Creating Shared Meaning to Drive Growth with Pete Steege
Watch/Listen here or on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts“I believe as the leadership team goes, so goes the rest of the company. So if you don't have that consistent and significant sustainable growth, you've got some work to do.” — Mike Goldman
Pete Steege is a growth strategist, author of Radical Clarity, and founder of B2B Clarity. In this episode, we dive into how accidental CEOs—technical experts turned leaders—can uncover purpose, lead with meaning, and scale their companies with intention.
Shared Meaning as the Foundation
Pete emphasizes that the most important characteristic of a great leadership team is shared meaning.
When CEOs and teams align on a deeper purpose—beyond profits—it transforms dynamics and keeps growth sustainable.
Without this shared clarity, scaling often unravels.
The Accidental CEO Journey
Pete shares his personal story: starting as an IBM engineer, moving closer to customers over time, and eventually creating B2B Clarity to help technical experts who suddenly find themselves as CEOs.
He calls these leaders “accidental CEOs”—brilliant domain experts who need guidance to thrive as company leaders.
Uncovering Meaning: The Truth Chain
Many CEOs know their purpose unconsciously but live in a “founder fog.”
Pete developed the Truth Chain exercise to help leaders uncover their “true story”—a concentrated truth in just a few words that resonates deeply with customers.
Example: A client’s meaning was “Shift Left,” a well-known but rarely achieved software testing practice, which became their rallying point and transformed their growth.
Deploying Meaning
Once meaning is clear, leaders must install it into the company by removing distractions and misaligned activities.
Pete uses the Gap Map Act process: mapping the customer journey, comparing ideal vs. current reality, and identifying blocks.
Success comes from focusing on a few top priorities, not adding more to the plate.
Scaling Meaning
With meaning embedded, companies can scale by becoming the only alternative for their bullseye customer.
This requires:
Market singularity: Leaning into what makes them uniquely valuable.
Thought leadership: Painting a vision for the future of the market, not just selling products.
Example: Mike shares how his podcast’s focus on leadership teams attracted a client without needing to “sell” them.
Sustaining Meaning
Long-term success requires meaning to live beyond the CEO.
Sustaining meaning is about embedding it in culture, structure, and succession planning.
CEOs must prepare for transitions—whether retirement, sale, or leadership change—so the company’s truth survives.
Leadership Team Alignment
The truth must be CEO-led, not created by committee.
Involvement of key partners or lieutenants is valuable, but clarity comes from the top.
Leaders who don’t fully buy into the meaning become misaligned and may need to exit the team—good people, wrong fit.
How Pete Helps Clients
Works primarily with accidental CEOs—engineers, scientists, or policy experts who become leaders through their technical mastery.
Focus areas: leadership, strategy, alignment, culture, and growth.
Uses 90-day growth sprints: one month of intensive work to clarify, followed by two months of guided implementation.
Special resources available at https://www.b2b-clarity.com/team/
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Mike Goldman (00:03)
What happens when a brilliant tech founder suddenly becomes the CEO and realizes they're in over their head? Today's guest, Pete Stegge, knows that story well. He's a growth strategist and founder of B2B Clarity, where he helps accidental CEOs, I hadn't heard that term before, technical experts turn leaders, gain radical clarity, lead with purpose, and accelerate business growth.
His book, Radical Clarity, offers a roadmap for technical leaders ready to step fully into their CEO role. Get ready for practical insights on leadership, growth, and scaling with intention. Pete, welcome to the show.
Pete Steege (00:44)
Mike, it's so great to be here. Thanks for having me today.
Mike Goldman (00:47)
Let's start where I always start. Pete, from all of your experience, I guess, as a CEO and now working with leaders and organizations, what do you believe is the one most important characteristic of a great leadership team?
Pete Steege (01:03)
Mike, thinking about this, what I wanna say is ⁓ shared meaning. And I believe that's the most important thing because at the end of the day, I believe leadership teams that work are teams that are ⁓ working towards something bigger than them individually. And when they have agreed together with the CEO, and I'm a big believer in the CEO driving this, but when that team all knows the same truth about
why they're there, what the company's real destination is, it totally transforms the dynamics, especially as they scale. When things grow and grow, they don't unravel because everybody can have that common touchstone to be going the same way.
