To understand how one person behaves, it is often necessary to understand the system of relationships around them.

In the 1950s, the psychiatrist Murray Bowen began studying families in which one person was experiencing serious psychological difficulties. At the time, treatment tended to focus primarily on the individual. However, he noticed something that would influence his work: helping the individual was often not enough. Their behaviour was bound up with the people around them, and Bowen became increasingly interested in what happened when the family was considered as a whole: how one person’s behaviour affected those around them, and how their responses, in turn, affected that person.

His work became the foundation of family systems theory[1], built around an idea that was unusual at the time: to understand how one person behaves, it is often necessary to understand the system of relationships around them. I often think about this when working with CEOs.

We put enormous effort into helping the person at the top change. We ask whether they are still the right CEO for the next stage, how their leadership needs to evolve, what they should do less of and where they can have greater impact. When the change required is greater, boards may spend months finding a different person altogether. What receives much less attention is what that change asks of everybody else.

The former CEO of a late-stage VC-backed company I worked with had always been extremely hands-on. Important decisions were reviewed by him, he held strong views on initiatives large and small, and very little happened without his involvement. When the company’s performance came under pressure, these tendencies became even more pronounced. More decisions travelled upwards, more information was requested and problems that might once have remained with his executives increasingly found their way to him. Each intervention might have been perfectly rational on its own; together, over several years, they shaped a cautious executive team in which difficult disagreements ended with the CEO and an extraordinary amount depended on one person. Eventually, the board concluded that the company needed a change of CEO, and one of his executives was appointed to succeed him. My work with the company started at this point.

She was a very different leader and wanted to run the company differently. We spent considerable time preparing for her transition from executive to CEO: establishing authority with former peers, developing a new relationship with the board, stepping away from the function she knew intimately and learning to see the company as a whole. She navigated much of this exceptionally well. Her self-awareness, her ability to build trust with the management team and the board, and her focus on execution made the personal transition remarkably smooth. What proved harder was the transition everybody else had to make.

Her former peers had spent years learning how to operate under one CEO and were now being asked to operate differently under another. Decisions they had become accustomed to sending upwards were suddenly theirs to make, and some had almost forgotten how to carry that responsibility. Relationships that had relied on the CEO as the ultimate arbiter had to become stronger in their own right. Executives who had learnt to lead their functions well now needed to take greater responsibility for the company as a whole. Greater freedom also brought greater accountability. And yet almost all the deliberate work on the transition had been concentrated on her.

At first, this made change harder and more frustrating than either of us had expected. She wanted to give away more ownership, but decisions still came upwards. In particular, the CMO continued to rely on her input for many decisions. The new CEO wanted executives to challenge one another more, but disagreements continued to find their way to her. She had changed the way the company was being led, but the leadership team had not yet changed the way it led.

Our work therefore moved beyond how she needed to operate as CEO. We began looking at what becoming a different leadership team would require from each of the people around her. Some needed to exercise judgement they had previously deferred; others needed to stop behaving principally as representatives of their functions and become more accountable for the whole. Identifying those individual challenges, and making them explicit, was key. There was no common problem, and therefore no single solution. For example, the CMO needed to feel more empowered in his role and to broaden the scope of his thinking. The new CFO needed more space to build his presence in the organisation and less guidance in the background. The CTO needed to structure her team better and add some mid-level management to accelerate development, which first required her to understand that asking for additional resources did not mean she was failing at her job. The CEO had to become clearer about what she expected from them while resisting the temptation to take responsibility back when doing so would have been quicker or easier.

It took time before the team fully understood and embraced something that now seems obvious: the company had not simply replaced one CEO with another. Their jobs as leaders had changed too. Over time, fewer decisions returned to the CEO and executives began resolving more disagreements directly with one another. The CEO could step back because the people around her had become more capable of carrying what she was giving away.

This brings me back to Bowen. One of the central ideas in his theory is that the functioning of people within a system is interdependent: one person’s behaviour affects others, whose responses in turn affect the first person. The parallel with an organisation is imperfect, but there is something useful in looking at a leadership team in this way. A CEO does not operate alongside a collection of independent executives. Over time, they develop a way of operating together, with assumptions about who decides, who challenges, where responsibility sits and what happens when they disagree.

This is perhaps what we underestimate about CEO succession. We treat it principally as the transition of one person: the outgoing CEO leaves, the incoming CEO takes responsibility, and considerable effort goes into making that handover successful. Yet for the CFO, COO or CRO who remains, the change can also be profound. The judgement that was previously expected of them may no longer be enough; decisions they once delegated upwards may now be theirs to make; relationships with their peers may need to become stronger because the CEO is no longer willing to arbitrate between them. In the case of an internal successor, one of those peers has suddenly become their CEO. In an external succession, they are learning an entirely new person while that person is simultaneously deciding whether they are part of the company’s future.

Seen in this light, the asymmetry in how we support these transitions becomes quite striking. We invest heavily in assessing, appointing and developing the CEO, while often assuming that the executives around them will make their own transitions through experience. Yet the very change we want from the CEO frequently depends on those executives becoming capable of something different too.

Not everyone ultimately makes that transition, nor should we expect them to. Helping people through change does not mean assuming that everyone can or should remain, but it gives a CEO a much better basis on which to distinguish between someone who cannot make the transition and someone who has simply never been helped to make it.

I have come to think that we underinvest considerably in this layer of leadership. There is an understandable logic to concentrating development at the top. The CEO carries the greatest responsibility, and improving the judgement of the person making the most consequential decisions has enormous value, but the same logic should eventually lead us further down.

As a company grows, the CEO’s own capacity necessarily becomes a smaller proportion of the leadership capacity available to the business. Fewer of the decisions that determine its success can sensibly be made by one person, and the quality of the company therefore depends increasingly on the judgement of the people around the CEO: whether they can make difficult decisions, challenge one another, think beyond their own functions and carry responsibility without constantly sending it upwards. And yet it is quite common for the CEO to have a coach, regular input from the board, mentors and perhaps a peer network, while executives responsible for large parts of the company receive remarkably little equivalent investment. We ask CEOs to delegate responsibility faster than we invest in developing the people to whom that responsibility is being delegated.

This is also why interdependence matters so much at the top of an organisation. Independence sounds appealing, particularly after a company has relied too heavily on its CEO, but a strong leadership team is not a collection of executives making good decisions in isolation. Its members borrow one another’s judgement, challenge assumptions, resolve disagreements and become collectively capable of carrying more than any of them could alone. Developing that capacity takes deliberate work.

Bowen’s insight was that individual change cannot be understood entirely in isolation from the relationships around it. Organisations are not families, but I think there is something important in that observation for leaders. We spend a great deal of time helping CEOs become what their companies need them to be for the next stage. Perhaps we should think just as carefully about what the leaders around them will need to become too.

ABOUT CAYETANA HURTADO

Cayetana’s coaching approach is distinguished by her ability to create a safe space for her clients to enable them to think critically and feel empowered. Candid, insightful and empathetic, Cayetana focuses on leadership development, growth acceleration, and the cultivation of a balanced professional life filled with authenticity and purpose. Cayetana trained as an executive coach with Meyler Campbell in 2024.

As a venture capital investor, board member, and CEO advisor, Cayetana understands the intricacies, pressures, and strategic considerations that accompany executive roles. Her journey has equipped her with firsthand experience in leading high-performance teams, driving organizational growth, and managing challenges inherent to executive positions.

More about Cayetana here.

[1] Bowen, M. (1950s) Introduction to the eight concepts, The Bowen Center for the Study of the Family. Available at: https://www.thebowencenter.org/introduction-eight-concepts