Why Do CEOs Call Other CEOs?
1,235 chief executives named where they go to make sense of what is coming. Other CEOs outranked both independent directors and the chair.
Egon Zehnder asked 1,235 chief executives a question most CEO surveys do not: Who are your best resources for discussing and making sense of the challenges ahead? (Question 11)
· Senior leadership team, 75%.
· Other CEOs, 43%.
· Independent board directors, 28%.
· The chair, 23%.
The study comes from a firm whose service lines include board review, board development, and board advisory. Their data, alongside the observation that it repeats what they found a year earlier- that CEOs are finding less time to discuss these challenges with their boards or their chair- makes for interesting observations.
What the numbers do not say
The survey offered three limitations that may have affected the responses.
1. Respondents could name more than one resource, so 28% should not be interpreted as the other 72% never consult their directors. Boards meet, and we can assume that most CEOs talk to them.
2. The board is also split across two options, independent directors and the chair, while the senior leadership team is identified as a single source. A CEO who names both has their answer divided between two smaller figures. Because the question allows multiple selections, those two cannot simply be added, and without the underlying overlap there is no way to know how a single combined board option would have ranked. It might well have placed second.
3. The 75% named the senior leadership team is not surprising, as this is the group is closest to the business and knows it best. It is also, when the question is whether the organization can execute what the leader intends, the group whose own performance informs part of the answer.
What survives all three is the comparison that does not depend on how the board options are counted. Neither board figure reaches the 43% who named other chief executives as their “go-to”.
The same expertise, a different relationship
One possible explanation is that chief executives seek expertise their directors do not possess. For the largest American companies, absence of CEO experience cannot account for such a preference. Deloitte's analysis of Fortune 100 director career histories found that, beyond the company's sitting chief executive, every board includes at least one director with CEO experience.
That does not mean the relevant expertise is always present. The Egon Zehnder respondents span a broader global population than the Fortune 100, and it raises an interesting possibility: that the difference lies not only in what the other person knows, but in the relationship to the CEO of the person whose knowledge is offered.
A peer chief executive has no vote on compensation, on succession, or on whether the CEO keeps the job. A director with CEO experience does. The operating experience may be comparable, while the consequences of displaying uncertainty are not.
A director with CEO experience may therefore be among the hardest directors to be uncertain in front of, precisely because that director can measure the chief executive's judgment against firsthand experience of the same problem. It is a possible explanation for why expertise that looks available on paper may not be activated while the chief executive is still working out what they think.
There is another consideration, because despite serving together, directors often hold incomplete understanding of one another's expertise, which I have written about previously. A chief executive probably has even less insight given their more limited encounters. Peers are usually approached for a relevance the chief executive already recognizes. Board expertise may be documented and still be insufficiently understood, insufficiently current, or not activated early enough to shape the conversation.
What the board cannot convert
So the question remains. Boards have committees, auditors, site visits, external advisers, and access to executives below the chief executive. Private-equity boards often add operating partners, and directors commonly sit on several boards, which means they are doing precisely what the chief executive is doing when they call a peer: importing pattern recognition from other companies and other cycles. On paper, the board wins the comparison outright.
My reading is that the constraint is not due to access; the constraint is that neither the knowledge nor the perspective could be used. Board time is organized around evaluating proposals. The mode runs from presentation to question to decision. It is a mode built for oversight and approval, but less than ideal for making sense of something that has not yet resolved into a proposal. A director's comparative judgment has little opportunity to be leveraged in a meeting when the agenda is already packed.
What remains dependent on management, even for a well-informed board, is the framing. Which question is this year's strategic question, what counts as the alternatives, where does uncertainty lie? Directors can test a framing when it arrives. Helping build one requires being present before it exists, and that depends, as much, if not more, on when they are in the room rather than what they know.
Where the research complicates the picture
That reading still assumes that what chief executives seek from peers is challenge. However, research on CEO advice networks suggests it may be something else. McDonald and Westphal, writing in Administrative Science Quarterly, found that chief executives facing relatively poor firm performance seek more advice from executives at other firms who are their friends or like them, and less from acquaintances or those unlike them. The consequence is that this pattern inhibits strategic change in response to poor performance, and their findings indicated it may worsen subsequent performance.
The research suggests that peer conversations may supply reassurance that resembles challenge. The tendency becomes stronger as performance deteriorates—precisely when genuine challenge matters most. In later work, McDonald and Westphal (the same authors as before) joined Poonam Khanna and found a countervailing effect: governance practices associated with agency theory increased CEOs’ tendency to seek advice from contacts whose perspectives differed from their own. That broader advice-seeking, in turn, contributed to better firm performance.
The implication is that governance may shape more than what happens inside the boardroom. It can also influence whom a CEO consults before an issue reaches the board, and therefore which perspectives inform the decision in the first place.
The case against my own argument
There is a position that 28% is not just acceptable but appropriate rather than concerning. In the separation of governance from management that Fama and Jensen described, initiating and implementing strategy belong to management, while ratifying and monitoring belong to the board. With that in mind, a board absent from early sense-making preserves the distance that gives its ratification value.
Not everyone agrees. Take Pugliese and his colleagues, who reviewed 150 articles across 23 management journals, and concluded that best governance practices and the emphasis on board independence and control may themselves hinder the board's contribution to strategic decision-making. More recent work frames strategic involvement as the attention directors give across strategy formation, from formulation through implementation. It treats the board's role in formulation as questioning and improving proposed options rather than approving them.