Mike Goldman (01:48)
So let's dig, I want to dig into this a little bit and I want to, where I intended to go next is I want to dig into your background a little bit and talk about accidental CEO and your experience and what you learned. But you said something really important there in shared meaning that I want to drill into. So shared meaning, it sounds like a part of what you mean is the purpose of the organization. Why do we exist and do we all share that?
Help me understand that's something I work with my clients on all the time, but I use this show to get free coaching. So you're to give me free coaching right now is when you are when you're working with your clients and you sometimes you get that leader that says, come on, who are we kidding? You know, the reason why we're in business is to make money. Like, let's not let's not be as each other. We're in it to make money.
Pete Steege (02:25)
Ha
Mike Goldman (02:42)
You know, A, how do you respond to that? And B, is there a method you use to help organizations go from what they do to why they do it?
Pete Steege (02:55)
Yeah, so a couple of comments, great question. If they come back and say, Pete, that's not the way the world works, right? It's about the money, it's about quarterly results. I'll work, I'll talk with them further about it, but if that's where they are, I can't really help them because I am a believer that meaning is really an essential key ingredient to successful companies. And that CEO
owning that and understanding the importance of that. That makes it work. And hopefully we'll get into some of the reasons why I think that's true. And then what was the other, what was the last question you asked? yeah, yeah. Yep. Yep.
Mike Goldman (03:31)
How do you get there? Like when you talk about meaning, when you talk about why we exist, how
do you help your clients? And some of them maybe you work with and they've got it, they already know it, it's why they were founded. But I imagine most struggle with a little bit as my clients do. So how do you help them come up with that meaning?
Pete Steege (03:42)
Yeah. Right.
desk.
More often than not, I think they know it unconsciously. The CEOs know it, but they haven't brought it to the surface, not only for their team, even for themselves. I like to say they're in a founder fog. And that's a problem where they have a vague vision. They feel it in their gut, but they haven't quantified it. They haven't made it really crystal clear.
So the first thing we do, we work together is we go through an exercise I call the truth chain. And that's a process and the goal is to get to what I call their true story. And the true story is it's not a tagline, but it's two or three or maybe five words that when you say those words to your target audience, they go, my gosh, where have you been? This is just what we need. That's enough, right? There's a really
⁓ concentrated truth to what they do. So to do that, we go through a truth chain exercise and briefly the way that works, the real issue is one of translation. They have a vision for what they do because accidental CEOs are technical experts or domain experts, right? They're really good at this thing. That brought them to be the leader of this organization. The problem with that is they often have a
bias towards, know, what if I just tell people the good news about what we can do? ⁓ my gosh, you know, build it and they will come that whole thing is it's real, right, especially with accidental CEOs. So what we have to do is translate from what we do to how I can help you. Right. And to do that, we what I call it's build a chain and the top of the chain, it's five links in the chain, the top of the chain is the target accounts, the
Mike Goldman (05:37)
you
Pete Steege (05:37)
who you're
targeting. And I call it a bullseye customer, not a target customer, because it's the sharper you can be about it, the more specific, the better. The bottom chain, I'll link in the chain, is your business. This thing you created and why you created it. So the very first, some companies know both of those things, but Mike, you'd be surprised how many of my clients aren't clear on that target customer because they don't want to exclude people, right?
That limits their, in their view, limits their opportunity. And I found the opposite is true. Right? So the first thing is to sharpen that. And then what we said, why are we here? What, what. Incented you to start this company or become leader of this company, right? What is that? And the leadership team is part of this conversation. Right? So who are we from those two links? The next two links take us closer to that key linchpin link in the middle from the customer. It's.
