CEO Growth Habits

The short 10-second takeaway
Growth doesn’t come from knowing more.
It comes from learning differently.
The best leaders I know treat growth like a system - built on habits, not hustle.

A few weeks ago, I sat with the founder and CEO of a multi-million biotech scale-up juggling Series B investors, product pivots, and team churn. “Honestly,” he told me, “I stopped growing 6 months ago - but nobody’s supposed to know.”

It hit me hard.

He wasn’t burned out. He wasn’t out of ideas. But like many top performers, he had fallen into the trap of leading without learning.

The truth is: at the top, learning becomes harder. People stop giving you feedback. You stop asking questions. And eventually, your leadership becomes a stale loop of “what worked before….”. This is neither unique to successful founders, long-time entrepreneurs or senior corporate leaders - I’ve seen this across industries and company sizes.

So here are 5 sharp learning habits I’ve seen my most successful clients install to stay ahead - mentally, strategically, and culturally.

Growth Habit 1: Seek fresh eyes, not familiar answers

New hires, interns, outsiders - they often see what you’ve become numb to. Systems that are bloated. Processes that no longer serve. Assumptions that no one’s questioned in years.

In order to solve this challenge, here is what works well:
Once a month, have lunch with a new team member and ask only two questions:

• What surprised you about how we work?

• What seems unnecessarily complex?

You’ll uncover blind spots no executive workshop could ever reveal.

Growth Habit 2: Study outside your bubble

Most leaders benchmark their competitors. But real innovation often comes sideways. I am sure you’ve heard about the famous cases of Netflix copying software companies, Amazon primarily studying logistics and Slack starting as a failed video game.

Here is the learning for you to implement: Pick an industry you know nothing about and ask yourself two questions:

• What would their customer service model look like in my company?

• What pricing playbook could disrupt my product?

Or even smarter: prompt ChatGPT to extract success factors from other industries and map them onto your current strategy. Your next unfair advantage might come from somewhere totally unexpected.

Growth Habit 3: Ask, don’t answer

Every senior leader falls into this trap: Problem => Opinion => Solution => Next.

But when you jump in with answers, you kill three things: Curiosity, Ownership, Growth. All these three you need to build not only highly motivated teams but longterm successful organizations.

One way to avoid falling into this senior leader trap is running your next leadership meeting like this: Only ask questions. No answers. You can try questions like “What’s the missing variable here?” or “What would the opposite strategy look like?”

Watch how your team reacts and steps up.

Growth Habit 4: Say “I don’t know”

Confidence is built on clarity, not on being right. Most CEOs think admitting they don’t know or they were wrong weakens authority. The best leaders I coach do the opposite.
They say, “I missed that,” or “That’s something I don’t know.”

As hard as it might sound - because no leader arrived in her or his position because saying “I don’t know” too often - do this next time:
Say it. Say “I don’t know” instead of giving in on that urge to provide answers to everything. Start saying it in a 1:1, move your way up to saying it publicly in a bigger team meeting. It signals that learning beats ego on your leadership team.
And trust follows clarity.

Growth Habit 5: Audit your assumptions regularly

What assumptions are baked into your strategy right now? Maybe that your clients value “personalized service”? Maybe that your price point is justified by “quality”? Maybe that your growth is sustainable?

When did you last check if all of them are still valid? At one of my clients for example, constant assumption audits helped the team stay 3 steps ahead of competition, creating unbeatable services and solutions for their customers.

In your case, run a “truth audit” quarterly:

• What do we assume is working?

• What’s the actual data?

• What are we afraid to change?

Assumptions are just invisible decisions. And invisible decisions are the fastest way to stall.

Are you ready to grow smarter, not harder?

These habits don’t require more hours, they require better systems and better self-leadership. If your executive learning curve has flattened, let’s rebuild your personal growth engine from the inside out.

Reach out for a short chat and happy to share some insights on the BE ME Operating system and how it helps top leaders install sustainable performance structures that grow with them - not against them.

Because the good news is: you don’t need another strategy, you need a system that sharpens YOU as fast as your business evolves.