A more recent study by Massicotte and Henri, surveying 185 Canadian directors, found no direct relationship between strategic board alignment and organizational performance. It operated indirectly, through board effectiveness and through the board’s strategic use of financial and nonfinancial information supplied to it. In their model, two commonly emphasized structural features, such as the proportion of independent directors and separation of the CEO and chair roles that showed no significant relationship with board effectiveness. The findings suggest that structure alone does not explain whether a board’s expertise becomes consequential; involvement and the strategic use of information may be the mechanisms that convert it into value.
The research does not settle where the boundary between governance and management should be. It does point to the question: how early can directors enter the reasoning process without assuming management’s role, and how late can they enter before ratification becomes largely formal?
Refining a direction, or forming one
The distinction between refining a direction and forming one is what matters. If directors see an issue only after the thinking has hardened, they are being asked to evaluate a direction they had no opportunity to help test. While most boards asked to approve a strategy have a view on whether it is the right one, a board can only judge what reaches it. Directors can competently approve the best of three options they were shown and never learn a fourth was set aside before they were not present. The approval is real, but that choice was made upstream of it.
The same shape, elsewhere in the study
Asked what matters for mastering today’s complexity, 91% of CEOs rated cultivating a culture of curiosity and open-mindedness as extremely or very important. Only 64% gave the same ratings to ensuring the inclusion of diverse and challenging views (the lowest-rated item on the list).
The distinction is revealing, as curiosity and open-mindedness describe a desired leadership posture. Including challenging views requires that posture to be embedded in who participates, what reaches the CEO, and how dissent enters decision-making. One is an intention; the other is a mechanism capable of challenging the leader’s preferred interpretation.
A related pattern appears elsewhere in the study. Investment in risk prevention ranked near the bottom of twelve planned changes, selected by just 12% of respondents, even as geopolitical instability ranked as their most critical external challenge. When asked how they balance short-term responsiveness with long-term objectives, CEOs’ answers also tilted toward the short term, with one describing the prevailing posture as “firefighting.”
Any one of these findings may have an ordinary explanation. Taken together, however, they reveal a recurring gap: CEOs place considerable value on adaptability, curiosity and open-mindedness while giving less emphasis to the mechanisms that widen perspective, anticipate threats and preserve the capacity for considered response.
The same ranking may describe different boards
The sample is a mix that includes European (59%) and North American (23%) boards, so these figures are not a portrait of the American middle market. As board structures and corporate governance differ, they also cannot be interpreted identically across governance structures.
On a two-tier European board, distance from executive sense-making may be an intentional feature of the model. On a deeply involved private-equity board, the chief executive may turn elsewhere precisely because directors are already participants in the operating discussion. On a founder-led board, the answer may reflect where authority resides rather than the quality of any board relationship.
The same ranking can therefore arise from appropriate role separation, excessive involvement, limited relevance, or insufficient trust. The percentage shows a pattern. It does not diagnose its cause, which is exactly why consulting the board more is not the answer. The same number can be produced by opposite conditions requiring opposite remedies.
Prepared, or accustomed
Ninety-two percent of these CEOs agree they must cultivate a level of adaptability beyond anything previously imagined and compared with a year earlier, they report feeling markedly more prepared. That may be what the report concludes it is: leaders who have been through several hard years and learned from them. But habituation and capability produce the same feeling from the inside, and the same answer on a preparedness scale.
One respondent supplied the distinction the aggregate cannot. Explaining his own readiness, he pointed to having mechanisms for anticipation and revision. That is the hinge, and it is why more board time is the wrong prescription. A board could have adequate hours, genuine independence, deep comparative experience, and complete trust, and its routine meeting format may still not be built to do that work.
The question a board can answer this quarter
Start here: what do we know about this company that did not reach us through management? Most boards should be able to answer that specifically. If the answer is very little, this may be a measure of how dependent the board's picture is on the people whose choices it oversees, and therefore one limit on the independent judgment it can bring.
Then take the last four significant strategic decisions. For each, ask when the board first saw it relative to when the direction was set, what alternatives were considered, and who helped think them through.
And then the question only the chief executive can answer. When you are genuinely unsure, who do you call, and what does that conversation permit that a conversation with us (the board) does not?
The answer might be candor, or expertise, or timing, or simply that the other conversation has no minutes. Each points to somewhere different. These 1,235 CEOs have answered that question for their population. No survey can answer it for yours.
Sources
Egon Zehnder, The CEO Response, October 2025 (n = 1,235).
Michael L. McDonald and James D. Westphal, “Getting by with the advice of their friends: CEOs' advice networks and firms' strategic responses to poor performance,” Administrative Science Quarterly 48, no. 1 (2003): 1–32.
Michael L. McDonald, Poonam Khanna and James D. Westphal, “Getting them to think outside the circle: Corporate governance, CEOs' external advice networks, and firm performance,” Academy of Management Journal 51, no. 3 (2008): 453–475.
Amedeo Pugliese, Pieter-Jan Bezemer, Alessandro Zattoni, Morten Huse, Frans A. J. Van den Bosch and Henk W. Volberda, “Boards of directors' contribution to strategy: A literature review and research agenda,” Corporate Governance: An International Review 17, no. 3 (2009): 292–306.
Steeve Massicotte and Jean-François Henri, “Revisiting the impact of strategic board involvement on organizational performance,” Journal of General Management, published online 13 August 2024, doi:10.1177/03063070241272364.
Eugene F. Fama and Michael C. Jensen, “Separation of ownership and control,” Journal of Law and Economics 26, no. 2 (1983): 301–325.
Deloitte Center for Board Effectiveness, “What directors' career histories may reveal about the capabilities of Fortune 100 company boards,” Deloitte Insights, April 2026.