Okay, we know who they are. What are the things that the burning issues that are keeping them up at night that are relevant to us? Right? So understanding the pain that's top of mind for them. Cause you don't want to, that's what they will hear anything about that pain, solving that pain. And from the company, the next step is, okay, we know why we're here. What is it that gives us the right to do this? What, what's special about our organization? What are the things we do?
that make us able to do. Part of it's a product, but it might be the people, might be the location, it might be the business model, whatever it might be, right? When we have that, then it's a pretty easy step to say, okay, what connects our superpower with their burning issues? And that is the nugget of truth. Again, hopefully it's a couple words that says, here's how we can help you with that pain that...
is top of mind for you. And that's the beginning of your conversation from then on. I guess I'll stop there. That's the answer to your question. That's how we get to that.
Mike Goldman (07:37)
No, I,
I love that. And it sounds like what we're doing. And I'm going to, this is a phrase I, I, you know, I don't use the truth chain and now I may, I may give you credit and use it because I really like it. But, but that, that middle, that, that third link on the chain that you're talking about that we're trying to get to, it's almost like saying, you know, what, what's, what's the biggest challenge our target client has our bullseye client has, what's the biggest challenge they have that
we solve better than anybody else. it sounds like if you can understand that from those first two links and then the last two links, that's the middle, that's beautiful. That's beautiful. Excellent. So yeah.
Pete Steege (08:16)
Yes. And it amplifies
your purpose, right? Because now it's not just your idea that, we could do this for the world. It's like, we see the people we can help. And that helps not just your marketing, it helps your team. Your team rallies around that truth as well.
Mike Goldman (08:32)
Yeah, as well well your client. That's great. So I want to step back and hear a little bit about your story. So you talk about being an accidental CEO tech founder suddenly became CEO. Tell me a little bit about that story.
Pete Steege (08:48)
I like to say I'm a rewired engineer. So I started as an electrical engineer at IBM and deep in the bowels of a chip factory near where you live and loved building things, right? just, that was my passion. Over my career, I shifted, I learned over time that my desire to build was actually more satisfied closer to the customer side of things. So I became, I had a career where I worked in growing companies.
⁓ from different aspects, different parts of the company, big company, small companies all over the world. After decades of that, five years ago, I kind of had a, a switch in my head say, you know what? I've got a lot of stuff I can, I've learned a lot about what works and doesn't work in these technology companies. Cause my whole career has been in these technology companies and there's
There's the people that are unique, these accidental CEOs that are so technical, but the companies have some unique dynamics as well. For example, so many of them, or small, have an existential pivot that they're dealing with. Big change in technology and we have to reinvent ourselves. It happens over and over and again and it's hard to do. So all this opportunity I had to help, I created the company B2B Clarity to...
help CEOs that are these accidental CEOs navigate both their leadership skills as well as their functional skills, strategic planning as well as marketing, everything, so that they can grow their companies, which is often like one of the number one goals for them.
Mike Goldman (10:28)
And when we talk about your methodology, your book, Radical Clarity, your background is technology. You work with a lot of technical CEOs, these accidental CEOs. But am I right in thinking that these ideas, while they may have spawned from a certain place, are these ideas specific to
Accidental CEOs that are tech CEOs or might any CEO get value from this?
Pete Steege (10:58)
Yeah, know accidental CEOs better than I do others, but what I've seen is we've tapped into some truths here for sure, some universal truths, which I hope we get into, but meaning is one of them. The import how meaning makes companies work because relationships are at the core of every B2B business and relationships come when...
the two sides have a reason to invest time and that's what meaning does for them
Mike Goldman (11:26)
Yeah, I absolutely think so. So if you're not a tech CEO or a wannabe tech CEO, don't don't turn this off. There's going to be a lot of value for you there, too. So I want to dive in and I'm sensing we probably already dove into to one of these, maybe the first one. But I know in your book you talk about there's these four different waves uncover your meeting, deploy your meeting, meaning, scale your meaning and sustain your meaning. Give us give us a high level. What what are
Pete Steege (11:33)
Right.
Mike Goldman (11:55)
What are the waves and why are they important? And then maybe we'll drill into a few of these.
