It means:
- Involving others for input (even if you aren’t necessarily giving them voting power)
- Reducing decision load and fatigue by delegating the “how” (as in, here’s what needs to be done and why it matters but feel free to determine the best way to get there)
- Reviewing key decisions monthly to learn and improve
Research backs this up. According to Harvard Business Review, high-performing CEOs aren’t particularly renowned for making great decisions all the time as much as they are known to be decisive. They make decisions sooner, faster and with greater conviction. And they do it even in the face of incomplete information and while operating in unfamiliar territory. Moreover, decisive CEOs were 12 times more likely to be high-performing than those that tend to be indecisive.
Jeff Bezos uses a similar model, separating Type 1 decisions from Type 2 decisions. A Type 1 decision represents a door that, once you walk through it, you can’t return. These decisions and irreversible and are, by definition, high stakes, requiring deeper thought and more prudent judgement.
A Type 2 decision, on the other hand, represents a door that, once you walk through it, you can walk back should you choose to. These decisions are reversible, meaning you can scrap them if you find out that they aren’t working as you had envisioned they would.
Bezos argues that most decisions belong to the second type, meaning they can be reversed or undone. So ask yourself: What decision are you currently avoiding? What would happen if you made it by the end of the day? Would the consequences be irreversible?
A Tool to Make Better, Faster Decisions
Being decisive doesn’t mean shooting from the hip. World-class CEOs create frameworks for making decisions quickly and intelligently — and one of the simplest, most powerful tools that you could use in this regard is the 6 Thinking Hats method, adapted from Edward de Bono.
This tool helps leaders explore decisions from multiple angles — fact, risk, emotion, benefits, ideas, and process — without analysis paralysis. It reduces ambiguity and drives speed with clarity.
Here’s how it works:
Leadership Behavior #2: Engaging for Impact — Turn Vision into Action
When you are decisive, you get things moving. But to drive results, you need alignment. That’s where the second leadership behavior comes in: engaging for impact.
Engaging for impact is about ensuring your team not only hears the mission but feels it. It’s leading with intent.
I learned to do this out of necessity: when my team began growing, silos inevitably began to form. Goals became transactional. It wasn’t until I began tying every conversation — from 1:1s to All-Hands — back to purpose that the organization began rowing in the same direction, to fulfill our biggest and most important strategic objectives.
Leading with intent means:
- Consistently articulating the company’s vision and purpose
- Connecting every meeting, metric, and milestone back to that vision
- Gathering diverse perspectives — from the boardroom to frontline staff
Great CEOs don’t just share strategy once a quarter. They bake it into their operating rhythms.
Harvard reports that 95% of a company’s employees are either completely oblivious to its strategy or don’t understand it wholly.
Moreover, Gallup states that 95% of employees fully trust their leaders when they implement three specific actions — chief amongst them being clear communication. Great leaders paint a clear vision for their people. They clarify the ‘why’ and help them see — and understand — where the organization is headed. The report finds that when leaders clearly articulate their vision, they provide their employees with a clear understanding of where they should direct their energy.
If you want to inspire action, you have to repeat yourself. Clearly and with purpose.
Leadership Behavior #3: Relentless Reliability — The Power of Consistency
You don’t build integrity through grand gestures. You build it by doing what you said you would do.
Relentless reliability means following through every time. Not 80% of the time. Not when it’s easy. But every single time. Even when it feels uncomfortable or isn’t easy to do.
I used to let small commitments slide. A call delayed. A note unreturned. Over time, those micro-breaks in follow-through corrode culture. If the leader doesn’t follow up, why should anyone else in the team be bothered?
Here’s how I changed that:
- I created checklists for repeatable tasks (to reduce mental drag)
- I ended every day by reviewing action items from meetings
- I kept a live, prioritized to-do list visible and updated
This wasn’t just a productivity hack. It was cultural leadership. Once I demonstrated relentless reliability, I earned the moral authority to expect the same from my team. And that consistency created a company culture where high standards were non-negotiable.
Studies show that predictability in leadership behavior is especially valuable in volatile or uncertain environments, because it reduces anxiety and builds trust.
Reliable leaders build reliable organizations. And those are the ones that scale.
Leadership Behavior #4: Bold Adaptability — Think Long-Term
The final behavior? Adapt boldly.
In a world where market conditions shift overnight, clinging to yesterday’s playbook is dying a slow death. Top leaders evolve in real time.
Keep your antenna tuned to the future. That might mean:
- Killing a product that used to work
- Letting go of outdated habits or tech
- Reimagining your org structure to prepare it for what’s next
During my CEO journey, I began running a powerful exercise with my team: a pre-mortem. When you’re about to undertake a major project or initiative, imagine it’s 18 months from now and that the project has failed. Why could that be? What might have caused the failure? This thought experiment forces your team to confront blind spots early and build the required contingency plans.
