The real job of a CEO: Inside The Movemeon Group's fireside chat with Steve Vamos

Managing egos, and the cost of self-interest

Asked how to have the difficult conversations that suboptimising a function requires, Steve turned to Patrick Lencioni's work on self-centredness versus service orientation. Most executives, in a normal, non-threatened environment, will step up for the good of the whole. A few won't, and they're often very good at their jobs, which makes it harder.

He shared two personal stories: a talented Xero executive he ultimately had to move on, not because he was wrong, but because he wasn't right for that moment in the company's life; and a brilliant executive on his team who reacted badly to any challenge, until a conversation uncovered why and who, once she became conscious of the trigger, changed her behaviour so completely that she went on to become a CEO herself.

The thread through both: self-awareness is the precondition for everything else on this list.

Picking your battles, and the discipline of saying no

Rich raised the advice he was given early on: write the email, don't send it, 95% of the fights aren't yours to have. Steve agreed, tying it to the discipline he most admired in Steve Jobs' return to Apple: not the innovation the world remembers, but the operational courage to kill products and be laser-focused.

"Focus is about saying no. And the challenge is you're saying no to good people with good ideas."

The trap, as Steve described it, is giving everyone a little instead of giving a few enough, and it's compounded by the fact that people underestimate how rarely their priorities actually land. Repetition matters, but slogans don't survive contact with reality; leaders need to stay in the detail of execution, not just the campaign around it.

What actually stands out on the path to the top

Asked what differentiates people heading toward senior leadership, Steve's answer had nothing to do with pedigree: people who genuinely care about the organisation's success, and people who are good at change. He pointed to Rachel Powell, his former head of HR at Xero, later CEO of Magentus, who saw the need for a founder-to-CEO transition at Xero years before anyone else did, and who quietly engineered it.

Being good at change, Steve argued, is a personal discipline before it's a professional one: recognising fear, ego and conditioning in the moment, and choosing to pause and respond differently. On AI specifically, his advice was to let go of the illusion of control and lean into curiosity instead, while dismissing the idea that "we'll all be out of jobs" as nonsense no one can actually substantiate.

Self-awareness across the company lifecycle

A question from the floor, what makes a good CEO across a company's different phases, from founder to scale-up to maturity, drew one of the evening's most personal stories. Steve described advising Xero founder Rod Drury for around eighteen months, working through how product decisions, strategy planning and marketing operations needed to change as the company scaled. Rather than Steve pushing for a bigger role, Rod got there first: he told Steve he'd realised he wasn't the right person to take Xero to its next stage, that the company needed someone who liked process and people development in ways he didn't, and that Steve should be the one to do it.

What made it work, in Steve's telling, was that Rod had never built Xero to be an extension of himself. He built it to be a global tech company with New Zealand values, and because the company was never about him personally, he could recognise, objectively, when it was time to step back and hand over.

A simple framework for career decisions

Prompted for the career-planning framework he's shared with many in Movemeon's network, Steve laid out the questions an outplacement agency once took him through in his own career transition:

• What do you love, and what do you know, about work?
• What are your skills and strengths, and where do you need to develop?
• What are your criteria for the next move: family, location, money, position, the nature of the company?
• What pathways are realistically open to you, and what would each demand of you?
• Do you actually have access to this path, and what's the learning curve to get there?

Rich added three of his own observations from working across The Movemeon Group's network: 1) take stock deliberately once a year rather than drifting; 2) be realistic about the next move rather than the long-term aspiration - career change is a game of chess, not a leap; and 3) be explicit about what you're willing to compromise, and for how long, because a step that looks like a step back is often the fastest route forward.

Holding the line, and knowing when to let go

On knowing when to persevere versus change course entirely, Steve was candid that there's no formula - only judgment sharpened by experience, and a refusal to fall in love with anything. He described killing Xero products with loyal followings once it was clear they didn't belong in the company's long-term future, not because the diagnosis was hard, but because making the call was.

Rich connected this to a conversation with Nicola Mendelsohn, former CEO of Meta in the UK, who argued the core of the CEO role is the ability to make decisions on imperfect data, continuously, and that postponing a decision is often worse than making the wrong one.

The human side of disruption

Asked what qualities leaders need most as change accelerates, Steve was direct: technology has never disrupted an industry, people have. The gap between how leaders think and what technology now enables is widening, and the only way to close it is to double down on the human elements of leadership: mindset, honesty, and the willingness to have difficult conversations, because change happens through words and nothing else.

Rich cited Kate Smaje again: that for every dollar invested in AI technology, organisations need three to four dollars invested in their people to see it show up on the top and bottom line, and that the most forward-thinking Chief HR Officers are now spending the bulk of their time thinking about how they manage an increasingly "agentic" workforce.

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Two things Steve believes remain distinctly human, at least for now: accountability, and the capacity to benefit from outcomes in a real, material sense.

Closing thoughts

Closing the evening, Richard Whiteoak drew a direct line between Steve's themes and Whiteoak's own experience backing founders through leadership transitions - including a recent CEO placement, sourced through The Movemeon Group, that transformed one of their portfolio companies. He offered a simple illustration: of two similarly successful restaurant-chain founders he'd recently met, the one who invested was the one who was open to the idea that something might need to change, not the one who insisted everything was already perfect.

It was, fittingly, a note that echoed the evening's central idea. The best leaders aren't the ones with the most answers. They're the ones most willing to keep changing.

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The Movemeon Group will be running more events like this one. If you'd like to hear about upcoming fireside chats, or want to learn more about OnUpBeyond coaching programme, get in touch with the team.

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