Pete Steege (12:02)
Yeah, and we talked about the first one, which is uncovering your meaning. And that's the truth chain is an example of that. I believe that the power of meaning comes when the CEO uses it as the foundation for the business. And for accidental CEOs, especially, but for all CEOs, there's so much going on. You mentioned the profit ⁓ motive and the pressure.
But there's all the activities, there's all the things that you might think you should do, there's what your competition's doing. It's easy to lose your focus. And I found that when you start with uncovering that meaning in the first way, before you try to do anything, first get clear with you and your team on why we're here. And when it's simple, like we talked about, it's easy to come back to, it's easy for people to remember, right? So that's the first. ⁓
wave. The second wave of meaning is now once you're clear on it and maybe your leadership or least key parts of your leadership team is part of that, you need to deploy that meaning into your business. Install it, right? And that comes from I see so many CEOs that the solution to their problem is not doing more things. It's not the things we add to their
projects, it's the things we remove. So often installing meaning starts with kind of a blank slate view of the business to say, okay, if we say that's where we're going, and we say this is our value and who it's for, what is in the way of that? Right? So rather than adding on, look for the things that are blocking. And the exercise I love to use there is
where we go through the customer journey. It's called the Gap Map Act process. And we look at that bullseye customers experience with us. Part of us understanding who we're gonna help, we have an image of what that looks like from how they meet us, where they meet us, how we go through a relationship and they trust us enough to buy from us, they use our product, et cetera, right? That whole path. We map that out.
with the way, the aspirational way we see it working, right? Then we go back through and say, okay, each of those steps, where's it at today? What's that experience look like today? And it's very sobering, right? It's an eye-opening experience. Some places, they're not too bad, but there's other places where, yeah, we want them to, this to happen, or we want this experience to happen, and it's not bad at all, or there's friction, or there's a block.
They may even be going around that. So I found that by doing that exercise, which is really auditing, it's doing a gap analysis on your business based on your ability to deliver that truth, that surfaces the priorities for the business. And I'm a big fan of a CEO and leadership team having a very small number of top priorities, two or three.
Yes, there are other things that have to be done to keep the lights on, but often they're spending way too much time on those lights on things and they need to really carve out time for those two or three initiatives that are going to make their vision a reality.
Mike Goldman (15:32)
Yeah, that's it's so important because I, you know, I, when I tell my clients is every time I get together with them, they're adding things to their to do list. And, you know, there's an exercise, a lot of folks do very simple one called the start, stop, keep, or start, stop, continue. And I don't do that exercise. I do a simplified version of it because I think they're starting things all the time. They don't need an exercise to start more stuff. So what I just do, you know, that start, stop, keep, I turn it into.
a stop exercise because we're always adding things. When do we stop and say, wait a minute, let's stop to think about what we ought to stop doing. So I want to rewind us for a second. we talked about uncover your meeting and that's kind of what we started with. You're now taking us through deploy your meeting and that gap exercise. But I think what might be helpful, let's rewind to the uncover your meeting for a second before we go to the remaining.
Pete Steege (16:01)
Nice.
Mike Goldman (16:29)
different waves, but give us an example. When we say meaning, took us through, you took us through the truth chain and that was super helpful. But when, when we say meaning, give us, and it could be a real example from a client or make one up or whatever you want to do. But what's an example of that meaning? Like it could be a word, it could be a phrase, it could be a sentence, but what's an example of that?
Pete Steege (16:56)
I'll give you a real example from a client. They were a small software test engineering services company. So there was three partners and they had a superpower of solving the gnarliest complex enterprise level software test problems that were out there. And there are a lot of big ones. The people they could help were companies with a thousand software engineers, Fortune.
