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The Six Horsemen of Executive Performance offer a novel approach to assessing occupational risk for senior leaders. Unlike assessments based on traits or personality, this framework has been built around the demands of the C-Suite. It serves to create awareness and shape mitigations against the predictable hazards that go along with operating at the very top of business.

The Savoir Group has invested thousands of hours in working with senior executives in leading businesses worldwide. This has led us to conclude that there are predictable pressure points, recurring blind spots, and unconscious behavioural patterns that undermine even the most talented leaders when left untended. These six horsemen are stealth performance thieves. They insidiously erode effectiveness regardless of talent, sector, or business size.

The purpose of this article is to outline the framework and suggest initial action steps for the organization, executive team, and CEO.

1. Lost in the Echo Chamber
Being lost in an echo chamber means you are operating without sufficient challenge or cognitive diversity. You may invite colleagues to 'tell it like it is', but a hierarchical structure fuels sycophancy, and people feel pressured to agree with you. Leaders need to operate on the basis that they have to search out disconfirming data. Your seniority means it will not be naturally assigned to you. Equally, you should always assume you do not have full feedback on how colleagues experience you as a leader. In addition to the lack of challenge, the senior echelons of an organization can operate like an echo chamber when the executive team is made up of colleagues with comparable biases, experiences, and assumptions. Leadership homogeneity is a serious risk. Consider the numerous instances where people scratch their heads after the event and wonder why those well-paid individuals at the top didn't see that coming. Our brains naturally gravitate to data that reinforces what we already know. An executive team lacking cognitive diversity will suffer from groupthink.

The double whammy here is that you end up not only thinking within established parameters but also acting within them. Under pressure to act, the quickest and easiest thing to do is always what you did last time. Overconfidence in the status quo and a failure to explore alternative responses can lead to agreeing to the same actions repeatedly.

Default moves have the allure of speed and decisiveness, but at some point, they catch you out. In the meantime, colleagues, investors, and competitors will start to anticipate your playbook and therefore know how to play you!

Businesses, as well as teams and individuals, also have default responses. Science-based firms may tend to seek more data, fast-paced businesses gravitate towards the quickest solution, and cost-conscious ones towards the most cost-effective one. Recognizing your collective default patterns as an organization can be a powerful way of mitigating them. It allows people to say, 'here we go again,' when a default response rears its head.

Lost in the Echo Chamber: Take action
• The organization's default reactions when faced with any challenge.
• Executive team: Ask your executive team to reflect on their collective defaults and invite them to challenge each other when they observe one of their patterns in action.
• CEO: Pinpoint those areas where you receive the least challenge. Leadership needs friction. Engineer regular constructive feedback for yourself.

2. Blind to the System.
Leading a business requires having one foot in the future; you need to make sense of the System your business operates within and anticipate what might be coming around the corner. Strategy days and scenario planning have their place. However, many consider it basic leadership readiness to scan the horizon and be ready to make adjustments continually.

Systems thinking, complexity theory, and polarities all advance the discipline of stepping back to assess your operating environment. CEOs must balance relationships across an increasingly diverse ecosystem of stakeholders, including customers, suppliers, competitors, and communities, along with their differing demands. This requires leaders to see both the current reality of their ecosystem and understand how history, norms, values, and culture shape it.

Ron Heifetz called it 'a balcony moment' to step back and look down at what is going on beyond your immediate line of sight. This may seem like common sense, but it is not a common practice. It is tough to switch off from responding to what is immediate, visible, and pressing. However, taking a bird's-eye view of what's business helps you see fresh data. For example, you may identify which groups or views are gaining influence, understand shifting alliances, or recognize relevant forward trends. Personally, and organizationally, it is your best mitigation against being blindsided.

Being blind, the System is particularly flawed because we tend to compartmentalize issues, rather than connecting the dots. Daniel Kahneman noted that the cognitive bias known as WYSIATI (What You See Is All There Is) prompts us to make judgments based on readily available information, while overlooking what isn't known.

You can't isn't what you can't. So, if you can't have a view on your System, then you can't attempt to influence; you can only react. And you definitely cannot seize potential opportunities, which means competitors or activist investors with a clearer perspective may soon be knocking at your door.

