Constantine Alexandrakis is CEO of Russell Reynolds Associates, a global leadership advisory firm that advises boards and CEOs on leadership decisions. It will surprise nobody that his new book rests on the conviction that the right leadership team is the single most important driver of organisational success. The conclusion is convenient for his industry. It is also correct, and the evidence for it is stronger than leadership books usually manage.
Our view: the hero CEO fails at transformation because one person cannot get enough of a company to own the change. That makes the fix a structural job. A leadership team that can decide and lead without waiting for the boss has to be built from goals, evaluation and identity. Most C-suites today are not built that way, and a CEO who answers the book by becoming more curious and more trusting will be the same bottleneck with a warmer manner.
The occasion is The Catalyst CEO: Why CEOs Can't Lead Transformation Alone, And What The Best Do Instead, which Eric Jacobson reviewed on his management blog in September. As Jacobson summarises it, the book asks CEOs to shift "from strategist to enabler, from command-and-control to trust-and-empower," and to build top teams that co-own transformation. Alexandrakis puts the goal plainly: transformation happens where "teams around the CEO can think, decide, and lead without waiting for the CEO."
The hero model runs out of reach before it runs out of talent
The usual case against the heroic CEO is about ego: the leader who hoards credit and silences dissent. That case is true often enough, but it misses the harder problem. Even a brilliant, humble CEO who personally drives change is limited by how many people can own it.
McKinsey has put a number on that limit. Earlier McKinsey research, cited in the firm's analysis of employee ownership in transformations, found that 7 percent of employees need to be involved in initiatives or milestones for a transformation to produce positive total shareholder returns. In most organisations, only 2 percent are. Companies that involve 21 to 30 percent of employees in core transformation roles see the highest returns.
That data measures employee involvement, not CEO style, and it should be read with that limit in mind. The link to the book's argument runs through the org chart. If every material decision routes back to the corner office, ownership cannot spread much past the people in the CEO's weekly meetings. A company stuck at 2 percent has usually built a transformation that only one office can authorise. Getting to 7, let alone 25, requires executives who make calls in their own right, and managers below them who do the same.
Command is fast at deciding and slow at everything after
This objection deserves respect, because it describes a failure everyone has seen: the leadership team that argues beautifully and ships nothing. At the moment of the big decision, such as whether to exit a business or restructure a division, a CEO who decides beats a team that deliberates.
The objection measures the wrong speed. A transformation is one large decision followed by thousands of smaller ones, in pricing, staffing, systems and customer terms, made by people the CEO will never meet. Command makes the first decision quickly and turns every later one into a queue. The book, at least as Jacobson describes it, leaves the CEO's authority intact; it says the shift is not "about diminishing the CEO's power." Alexandrakis also asks for teams that argue directly "while still finding a way to decide and move forward together." Debate is the price of a decision the team will defend in his absence.
The crisis case is real but narrow. When survival is at stake, the CEO calls it. Then someone has to carry the call into every function, and a team trained to wait for instructions will wait for those too.
Command makes the first decision quickly and turns every later one into a queue.
A catalyst CEO starts with the scorecard
The topics Jacobson highlights lean on dispositions: modelling courage, leading through dialogue, choosing curiosity over certainty. Those matter, but the evidence suggests most top teams break down somewhere else.
Gartner research reported in Harvard Business Review, based on surveys of US CXOs and global CEOs and senior executives in 2023 and 2024, found that just 31 percent of C-suite executives considered their C-suite peers their primary team. The reasons Gartner gives have nothing to do with the CEO's tone. Executives don't identify primarily as members of the C-suite team, their goals are often misaligned, and they aren't always evaluated on collective results.
No amount of empowering behaviour fixes that. A chief financial officer paid on cost targets and a head of sales paid on bookings will argue, each in defence of a function, with nobody holding the shared outcome. Asked to "decide together" without the CEO, they will negotiate a ceasefire or escalate, and either way the CEO is back in the chair. Building a team that can act without waiting means changing what executives are accountable for:
- Some of each executive's goals and evaluation should rest on transformation outcomes the team owns jointly, alongside functional targets.
- Decision rights should be written down, so the team knows which calls it can make without the CEO and which it cannot.
- Executives should be judged on whether ownership spreads through their organisations as well as on whether their own milestones land.
- Hiring for the top team should weigh whether candidates can operate as peers, since a group of strong functional chiefs is not automatically a team.
Candour is the other half, and here the book's instinct holds. Amy Edmondson and Michaela Kerrissey, writing in HBR, define psychological safety as "a shared belief among team members that it's OK to speak up with candor," and list among the common misconceptions that it means being nice and that it requires a top-down approach. That second point is awkward for any CEO hoping to model a team into candour. A leader can make dissent survivable, but the team has to practise it, and executives who are rewarded only for their own function have little reason to pick a fight on behalf of the whole.
There is a gap the book, as reviewed, does not close, and neither did the research we consulted: no dependable way to tell a top team that genuinely debates from one that nods in the room and resists in the corridor. CEOs should assume they cannot see the difference from the head of the table. The more reliable signal is downstream. If decisions still stall until the CEO weighs in, the team is complying, whatever the meetings feel like.
Alexandrakis is right that the heroic CEO has run out of road, and right that the CEO's job is to build a team that leads change itself. The risk is that readers take the lesson as a change of personal style. A CEO who resolves to be more curious will improve the Monday meeting. One who changes what the CFO and the head of sales are measured on will change who decides. Only the second is a catalyst; the first is still a hero, just a better listener.