100 companies that had a software division, let's say, something like that. The problem was, they were three partners, they'd come out of corporate, they'd learned a lot, but they didn't know how to approach, let alone win, an enterprise client, right? They had a million dollars in revenue because they had some people that knew them in the corporations that had worked with them, right? So they came to me because
they needed a way to go from, yeah, we're working for people that know us to how do I win enterprise accounts? Because they're really good at this. So when we looked at their world, what we found, their true story, kind of to short circuit this, is two words, shift left. You might say, why that? Turns out in the software test space, there's a best practice, an ideology, almost like agile.
that is called shift left. It's essentially you need to bake testing in at the very beginning. That's the essential strategy. And because it's so well known for decades, all of the executives in these companies know very well the term and that it's kind of an ideal state. But they also know that they've never achieved it. And it's the unattainable perfect state, right? It just turned out that our clients, my client,
That was essentially their special sauce was making that real. So by saying shift left done right, they could travel through these enterprise organizations without being there with that story. ⁓ who are these guys? they do shift left. And within four months, they land in a multimillion dollar fortune 50 account because that story did the work for them. And
internally having that clarity, again just two words, really encapsulated their purpose, right? Why are we here? We do shift left, that's what we do. You can just imagine how that affects who you hire, it affects how you organize, it affects your messaging. It was just a great tool for them to build this team and scale the business and it's growing, it's a rapid race.
⁓ rapid rate today.
Mike Goldman (19:39)
I love that and I imagine the difficult thing and I don't know if these three founders had a difficult time with this, but when you figure that out and I was just, just working with a new client yesterday, so this is fresh in my mind that I'm gonna change the story to kind of protect the innocent here and not give away stuff from my client, but they were founded by working with a certain
type of company, their B2B company, and they were working with a certain type of company. And that was what they were all about. That was their why, was all about working with these specific companies and helping them. And over the last few years, they've had a lot of other opportunities come their way, which is brought in revenue and profitable revenue. But they chased those opportunities, won those opportunities.
But when we went back and said, okay, why do you exist? Who are you as a company? What's your purpose? They went back to the old purpose that they were founded upon. And I said, well, wait a minute. You just told me you're building with this whole other area. Yeah, we are, but you know, everything doesn't have to align with the purpose, does it? And I was like, well, yeah, it really should. That needs to be your North Star. And if you're doing something that's...
not consistent with who you are, we better question why the hell you're doing it. So it seems like, ⁓ shift left, done right, that's great, let's do it. But sometimes that comes with some really hard decisions to bypass some business that's out there waiting for you, but it may not be the right business for you.
Pete Steege (21:11)
Totally.
Yes.
Many of my clients have that issue of, and you can understand it, right? You're the CEO and you do have to grow, right? You do have to bring in revenue and you have to keep your team busy and all those things. But saying no is an important component of success here and being willing to take the hard path within reason. Totally get that sometimes you do something, but
To your point, it doesn't sound like they are viewing it as a temporary, you know, filling a gap, they're more of a, and no offense to them, but more of a lazy decision to say, there's money there.
Mike Goldman (21:58)
Hey, wait a minute, you're insulting my
client. No, and it's a tough thing, right? And at that point, you could either say, hey, we've got to go back to who we really are and we shouldn't be doing that work anymore. Or you could say, hey, maybe who we are has changed. And while that's OK, I would imagine you probably feel like I do, where if who you are changes every two or three years, you got a problem.
Pete Steege (22:02)
Yeah, it's tough.
Yes, one or the other.
Totally
agree. I like to say that who you are can evolve, but it shouldn't change.
Mike Goldman (22:28)
Yeah, I like that. I like that. Okay, so you've given us a great example of uncovering your meaning. Deploying your meaning, part of that is about the gap analysis and that journey, understanding what are the things we shouldn't be doing anymore, types of business, types of clients. That's deploy your meaning, right? Now, what's the third wave?
Pete Steege (22:50)
Third wave is scaling your meaning. And that is now taking that meaning that you've installed in your company and going public with it, right? Spreading it into the world, sharing the good news of what you do. The good news is you already know, you've got, it doesn't have to change. If you found that real truth, it's just another way to say what you're already using internally, right? That's the power of it. You're not looking for another story.
There's two really key tools I found that make this the most successful. And the goal here, in my opinion, is market leadership. One is what I call market singularity. I believe that any company with a true value, that's identified a true value, can be the only alternative for their target customer for the thing that they do. And...
