What separates good CEOs from great ones?

Test	What it means
Simple plan around strategy	The cornerstone test. Get this wrong and nothing else in the business works.
High-performing culture	The CEO has to define acceptable behaviours, model them, and enforce them. There is no other way.
Building real teams	You can’t overcome a bad team. The quality of your enterprise is defined by the quality of your top team.
Leading transformation	Leading the organisation through change, one of the seven core chapters in the book.
Listening	The test most leaders overestimate. Poor listening nearly ended Kevin Sharer’s career at Amgen.
Managing a crisis	Most leaders’ kryptonite, because by definition it’s the test you’ve had the least practice at.
The inner game of leadership	Shifting from what you do as a leader to how you need to be, which Bryant and Sharer call a very important distinction.

Why does this episode matter for a scaling CEO?

Because the simplest questions in leadership are the hardest ones to answer, and Bryant and Sharer show you exactly why. You’ve read the books. Listened to the podcasts. Watched the TED talks. And leading well stays stubbornly hard. These two bring an unusual pairing to the problem.

Adam Bryant spent 30 years as a journalist and editor at the New York Times, running the weekly From The Corner Office column where he interviewed 525 CEOs about what life had actually taught them. Kevin Sharer ran Amgen, the world’s largest biotech company, then went to teach strategy at Harvard Business School. Between them, access to hundreds of leaders. So here is the test. What is your strategy? Why are you a team? They sound obvious. They break people every day.

What are the five key lessons from The CEO Test?

1. They started with 154 possible topics and cut to seven. Everything else was either table stakes or a subset of the seven tests that actually make or break leaders.
2. You can’t overcome a bad team. The quality of your enterprise is defined by the quality of your top team. Sharer’s discipline: at least once a year, ask yourself whether you could put this team on the field and win. If not, you have to want the best team, not settle for the one you can get along with, and get specific about what good looks like.
3. Culture is set by what you enforce, not what you write down. The CEO defines acceptable behaviours, models them, and fires the backstabber who is delivering the numbers. There is no other way.
4. Strategy has to be simple enough that Betty in reception can explain it. Adam Bryant’s one-page test, borrowed from Harman’s former CEO Dinesh Paliwal: a concrete statement of what you’re trying to achieve, the three or four levers you have to pull, the three or four challenges you have to beat, and a scoreboard to measure progress. The skill underneath is simplifying complexity and being right, not making things look more complex to prove you’re clever.
5. Crisis management is most leaders’ kryptonite. By definition it’s the thing you’ve had least practice at, and it takes a focus and a presence that is rare.

What do Bryant and Sharer say in their own words?

These short excerpts show the episode’s most useful points in the guests’ own words.

“We put a very specific aperture on the lens of leadership, which is a big sprawling topic, right? But the way we framed it up was this idea of, well, what are the tests that make or break all leaders? Why do people succeed or fail in these roles?”

What it means: The book isn’t about the traits of a leader. It’s about the specific tests that decide who succeeds, which is why it applies just as much to a founder running a small company as to a Fortune 500 CEO.

“You’ve got to know what good looks like, you got to be very specific, in your own mind. What does good look like? And why do I think that? And it’s not just about can you implement the plan? It’s, can you build a team? Do you have a vision for the future? Are you a role model for the values?”

What it means: Building the best team starts with a specific, written standard in your own head. Vague hopes about hiring well produce vague teams.

“The CEO has to define what are acceptable team dynamics and team behaviours. The CEO themselves has to model those behaviours and they’ve got to enforce them. And if somebody’s just going to be a backstabber, you got to fire them. And that takes guts when somebody’s delivering the numbers.”

What it means: Culture is a discipline, not a poster. The test of whether you mean it is whether you act when a high performer breaks the standard.

“The kryptonite generally is crisis management. Crisis management by definition is something you probably have very little skill at. Crisis management takes a focus and a presence that is rare.”

What it means: The hardest test is the one you get least practice at. You can’t rehearse your way to competence, so the presence you bring under pressure matters more than any playbook.

Who are Adam Bryant and Kevin Sharer?

Adam Bryant spent 30 years as a journalist and editor at the New York Times, where he wrote the weekly From The Corner Office column, interviewing 525 CEOs about the transferable lessons of leadership. Kevin Sharer is the former CEO of Amgen, the world’s largest biotech company, and went on to teach strategy at Harvard Business School. Their book, The CEO Test, is built on that combined access to hundreds of leaders.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between a good CEO and a great CEO?

A good CEO clears the table stakes: energy, honesty, intelligence, resilience. A great CEO gets good at the seven hardest tests Bryant and Sharer identify: simplifying complexity and being right, building the best possible team instead of the most convenient one, and enforcing culture even when it costs a high performer.

The difference isn’t raw talent. It’s being intentional about the few things that are simple to name and hard to do.

What are the seven tests in The CEO Test?

The seven tests are: can you develop a simple plan around strategy, can you create a high-performing culture, can you build teams that operate as real teams, can you drive transformation, can you listen effectively, can you manage a crisis, and can you shift from what you do as a leader to how you need to be as a leader.

Bryant and Sharer reached these seven by cutting an original list of 154 topics down to the ones that genuinely make or break leaders.

Do you need to be a CEO for this to apply?

No. Bryant and Sharer are explicit that the tests apply from the CEO of a global corporation down to someone starting their first leadership job, because people running small companies face exactly the same challenges, just at a different scale.

If you are a founder-CEO trying to build a team, set a culture, and get a crisis under control, these are your tests too.

How does a founder-CEO get better at these tests in practice?

By working on them deliberately rather than hoping they resolve themselves. Bryant and Sharer frame it as return on investment: of everything you could improve, which few things give you the biggest return. For a scaling founder-CEO that usually means building a leadership team that actually leads.

And putting in a culture and rhythm that run without you in every room. That’s the work a mentor who has scaled and sold their own businesses can hold you to.

What is the single best question to ask a leader about their team?

Kevin Sharer’s test for rising leaders is five direct questions: tell me about your team, how do you pick people, how do you evaluate people, what was your toughest decision, and who are you most proud of. The answers reveal whether someone is actually building a team or just managing direct reports.

Where Monkhouse & Company fits

Knowing the seven tests is the easy part. Passing them, inside your own business, while you’re still running it, is where founder-CEOs stall. Dominic Monkhouse is a two-time £30m scale-up founder, Rackspace UK and Peer 1, and has coached more than 200 founder-CEOs of scaling businesses through exactly that gap. If the seven tests describe the distance between where you are and where you want to be, see how ongoing CEO mentoring builds on this. You can also read eleven proven ways to become a better CEO, work through succession planning and why it matters, or look at how a CEO coach supports you week to week.