This is what adaptability looks like: not reacting faster than others but scanning ahead so you can stay ahead of the curve. And, as the research that backs this up states, the onus is on leaders to instill this culture of adaptability.
According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, transformation efforts fail when leaders neglect the cultural side of adaptability. The authors point out that culture itself is dynamic — it will shift whether leaders guide it or not — and that the most effective executives are those who shape culture deliberately rather than trying to retrofit it once change is already underway.
In other words, adaptability is a cultural discipline that must be led from the top.
Why These Leadership Behaviors Matter More Than Ever
We are living in some turbulence times — underpinned by the aftershocks of the pandemic that were felt across the globe, supply chain fragility, and shifting talent expectations. And during such times, leadership behaviors are what separate companies that become obsolete or barely survive from those that thrive.
McKinsey’s 2023 State of Organizations report surveyed over 2,500 business leaders across industries and geographies to surface the biggest shifts impacting how organizations operate. One key finding stands out for leaders: 50% of organizations say they are not well-prepared to anticipate or respond to external shocks.
That’s not just a problem of strategy or capital — it’s a problem of leadership, and one that can only be solved by paying attention to and addressing leadership behaviors.
If half the organizations are entering storms without a map, then the ones that can act decisively and reliably, can be adaptable and work in alignment will win ground that others lose.
Here’s how the four leadership behaviors map directly to what McKinsey calls the ten organizational shifts:
- Decisiveness aligns with “increasing speed, strengthening resilience”. To bounce forward, not just bounce back, you need to take quick, confident action.
- Engaging for Impact helps resolve the “capability chasm” and builds clarity across hybrid work models. When people feel connected to your vision and strategy, the noise of remote/hybrid doesn’t dilute direction.
- Relentless Reliability becomes foundational when organizations demand efficiency at scale, clarity of roles, and consistent execution across dispersed teams. McKinsey names efficiency reloaded as a major shift — reducing duplication, improving clarity, and eliminating decision bottlenecks.
- Bold Adaptability is how you stay ahead of shifts like AI adoption, changing talent dynamics, or new business models. McKinsey sees “making way for applied AI” and “new rules of attraction and retention” as non‑negotiable trends.
Beyond mapping, there’s a deeper insight: many organizations invest in strategy but neglect the leadership behaviors that make the strategy stick. McKinsey’s success stories (“beacon organizations”) repeatedly emphasize leadership that is proactive, resilient, and adaptive.
Let me give you two concrete examples to make this real:
- A mid‑sized manufacturing firm restructured its decision cadence: every weekly decision that required cross-functional input was now capped at a 48‑hour deadline. The outcome? Execution speed increased; teams stopped waiting. That’s Leadership Behavior #1 (Decisiveness) in action.
- In a SaaS company making a hybrid expansion, the CEO began weekly town halls that ended with “what does this mean for your work next week?” — forcing every team to internalize the vision. That’s Engaging for Impact, closing the gap between leadership and execution.
These aren’t theoretical exercises. They’re the behaviors that turn strategy into execution. They reduce friction. They build trust. And in volatile times, trust and speed become strategic assets.
How To Develop These Leadership Behaviors in Yourself
You don’t need a 12-month sabbatical or a new job title to start leading differently. Here’s how to build each of these four behaviors into your daily rhythm:
- Decisiveness: Set 24-hour deadlines for all non-critical decisions. Delegate the “how” more often.
- Engaging for Impact: Tie every meeting or message back to a shared goal. Over-communicate.
- Relentless Reliability: Use checklists. End each day with a 5-minute integrity review.
- Bold Adaptability: Block time monthly to scan for market shifts. Run a team pre-mortem each quarter.
Above all, measure your consistency. Track these behaviors like KPIs. Because what gets measured gets improves.
Final Thoughts
Leadership behaviors are the engine of scalable growth. They don’t require a fancy degree or a viral TED talk. They require practice.
My own story, from making 4:30am meat market sprints to becoming the UK’s CEO of the Year, is proof of how effective making these shifts can be. What changed wasn’t my DNA; it was my discipline.
So, if you’re wondering whether you have what it takes to lead at the next level — stop wondering. And start practicing.
The path to becoming a world-class CEO doesn’t start with talent. It starts with behavior.
And it starts today.
If you’d like to develop these leadership behaviors inside a community of ambitious, driven CEOs that hold each other accountable, check out The Founder & CEO Accelerator and become the kind of leader that your business needs and deserves.
Explore More:
Elon Musk’s Secret to Time Management: Use This CEO-Level Timeboxing Strategy
How to Break Bad Habits That Destroy Confidence (and Replace Them with Winning Routines)
10 High Performance Habits to Achieve Extraordinary Success
How to Get the Best Out of Your Team: 5 CEO-Level Tactics That Actually Work