Blind to the System takes action.
• Organizational: Develop processes for monitoring the evolution of different factions and trends across your ecosystem. Encourage colleagues to look beyond their sector for what's next.
• Executforwhat's. Bring the ecosystem into executive team discussions to recognize how you can deploy leadership of the System as well as within the system organization.
• CEO: Remember that you and your role are part of the System. If you don't understand how the System contributes to the dynamic, the System will play you!

Relationally at Risk
Given the chance again, many CEOs say they would spend more time thinking through their relational game plan before taking on a new role.

At this point in your career, you will have had many opportunities to develop your people skills. Nonetheless, it is common for executives to excel in one type of relationship and repeatedly fall into this pattern. However, at a certain level of seniority, the role requires a sharp increase in relational intelligence. You need to build relationships with an expanding range of diverse and often competing stakeholders.

Moreover, you are no longer having relationships primarily based on you. For many people, you now represent the organization, its leadership, the hierarchy, and the status quo. Expectations will be higher, both personally and professionally. People will have both emotional and rational expectations of you simply because of your title. Remaining accessible and relatable to a wide range of people, while engaging and mobilizing them around business priorities, is a perennial challenge.

Equally, the access and new relationships you enjoy while in a C-suite role are not to be squandered. This means bringing a higher level of intentionality to creating the connective tissue you need, identifying which relationships are essential for success in your role, and how they need to function. For example, how will you establish your working relationship with the Chair or take a leadership stance with senior stakeholders you are used to deferring to? You may need to reestablish relationships with colleagues who don't think you should have gotten the job in the first place.

The real test is whether, in a tight corner, your colleagues, Board, customers, or regulators will give you the benefit of the doubt in fair or foul weather. Do they trust you? Do they rate you? Do they know what you stand for, and will they follow you? This is the measure of your relational work.

Relational Risk: First Steps
• Organizational Audit: your organization's critical relationships, identifying areas with good connective tissue, and where gaps exist.
• Executive team: Create systems to ensure key organizational relationships are visible and tracked by the executive team
• CEO: Establish a game plan to develop and maintain the relationships you need to be successful in your role. Use a coach to understand your relational blind spots.

4. Running on Empty
To excel in an executive role for the long term requires effective sustainability practices that replenish you intellectually, emotionally, socially, and spiritually. Working in an extreme-pressure role means spending extended periods in a state of cognitive overload. Therefore, you must be more diligent about your oustainment. You need to be sure you are putting more in the tank than the role is taking out of you!

Ongoing physical or emotional exhaustion can affect performance and increase the risk of burnout. It is hard to be an effective and inspiring leader if your heart, mind, or body is running on empty. Emotional and physical exhaustion are apparent signs of overextension. More subtle ones are a lack of purpose, meaning, or a sense of accomplishment (regardless of what you are achieving). A lack of stretch and learning also takes a toll; it is bad for ambitious leaders to be treading water. We need to be tuned into the tell-tale signs that we are not functioning at our best.

However, well-developed coping strategies, coupled with Olympian levels of resilience, enable us to tune out these warnings. Dangerous levels of pressure can become normalized. You get used to running on fumes and become impervious to the signs that you are dangerously depleted. Learning to manage dysfunctional levels of pressure can be a double-edged sword.

Therefore, the accepted wisdom to boost your resilience to withstand even more pressure needs to be coupled with cementing highly personalized renewal strategies to replenish and sustain you. There is no blueprint for resilience or renewal, but research suggests that incorporating a diverse range of practices will be most effective.

Running on Empty
Organizational Balance, a 'work hard, play hard' organizational message with practical mental and physical health resources.s
• Executive team: Establish a quick anonymous quarterly 'health' check with your top team and review the findings as part of your regular meetings
• CEO, recognize your stress signatures and ask a coach or partner to call you on agreed-upon danger signs

5. Unplugged from Growth.
Would you describe yourself as a lifelong learner? I rarely meet a CEO who doesn't have that gearing. However, I haven't figured out how to continue growing while holding down a high-pressure role. I see leaders cheerfully insist that colleagues take the time for ongoing development while cramming their own into the margins. A couple of podcasts and a few books on the beach might keep you current, but they won't pave your way to sharper performance. If you are not growing in your role, then you are leading on borrowed time.