There's a guy named Chris Lockhead, wrote some books. I don't know if you're familiar with him, but he calls it category leadership. But the idea is you have these unique things that you do, and it's for this very specific group of people. Lean into that and be the only alternative for that.
Mike Goldman (23:58)
so we've talked about uncover your meaning, deploy your meaning, great example of that that's helpful. What's the third wave?
Pete Steege (24:06)
The third wave is scale your meaning. And that is to take what you've installed into your team and now go out into the world with it, right? And yes, they're already selling the world, but to reinvent how you go to the market. And there's two really key ideas that are successful with this when I work with accidental CEOs. One is called market singularity. And that's the idea that if you have a real truth,
If you found that real truth and you know exactly who you can help with it, I believe that any company can be the only alternative for that target for what they do. And that they should lean into that special space. And that's important because it's kind of like the opposite of commoditization. Rather than, I'll use the example of the shift left team.
There was nobody else in the market that we saw, big or small, that claimed this ability to realize shift left for these engineers. So let's say you're in this Fortune 50 company and they're trying to decide what to do. They're not saying, okay, well, here's a spreadsheet of the six vendors for the shift left thing we need to do because our team has defined the problem as not having shift left. Rather, they said,
Are we gonna do this shift left thing or not? Right? So that's how, and I believe every company can do that. And when you do that, now it's just a matter of hard work and execution to lead the market because you are by definition the market leader.
Mike Goldman (25:44)
and the sales process becomes a hell of a lot easier to close the deal.
Pete Steege (25:48)
totally. And pricing, every, you know, it helps margins. It helps in so many ways. And by the way, it just reinforces in every transaction, it reinforces your meaning, your purpose, right? Cause that's, that's what you, that's what you're talking about. The second piece that helps with this is thought leadership. I'm a big believer in thought leadership as a, as a strategy. it's a way to, to talk about a future.
without tying it to a product roadmap, right? So there are times when you have to say, here's the product roadmap, and then you have all the quite, when am I gonna get that and this and that versus here's the future of our market. Here's where this market is going, where you need to go. Here's some best practices, some understanding of how it works, some insights, and you're painting a picture for where you're going.
It's where they're going and yet you're not tying it to expectations, right? There's a place for that, but thought leadership gives you the opportunity to paint that picture and maintain that leadership.
Mike Goldman (27:00)
love that, love that and and to and maybe this is going to sound like tooting my own or my own horn which I don't want to do but I think I've got a great personal example of this where my brand is all about creating great leadership teams and most coaches talk about we help your company grow we did but I'm very specifically about creating a great leadership team and one recent client the one recent prospect that became a client
very, very quickly and they sold themselves is because they said, we really need to improve our leadership team in order to grow. What do we do? They did a search, found one podcast, mine, this one focused on building great leadership teams. They listened to about 30 episodes and said, we need to work with this guy. And they basically called me and said, how do we work with you? I didn't need to sell them on anything.
Pete Steege (27:54)
Yes.
See, I love that Mike
Mike Goldman (27:55)
So
it's wonderful when you have that you know that focus
Pete Steege (28:01)
Back to the accidental CEO bias, in their mind so often they think, well yeah, when do I get to explain to them how the product works? And they need to understand that that has a place, but it's so much lower in the priority than they think. And it's later in the sales process. The hard part is the connection. And that comes from back to the, I'm helping you with the problem that's important to you. And thought leadership's perfect.
Mike Goldman (28:30)
Love that, love that. And going out there and getting on stages at industry events and that's beautiful. All right, let's take us to the fourth wave.
Pete Steege (28:40)
All
right, fourth wave is sustain meaning. And the really message there is whether it's 10 years or 50 years, at some point, no matter how much you love this business, you're not gonna be there. And you, you know, it'd be a shame if this thing you created, this value you created ends when you're not there anymore. So what sustaining meaning is is about.
about putting it, not just installing in the business, but putting it in the hearts and in the structure of the business so that this value that you've built as a team lives on after you're gone. So it's a lot about how you organize your team. It's about culture. It's about what I call the finish line. A lot of CEOs, when I talk to them, they have a goal.
