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CEOs

Why CEOs Can Lose Touch With Everyday Life—and How to Stay Grounded

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CEOs can lose touch with employees and customers without making a deliberate choice to change. In Nitin Nohria’s account, the shift often happens gradually: accommodations that solve real problems accumulate, others defer more readily, and what once felt exceptional starts to seem ordinary. The result is a leadership bubble that can make everyday expectations harder to see.

How a CEO’s sense of normal can change

Nohria illustrates the shift with an unnamed CEO he met at a workshop. Shortly after taking the role, the executive apologized for arriving late after waiting at a taxi stand, picked up his used coffee cup and said the Four Seasons felt too fancy. Five years later, staff had arranged a suite, gathered detailed food and wine preferences, secured a private room for calls, and organized chauffeured transport with a bodyguard and chief of staff. He arrived late again, but did not apologize. Nohria presents this as an illustrative observation, not evidence of how CEOs generally behave.

The point is not that every accommodation is indulgent or that a leader’s character must have changed. It is that repeated adjustments can reset expectations. When an organization continually bends around one person, the CEO may become less aware of the time, inconvenience and ordinary constraints experienced by everyone else.

Why the executive bubble forms

Convenience becomes the default

CEO schedules can be demanding, and travel creates pressure to save time. Nohria notes that private aviation can become easy to rationalize in that context. But when every arrangement is optimized around the CEO, other people’s time and needs can become secondary by default.

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Emotional strain narrows the room for candor

Leaders are expected to project confidence through uncertainty, reassure employees and make painful decisions, including closing businesses or conducting layoffs. One CEO described the burden to Nohria as “emotional asymmetry”: taking in other people’s emotions while having little room to express one’s own. Nohria suggests that this burden can contribute to a feeling of being owed special treatment.

An unnamed CEO put the constant mental load this way: “Even when I’m not working,” one told us, “I’m thinking about work.” That quotation is an anecdote, not a measure of every executive’s experience.

Security measures can become customary

Some security arrangements are sensible when a leader faces a real threat. Nohria refers to bodyguards, armored vehicles and private air travel, and notes the December 2024 killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. His concern is not that safeguards are inherently unreasonable; it is that a measure first adopted as an exception can later feel essential without anyone revisiting why it remains in place.

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Deference changes the social environment

Nohria draws on Harvard colleague Rakesh Khurana’s idea of “structurally induced narcissism”: attention, adulation and deference can cultivate narcissistic tendencies even in people who did not begin with them. A separate possibility is that people with narcissistic traits may be drawn to leadership roles. These ideas are distinct; Nohria’s warning is that the structure around a CEO can itself shape how a leader sees their place in the world.

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What the workload figure does—and does not—show

Nohria says a minute-by-minute study he coauthored with Michael Porter found that CEOs worked an average of 62.5 hours per week and worked most weekends and vacation days. The Fortune essay does not state the study’s publication year, sample or methodology, so the figure should be read as Nohria’s report of that study, not as a fully specified estimate that can be generalized to every CEO.

Why periodic review matters

Nohria’s historical example is Jack Welch’s GE retirement package, which became public during Welch’s divorce about a quarter-century before the essay. Nohria says the reported benefits included use of an $11 million Manhattan apartment, unlimited company-plane use, a chauffeured limousine, flowers, dry cleaning, wine and premium sports and entertainment seats. According to Nohria, Welch agreed within days to give up most of the benefits and pay for those he retained, while defending the arrangement as legally negotiated and earned. Nohria quotes his defense: “In this particular deal, I sacrificed millions of dollars.”

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The example underscores why boards and senior colleagues should periodically ask whether executive arrangements still serve a purpose. The test is not whether an accommodation looks lavish in isolation. It is whether it continues to address an operational or security need, whether its value is still clear, and whether it is creating needless distance from the people and customers the organization serves. These are useful questions for review, not a validated scoring system.

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How CEOs and boards can help leaders stay grounded

Review accommodations, including the ones that feel routine

Boards and senior colleagues can revisit travel, security and other arrangements on a regular basis. A review creates room to distinguish what remains necessary from what continues mainly because nobody has questioned it. Security decisions should take actual threats into account rather than treating all protection as either excessive or automatically justified.

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Ask how a choice looks from outside the executive suite

Nohria recommends that leaders pause and ask: “This may feel normal to me, but how does it look from the outside?” The question can expose a gap between an executive’s intentions and the message an arrangement sends to employees or customers.

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Keep advisers who can disagree safely

A leadership coach, a wise general counsel or CHRO, and people close to frontline work and customers can offer perspectives an executive schedule may screen out. For that counsel to matter, disagreement must be safe—particularly when the adviser’s job depends on the CEO’s goodwill.

Protect relationships that are not about status

Long-standing friendships, family time and activities with people whose lives differ from the CEO’s can help preserve relationships outside work’s hierarchy. Nohria mentions pickup basketball and book clubs as examples. One unnamed CEO described the value of family time: “It’s not about the meal,” he said. “It’s about being reminded that I’m just Dad.”

Choose ordinary arrangements sometimes

Nohria describes a prominent alumnus who rented his own car, parked in the regular lot and ate in the employee cafeteria rather than the executive dining room. The significance is not that these specific choices prove a leader is grounded; it is that ordinary settings can keep leaders in contact with how other people experience the organization.

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These are Nohria’s practical recommendations, not interventions shown in the essay to have been experimentally tested. Their purpose is to make it easier for leaders and those around them to notice when convenience, protection or deference has become separation.

Source

Nitin Nohria, “Nitin Nohria: Why it’s so hard for CEOs to stay grounded,” Fortune, October 3, 2026.

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