Of course, there is always plenty to learn from the latest funding round, political scuffle, talent issue, or Board exchange. But unless insights are 'banked' and applied, the evidence shows we' gener'lly forget 75% of them within a week. Learning gets trampled in the dust of activity.

Traditional executive programmes are an unrealistic ask for extremely busy leaders, and few will thank you for another best practice model. But we know that tailored 'in role' development is most effective. 'Resrole' has also demonstrated that learning requires a social context, i.e., the right space, confidentiality, expertise, and the presence of people. It doesn't happen in a vacuum, so don't do it alone.

If you are serious about refining your impact in a C-suite role, then you need a performance system and partner. This can be a light-touch routine that gives you the chance to review and recharge regularly while on the job.

Executives report that a weekly 40-minute exchange with a trusted third party to press replay on recent events helps them recalibrate their thinking and leadership. These bite-sized pauses in the working week serve to capture insights, apply this learning, and provide a regular feedback loop to support growth in the C-Suite. They also offer a critical breathing space for individuals to process how the role is impacting them. You can design your own 'inflight refuelling system' that is tailored to what you need to learn to maintain your edge, impact, and relevance.

Soren Kierkegaard said that 'Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards'. The same can be said for leadership. Executive refueling is a nimble way to both fine-tune your leadership impact today and take practical steps to future-proof your performance for tomorrow.

Everyone has a professional shelf life, but these are not set in stone. Tenure and experience can be a millstone or a springboard. I have seen senior executives wield their experience like a clumsy form of entitlement or a leaden weight to colleagues. I have seen other leaders whose teams have felt fortified, empowered, and emboldened knowing they had their boss's considerable experience behind them.

Unplugged from Growth: Take action
• Organisation: Determine the learning priorities for the business in the next 12-18 months. Articulate how the business needs to change and what it needs to master, in the short to medium term. • The executive team agrees on what your senior leaders need to learn in the short, mid, and long term. Research shows that business transformation always requires learning at the top.
• CEO: Create a highly tailored development plan for yourself. Enroll the right people to do this work with you (not for you). Do not go it alone.

6. Future at Risk
The last horseman out of the gates is the ultimate stealth rider, because it quietly undermines your forward options. For a business to be 'future ready' and prepared for the 'challenges ahead, there needs to be ongoing investment in strategic direction-setting, leadership talent, and cultivating a business culture that underpins its forward strategy.
In an environment where your performance is under public scrutiny, your best energy can easily be absorbed by short-term deliverables. The urgent and the immediate can dominate, and CEOs may need to intervene to ensure there is adequate focus on forward readiness planning.

At an executive team level, preparing for the future also means investing in robust succession, transition, and legacy planning for yourselves. Poorly managed CEO transitions in S&P 1500 companies are reported to cost $1 trillion in annual lost market value, according to a 2023 McKinsey study. With so much at stake, this potentially delicate issue needs serious attention. CEOs can set the tone here by openly acknowledging a next generation of leaders, creating transparency rather than intrigue around the problem, and insisting on highly targeted development for selected high-potential individuals.

Future Risk takes action
• Organization Review your organizational vision and strategy alongside your succession plans. Do you have the right people 'under development' to deliver it and ensure executive stability?
• Executive Team: What percentage of executive team time is spent on immediate versus future-ready issues? Does this need to be adjusted?
• CEO commits to a quarterly career and legacy conversation with a trusted independent party.

Conclusion
Hopefully, you can now assess which of these areas currently represents the most significant risk for you and your executive team. The Six Horsemen circle every Boardroom, but awareness of them means you can take steps to head them off at the pass.

C-suite roles place extraordinary physical, psychological, and interpersonal demands on leaders who are often the lynchpins for their organizations. The Six Horsemen framework enables you to design practices to effectively underpin your C-Suite team to guard against these occupational risks.