And it's tied to that, I call their finish line, whether it's exit or retire or handoff to somebody else on the team, but it's a transition. And the, the business goal that they're striving for is to, to enable that. Right? So part of sustaining your meaning is navigating the finish line that's in front of you and, understanding what to do once you get there, because you know what?
Once you get your finish line, there's another finish line after it. And how do you manage that? So many times CEOs are kind of maybe obsessed with, we're going to go public. And yeah, there's life after you go public too, right? Whether you're in it or not. And how are you going to navigate that too? So it's this whole story or need to manage beyond your timeframe.
Mike Goldman (30:25)
Going back to probably a combination of uncover your meaning and deploy your meaning, those first two waves, I want to relate this to the leadership team, both the CEO and the leadership team.
Is this what when you uncover the meaning? Is it you mentioned it and I'm with you 1000 % that it's super important that this is not a bottoms up kind of exercise. This is a top down exercise. It's gotta be owned by owned by this CEO. Is this typically an exercise that the whole senior leadership team is involved in that kind of, you know, truth chain exercise you took us through? Is that typically?
you sitting down with the CEO and them going through it? Is it the leadership team doing it together? And there may not be one right answer, but what's the typical?
Pete Steege (31:19)
I found Mike, and I'd like your perspective on this too, I found that that line varies on the company on how many people need to be involved with these kinds of conversations. There's a line there where it becomes management by committee and it's really important to avoid crossing that line. So it depends on the company size and everything too, but I've found that I need people in the room that have
the ownership or the perspective that collectively gives the team a complete view of who we help and why we're here. Often, and that's the CEO is the lion's share of that, but sometimes there's partners, sometimes there's a really key lieutenant. There might be a handful. Rarely is it eight people or 10. That's in my experience, for the beginning,
That's too many. Yeah, there might be a little thing they can add, the purpose of the first of discovering it is not buy-in. It's sanity checks. That's where you need the right people in the room, but it's finding it, right? It's uncovering a truth that's there. And I haven't had any, I've never had an issue finding it once we uncovered it. It was there in every case, every client I worked for.
If they have a valid, if they have a business that's working, it's under there somewhere. So it's not, it's not like, yeah, we gotta get more people in the room to figure out what it is we do. No, because that actually is why a lot of these efforts fail because it becomes this committee thing. You you've experienced it. Same with mission statements. That's not what we're talking about. It's not, it's not making it appropriate. It's what's true. It's the truth. That's what we're looking for.
Mike Goldman (33:07)
And then what challenges have you seen in, know, let's assume it is the CEO and maybe a lieutenant or a couple of, you know, partners, you know, it's not, as you said, you know, maybe there are six or seven people on that senior leadership team that all report up to the CEO, but maybe it's the CEO and one or two other, you know, folks who could think that strategically and they get together and figure this out.
share it with the senior leadership team. Maybe they throw some darts, but ultimately this is it, or maybe they tweak it. What have you seen is helpful in making sure the leadership team is not, doesn't just understand this. Well, one of the things I believe about company vision and this meaning as part of that vision, one of the things I believe is that your leadership team,
Pete Steege (33:42)
It's tweaked.
Mike Goldman (34:04)
needs to understand your vision, but that's not enough. They need to. Not just buy into the vision, they need to be evangelists of that vision, and if they're not evangelists, they don't belong on the team. They may not be bad people, but they're a bad fit for your team. So what have you seen great CEOs do to help get everybody on board so they are passionate about it?
Pete Steege (34:13)
Yep. Yep. Yep.
Mike Goldman (34:29)
including when they might need to make the tough decision to say, this is a good person, but this is not someone who believes what we believe. So they're not a good fit.
Pete Steege (34:38)
So it starts with the truth, uncovering the real truth. It can't be made up. It can't be what we want it to be. So that's the first thing. When it's true, it has to be that first. But when it is, the next important thing is the CEO has to be committed 100%, totally committed. And it shows, right? If they really are committed, they're not just saying the right things, they really believe it.
that will be persuasive in its own way. If it's true, if the leadership team gets the signal that yes, this is us, this is what we're gonna do from the CEO, then if they're not on board.
