10 Habits of Highly Successful CEOs and What Leaders Can Learn

Introduction

The habits of highly successful CEOs are rarely about waking up at 4 a.m., drinking a particular coffee, or following an elaborate morning routine. The more consequential habits are less visible: deciding what deserves attention, protecting time for strategic work, developing strong teams, listening carefully, and making difficult decisions before they become unavoidable.

That distinction matters because the CEO role is fundamentally about allocating scarce resources—time, capital, talent, and attention—while creating the conditions for an organization to perform. McKinsey's research on CEO effectiveness, based on a database covering 7,800 CEOs across 3,500 public companies, identifies six broad responsibilities: setting strategy, aligning the organization, leading the top team, working with the board, engaging external stakeholders, and managing personal time and energy.

The lessons aren't limited to people sitting in the corner office. Managers, department heads, entrepreneurs, and aspiring executives face many of the same challenges at a smaller scale.

Here are 10 habits that offer useful lessons for anyone trying to become a more effective leader.

1. Successful CEOs Protect Time for Strategic Thinking

One of the biggest challenges for senior leaders is that there is always something demanding immediate attention.

Emails arrive. Meetings multiply. Employees need decisions. Customers have problems. Projects fall behind. Before long, a leader can spend an entire day responding to other people's priorities.

Highly effective CEOs deliberately protect time for work that only they can do.

McKinsey's research specifically identifies managing time and energy as one of the core responsibilities of CEO effectiveness. Its research suggests that excellent CEOs establish working norms and structures that make priorities explicit and help them concentrate on responsibilities that cannot easily be delegated.

The lesson for other leaders is straightforward: being busy is not the same as being productive.

A manager who spends eight hours resolving operational issues may feel productive while neglecting hiring, strategy, customer relationships, or long-term planning.

A useful exercise is to ask:

What decisions require my involvement?
What work could someone else own?
What strategic issue am I repeatedly postponing?
Where does my time create the most value?

Protecting strategic thinking time is not avoiding work. It is making room for the work that has the greatest organizational impact.

2. They Make Decisions With Speed and Conviction

Leadership inevitably involves uncertainty. Waiting until every piece of information is available often means waiting too long.

Research summarized by Harvard Business Review from the CEO Genome Project found that four behaviors were particularly associated with high-performing CEOs: deciding with speed and conviction, engaging for impact, adapting proactively, and delivering reliably.

That doesn't mean successful CEOs make reckless decisions.

The better lesson is that effective leaders understand which decisions require extensive analysis and which require a timely judgment call.

A project manager deciding whether to move a meeting by one day doesn't need the same decision process as a CEO considering an acquisition.

Good leaders develop judgment around the difference.

They also understand that indecision has a cost. Teams cannot move forward when priorities remain unresolved, and opportunities can disappear while leadership debates every possible scenario.

For managers, the goal should not be to make every decision quickly. It should be to avoid allowing relatively reversible decisions to consume disproportionate amounts of time.

3. They Communicate Priorities Repeatedly

Leaders sometimes assume that once they have communicated a strategy, everyone understands it.

In practice, employees are dealing with competing priorities, changing circumstances, and information coming from multiple directions.

Effective CEOs continually reinforce what matters most.

Harvard Business School research on CEO leadership emphasizes that senior leaders are constantly communicating messages through their actions, not simply through formal announcements. Leaders must manage organizational context rather than attempt to personally run every part of the company.

That makes communication a leadership system, not merely a soft skill.

A leader should be able to answer three questions clearly:

What are we trying to accomplish?
What matters most right now?
How will we know whether we're succeeding?

The strongest leaders repeat these messages without assuming that repetition means failure.

If a priority is important, employees should hear about it more than once.

4. They Build Strong Teams Instead of Trying to Do Everything Themselves

A CEO cannot personally manage every customer, project, employee, and operational problem.

The same principle applies to managers.

One of the clearest transitions from individual contributor to leader is learning that success increasingly depends on what other people can accomplish.

McKinsey identifies organizational alignment and talent as important components of CEO effectiveness, including matching talent to the roles that create the most value.

That requires more than hiring talented people.

Successful leaders think about:

Who is best positioned to own a problem?
Which responsibilities are unclear?
Where are decision rights concentrated unnecessarily?
Which employees need more authority?
Which capabilities will the organization need next?

