The average graduate gets better feedback than the average CEO

The average graduate gets better feedback than the average CEO.

Over the past decade I have put that contention to hundreds of executives and non-executive directors. The reaction is almost always the same. A pause. A small calculation. Then the nod and acknowledgement of truth.

It is a striking thing to concede, because the consequence gap is absurd. A graduate who handles a stakeholder update poorly creates an awkward meeting. A CEO who makes the wrong call can destroy value, damage culture, unsettle investors, lose the executive team, or put hundreds of people out of work.

And yet the graduate usually has a clearer feedback system.

They have a manager. They have expectations set in advance. They have a review cycle. They have someone whose job is to tell them, however imperfectly, where they are falling short while there is still time to improve.

The CEO often has none of that in any meaningful sense.

That does not mean CEOs are ignored. Boards assess them constantly. Directors form views. Chairs pick up signals. Executive teams know exactly where the CEO is strong and where they are not. Investors have their own opinions. Regulators, customers and employees all see pieces of the role.

The problem is not that there is no information.

The problem is that much of it never becomes useful feedback.

It remains a private view. A concern after the meeting. A comment between directors. A frustration held by the executive team. A theme that everyone can feel but no one has quite named directly to the person who can do something about it.

By the time that information becomes explicit, it is often no longer developmental. It is terminal.

That is the real failure. Boards are often better at deciding whether a CEO should continue than helping a CEO understand how they are actually going before the answer becomes existential.

There is an obvious exception, and it matters. CEOs do receive remuneration-based feedback. Their short-term incentives, long-term incentives, scorecards and performance hurdles tell them something about how the board thinks they are doing.

But remuneration is not feedback in the sense every other person in the organisation would recognise it.

There is a reason companies separate development conversations from pay conversations everywhere else. Remuneration tells you what was rewarded. Feedback tells you what to understand, adjust and improve. They are related, but they are not the same.

For many CEOs, the remuneration process is the closest thing they get to a formal performance conversation. That is a category error. Pay can reflect judgement. It rarely creates insight.

The harder question is why boards tolerate this.

The answer is not simply cowardice. That is the lazy version, usually offered by people who have not had to manage a chair-CEO relationship when something important is at stake.

CEO feedback is hard because the CEO role does not fit inside ordinary performance management.

The CEO has no manager in the traditional sense. The chair is not a line manager. The board is not an executive committee. The chair must be close enough to help the CEO succeed, but independent enough to judge them. That is not a neat role. It is a tension with a title.

The CEO’s remit is also much broader than any other executive role. A CEO is managing the board, the executive team, investors, regulators, government, customers, employees, media, risk, capital, culture and strategy, often all at once and under pressure.

This is why CEO succession is so difficult. You can test the component parts before someone becomes CEO. You can test judgement, intellect, communication, stamina, commercial instinct and stakeholder management. What you cannot fully test is whether all of those things will work simultaneously, in the seat, with the whole organisation looking upward.

That is not an argument against CEO feedback. It is the argument for it.

A CEO needs a way to calibrate their own understanding of their performance against how their leadership is actually being experienced. Not once things are broken. Not when the board has lost confidence. Not when the chair has started sounding unusually careful over coffee.

Early. Repeatedly. As part of how the board and CEO do business.

That is where boards often go wrong. They treat CEO feedback as something to introduce once there is a concern. At that point, the process is already contaminated. If a board waits four years before suggesting a structured CEO review, the CEO will not hear, “we want to support your development”. They will hear, “something is wrong”.

And they may be right.

Feedback should be treated like succession planning. There is only one safe day to start talking about CEO succession: the first day the chair and CEO are in the role. On that day, it is good governance. Three years later, the same conversation sounds like a vote of no confidence.

CEO feedback works the same way.

If it is established at the beginning, it is calibration. If it arrives late, it is suspicion wearing a process.

The point is not to turn the board into a management team, or the chair into a human resources business partner with better shoes. The point is to create a feedback architecture that suits the CEO role.

First, boards need to define what good looks like for this CEO, in this company, at this moment. Not generic CEO excellence. Not a laminated leadership model. The actual work.

What does the board need from this CEO this year? Is the task growth, turnaround, simplification, renewal, capital discipline, cultural repair, executive team lift, stakeholder confidence, strategic clarity, or something else? What are the few leadership behaviours that will matter most? What would the board expect to see if the CEO were doing the job well? What would concern it if those things were absent?

Without that standard, feedback becomes atmosphere. One director sees impatience. Another sees urgency. One director sees insufficient consultation. Another sees overdue decisiveness. Everyone may be honest. Nobody is anchored.

Second, feedback must come from more than one line of sight. The chair’s view matters enormously, but the chair does not see the whole role. The board sees the CEO in one context. The executive team sees another. Key stakeholders may see another again.

A proper CEO review needs to gather signal from the people who actually experience the CEO’s leadership: the chair, directors, executive team and, where appropriate, selected external stakeholders. Not as a popularity contest. Not as an anonymous complaint box with corporate stationery. As a disciplined way of understanding how the CEO’s leadership is landing across the full remit of the role.

Third, the process must create rhythm. Annual is usually the minimum. More informal calibration should happen in between. The board should not wait until the remuneration discussion, the reappointment decision, or the crisis meeting to discover it has a view.

The goal is to make feedback survivable. If feedback is normal, it can be heard as information. If feedback is rare, it lands as danger.

Fourth, the chair still matters. A structured process does not replace the chair’s judgement or relationship with the CEO. It improves the conditions in which that relationship can be honest.

The chair should not have to walk into the hardest conversation in the company armed only with personal courage and a few private hunches. Structure gives the chair something better: a shared frame, broader evidence, clearer language and a reason the conversation is happening now that is not, by itself, alarming.

Done well, CEO feedback prevents surprises. It helps a CEO see the gap between intention and impact. It surfaces drift before it becomes failure. It gives the board a way to support improvement without blurring the board-management line.

And sometimes it confirms that the CEO is not responding. That matters too. Some CEOs should go. A better feedback process is not a protection racket for underperformance.

But many CEOs are not failing when the first concerns emerge. They are overplaying strengths that once served them. They are underinvesting in parts of the role they do not naturally enjoy. They are missing signals because the organisation has learned to send them in code.

That is exactly when feedback is supposed to help.

The average graduate does not get better feedback because their work matters more. They get better feedback because the organisation has built a system around their improvement.

The CEO’s work matters more than almost anyone’s. Yet too often the system around their improvement is a remuneration scorecard, a dinner with the chair, a few careful comments after the meeting, and a silence so polished it could pass for support.

That is not good governance.

It is expensive politeness.

CEOs need feedback. Not because they are fragile. Because the job is difficult, the stakes are high, and inference is a ridiculous way to manage the performance of the most consequential person in the organisation.

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