Yeah, you have an issue, right? Because you're not gonna change the truth of who you are to convince somebody to come along. It's not a compromise. It's absolutely worth conversation and explanation and encouragement. But at the end of the day, if they're not on board, I totally agree with you and I've seen it happen. This surfaces alignment issues.
And if one of two things happens, they have emotional maturity or, you know, emotional quotient that they're able to say, I don't really, I didn't really get it at first, but explain it to me. Cause I understand that's where we're going. I want to, if they want to, right. Great. Or they, they can't right. Or they don't either way, whether it's either a maturity issue or a, you know,
character issue or they're just going a different direction. Nothing wrong with that. You need to know this is a time to know it, right? This clarity of alignment is another way you're gonna be successful. It surfaces that.
Mike Goldman (36:26)
The same
way you need to say no to priorities and initiatives that don't fit with that truth, you gotta say no to people that don't fit with the truth. And they're not bad people, just, they're just not a great fit.
Pete Steege (36:34)
Yes.
I imagine there's, you've had several guests and maybe in your work you talk about the, you know, the right people on the bus conversation and that there's people in organizations that I think we've all lived with that are capable on paper at their job, but they're sapping the spirit of the organization, right? There's a ⁓ negative energy thing going on that gets overlooked often. This process is a way to...
⁓ identify that maybe make that a little more clear.
Mike Goldman (37:13)
Excellent. So as we start to wrap up, Pete, tell me a little bit about the types of clients you work with. maybe it is just to now. Now, I absolutely see what we talked about it about today is relevant for every CEO and every company and every leadership team. But tell me specifically who are the types of clients you work with and how do you work with them?
Pete Steege (37:39)
So, accidental engineers is my thing. Talk about focus. Those are my peeps. And the way I define them are they're either engineers or scientists. They might be policy wonks. They have this domain expertise that they had maybe part of a career and they're really, really good at that. And they wake up one day and they're in the CEO seat, however they got there, because of their technical expertise. And they need help.
being excelling as a CEO with leadership, strategy, alignment, culture, and growth, right? Growth strategies. And so I work with them on those five areas. we do some of the work we talked about here today, but we also do strategic planning on, you know, given those priorities and those focus areas, how do you organize the business to make that work? So we help them.
achieve the finish line that they have, whatever that might be.
Mike Goldman (38:33)
And is it typically more project work where you're going to go in for X number of months and do this amount of work, or is it more of an ongoing relationship?
Pete Steege (38:44)
That's a great question. I have found over the five years, I found my optimum way of helping these clients. And it's what I call is a growth sprint. It's typically 90 days and it starts with one month intensive and we spend a lot of time together and we come up with the thing that the kind of the next level of awareness and understanding wherever they are and what we can do in the next 60 days to implement that.
And then I spend 60 days guiding them through implementation of that, them and their team. That 90 days, that sprint I found is just a maximum value because then it might be four sprints, it might be one sprint, but we do them one at a time. And then after that 90 days is done, we start again, the whiteboard clean and say, okay, now where are we? And what's the next sprint look like?
I found that process is the maximum way to ⁓ grow a CEO.
Mike Goldman (39:42)
If people want to find out more about you and how you can help them and maybe more about your book, and I recommend everybody read the book, but if people want to find out more about you, where should they go?
Pete Steege (39:54)
Mike I've got some resources that I'd love to share with your audience. I think they're as you said not just accidental CEOs I think they'll be value for everybody. I'm putting them on a page just for your audience on my website it'll be at b2b-clarity.com/team and They'll be able to do an accidental CEO audit online audit where I'll send them a report on kind of their gaps They'll be frameworks from the book. They'll be able to order the book from there
And also if they just want to talk to me, there'll be a place for them to schedule a meeting with me as well.
Mike Goldman (40:27)
Beautiful, beautiful. Thank you for doing that and creating a special place for that. Well, I always say if you want a great company, you need a great leadership team. Pete, thanks so much for helping us get there today.
Pete Steege (40:39)
Thank you, Mike.