Delegation is therefore not simply about getting tasks off a leader's desk.

It is about building organizational capacity.

A manager who develops five people capable of making good decisions has created substantially more leverage than a manager who insists on making all five decisions personally.

5. They Keep Learning After They Reach the Top

It is easy to associate executive success with expertise.

But the higher someone moves in an organization, the more likely they are to encounter unfamiliar problems.

A successful CEO may understand their industry extremely well while knowing relatively little about an emerging technology, geopolitical development, regulatory issue, or new business model that could reshape it.

McKinsey's research on CEO excellence emphasizes maintaining a learning agenda and learning from external stakeholders as well as employees throughout the organization.

This is particularly important because leadership can create an information problem.

Employees may hesitate to challenge a senior executive. Established processes can reinforce existing assumptions. Success itself can create confidence in approaches that may no longer work.

Continuous learning provides a counterweight.

For leaders, that can mean reading outside their industry, talking to customers, studying competitors, learning new technologies, participating in executive education, or simply asking more questions.

The objective isn't to become an expert in everything.

It's to remain intellectually curious enough to recognize when your existing knowledge is no longer sufficient.

6. They Seek Perspectives That Challenge Their Assumptions

Leadership becomes dangerous when confidence turns into certainty.

Successful CEOs need enough confidence to make decisions, but enough intellectual flexibility to reconsider those decisions when evidence changes.

McKinsey describes the value of taking an "outsider's perspective"—periodically examining a business with fresh eyes rather than automatically defending existing strategies or favored projects.

This habit can be surprisingly difficult.

Leaders naturally develop preferences. They have backed particular products, hired particular people, approved particular investments, and publicly supported particular strategies.

Changing direction can feel like admitting failure.

But strong leadership requires distinguishing between consistency and stubbornness.

A useful question is:

"If I were joining this organization today, what would I question first?"

That question can reveal problems that have become invisible through familiarity.

Managers can use the same technique during quarterly reviews, project retrospectives, and strategic planning sessions.

7. They Focus on Customers and the External Environment

Executives can become disconnected from the people and markets their organizations serve.

The larger the company becomes, the easier it is to spend most of the day talking to internal stakeholders.

Successful CEOs maintain an external perspective.

They pay attention to customers, competitors, suppliers, regulators, investors, technological changes, and broader economic conditions.

This matters because strategy doesn't exist in isolation. A company can execute its internal plan extremely well and still lose ground if customer expectations or market conditions change.

McKinsey's framework for CEO excellence includes serving as the face of the company to external stakeholders alongside strategy, organizational alignment, and internal leadership.

For other leaders, this could mean something as simple as regularly speaking with customers instead of relying entirely on reports.

A product manager can talk directly to users.

A sales leader can listen to lost prospects.

An HR executive can talk to employees.

A department manager can understand how internal decisions affect other teams.

Leadership improves when decisions are informed by reality rather than filtered entirely through organizational hierarchy.

8. They Know What to Delegate—and What Not to Delegate

Delegation is frequently presented as a productivity technique.

At the executive level, it is much more important than that.

It determines where leadership attention is concentrated.

McKinsey's research describes an important CEO principle: "Do what only you can do." Excellent CEOs don't attempt to excel at every organizational responsibility themselves. They concentrate their attention on areas where their involvement is uniquely valuable.

That creates a useful framework for managers.

Before taking ownership of a task, ask:

Does this require my authority, expertise, or judgment?

If the answer is no, consider whether someone else can own it.

But delegation doesn't mean disappearing.

Effective delegation includes clear expectations, authority to act, measurable outcomes, and appropriate follow-up.

The worst form of delegation is giving someone responsibility while retaining every meaningful decision.

That isn't delegation. It's supervision with extra steps.

9. They Treat Execution as Seriously as Strategy

Vision receives plenty of attention in discussions about CEOs.

Execution is less glamorous but often more consequential.

A brilliant strategy that never becomes operational reality has little value.

The research behind the CEO Genome Project found that reliable delivery was one of the behaviors associated with high-performing CEOs.

This is an important lesson for emerging leaders.

Organizations don't simply need people who generate ideas. They need leaders who can turn priorities into action.

That means establishing:

Clear ownership
Realistic deadlines
Measurable outcomes
Accountability
Follow-through
Regular review

It also means recognizing when execution is failing because the strategy is flawed rather than simply demanding that employees work harder.

Great leaders don't confuse pressure with execution.

They create systems that make execution more reliable.

10. They Adapt Before They Are Forced To

Some organizations change because they see an opportunity.

Others change because they have no alternative.

Successful CEOs try to avoid the second situation.

McKinsey's research emphasizes proactive adaptation and periodic reassessment of strategy. Its analysis also found that bold strategic moves can materially improve the likelihood of moving from middle performance levels toward the top of economic profit performance.

Adaptation doesn't necessarily mean constantly changing direction.

It means remaining willing to change when the evidence warrants it.

That distinction is important.

A leader who changes strategy every month creates confusion. A leader who refuses to change strategy for five years despite changing market conditions creates a different problem.

The better habit is continuous reassessment.

What has changed?

What assumptions are no longer valid?

What are customers doing differently?

What technology could alter our competitive position?

What risks have emerged?

What opportunities did we overlook?

Those questions help organizations adapt before circumstances make the decision for them.

What These CEO Habits Have in Common

The 10 habits above may look different on the surface, but they share a common theme.

They are largely about leverage.

Successful leaders don't simply try to work harder. They try to make better use of limited resources:

Time
Attention
Talent
Information
Capital
Relationships
Organizational capacity

That's why the most useful CEO habits aren't necessarily the habits that make for entertaining social media posts.

The real advantage comes from repeatedly making better decisions about where leadership attention belongs.

Harvard Business Review research on strategic leadership similarly identifies six capabilities that leaders need to navigate uncertainty: anticipating, challenging assumptions, interpreting information, deciding, aligning people, and learning.

Those capabilities closely connect with the behaviors seen in effective CEOs.

How Managers Can Apply These Habits

You don't need to be a CEO to practice CEO-level leadership.

A department manager can protect strategic thinking time.

A project manager can make decisions faster.

A team leader can communicate priorities more consistently.

A director can develop future leaders instead of becoming the bottleneck for every decision.

An entrepreneur can spend more time talking to customers.

The key is to translate executive behavior into the scale of your own role.

Try choosing one habit at a time rather than attempting to transform your leadership style overnight.

For example, spend the next month focusing on delegation.

Then focus on strategic thinking.

Then develop a more deliberate approach to decision-making.

Over time, these behaviors can become part of how you operate rather than another checklist of leadership techniques.

Developing the Skills Behind Effective Leadership

Studying successful CEOs can reveal useful patterns, but observation only goes so far.

Leadership also requires deliberate development in areas such as strategic thinking, communication, decision-making, organizational leadership, change management, and financial judgment.

For executives and experienced professionals who want a more structured approach, executive education can provide an opportunity to develop those capabilities while learning alongside other working professionals.

GetSmarter offers online executive education programs from leading universities covering areas such as executive leadership, strategy, artificial intelligence, project management, and other subjects relevant to modern business leaders.

Explore GetSmarter's Online Executive Education Programs →

The important point is that executive education should complement experience rather than replace it. The greatest value comes when new frameworks are applied to real decisions, teams, and business problems.

A Practical Leadership Habit to Start With

If there is one lesson to take from the habits of highly successful CEOs, it is that effective leadership is less about having a perfect routine and more about consistently making better choices about where to focus, what to decide, who to empower, and when to adapt.

Start by examining your calendar.

Where are you spending your time?

Which decisions are consuming too much attention?

What work could you delegate?

When was the last time you challenged one of your own assumptions?

And are you spending enough time thinking about what your organization, customers, and employees will need next?

Those questions are simple, but answering them honestly can reveal more about your leadership effectiveness than another list of productivity hacks.

The habits of successful CEOs are ultimately not about copying the daily routines of famous executives. They are about developing the judgment, discipline, curiosity, and organizational awareness required to lead effectively when the answers aren't obvious.

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About the Business Training Media Editorial Team

This article was researched and written by the Business Training Media Editorial Team. We publish expert content covering business strategy, leadership, workplace skills, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, compliance, career development, online learning, professional certifications, business software, and organizational excellence. Our goal is to provide practical, research-backed insights that help professionals, business leaders, and organizations make informed decisions.