The CEO Under Siege
Some weeks, a CEO is fighting a war on every front. A deadline slipped and two functions are blaming each other. The board wants a straight answer no one can give. A good team has gone silent, and a fresh problem is smoking before lunch. Put one fire out and two take its place. It stops feeling like leading and starts feeling like a siege. The fires themselves are seldom the problem. Once the connections become visible, the war on every front, the fires that keep returning, and the exhaustion behind them turn into one problem instead of ten.
CEO Brief: In a study that measured stress directly, people were most on edge when the odds of a painful outcome sat at a coin toss, and calmer when the outcome was certain (de Berker et al., Nature Communications, 2016). The body reacts to not-knowing, and a CEO who cannot tell where the next fire will land sits near the top of that curve. Living close to uncertainty is part of leading a growing company. The siege comes from the relationship to it, the reflex to fight the not-knowing, plus the fog a company makes when no one can see who owns what.
Why does it feel like a war on every front?
Because the fights feel personal, and most of them are not. When a company is small, everyone sees how the work connects, and coordination happens in the hallway. Past a certain size that picture disappears. Handoffs cross functions that no longer sit together, and no one holds the whole map. What used to be a quick conversation becomes a collision wearing somebody's face.
That is why the peer who seems territorial and the team that seems resistant can both be symptoms of the same invisible structure. Simons and Peterson studied 70 senior teams and found that when trust is low, task conflict, the ordinary friction of the work, gets misread as relationship conflict, the personal kind (Simons & Peterson, Journal of Applied Psychology, 2000). The disagreement was structural. It got filed as a grudge, which is why the same cross-team conflict keeps resurfacing no matter how often the people involved try to clear the air.
Underneath most of these collisions sits a plain question no one can answer cleanly: who owns this? In one company Rogers and Blenko describe, asked who decided a single product feature, 77% of product developers and 61% of marketers each said the call was theirs (Harvard Business Review, 2006). Ownership that overlaps like that guarantees a fight, and the fight looks like a personality clash to everyone standing in it, when the real fault line was a design nobody had drawn.
Why do the fires keep multiplying?
Because firefighting treats the fire and never the wiring. A fire fought without seeing what it is attached to leaves the attachment intact to spark again elsewhere. This is the Hydra problem: cut off one head and two grow back, because the trouble was never a single head.
A physical limit makes it worse. Working memory holds only about four things at once (Cowan, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2001). A web of owners, handoffs, and dependencies does not fit in four slots, so a CEO holding it all in their head is dropping most of it. Attention goes to the loudest fire while its cause sits in the dark.
The load lands on one nervous system: the leader becomes the integration layer the organization never built, absorbing complexity the structure should be carrying. On the surface they look composed. Underneath, the body runs that same uncertainty calculation on a loop, and it drains in a way sleep does not fix. This is where a capable leader starts to doubt themselves, reading the depletion as a personal failing rather than the ordinary cost of carrying an unmapped system. The tiredness is real, and the mind offers it as proof the person is failing, the one conclusion it does not support.
What actually ends the siege?
The siege lifts when the structure becomes visible, because a shared picture turns guesswork into something a person can act on. It never removes uncertainty, and it does not need to. It clears the fog a company makes for itself, the not-knowing that exists only because no one wrote down who owns what. Fighting harder cannot draw that map, and one more all-hands about accountability leaves the wiring untouched. The move is smaller and more concrete than it sounds: put the real picture on one page, in the present tense.
Present tense is the piece that usually gets skipped. The exercise drifts into history, relitigating who dropped what months ago, which settles nothing and reopens old wounds. The only questions that move anything are current ones: the status right now, who owns each piece, what is actually blocking what, and the one ask that would unblock it. A shared map like that does two jobs at once. It closes the accountability gaps behind the collisions and lifts the weight off the leader's head back onto the system, the only thing large enough to hold it.
The map also has to sit at the right altitude. A senior audience acts on ownership, structure, and a clear request; a hundred rows of detail give them nothing to hold. Piling on detail is its own failure of clarity, and it is the reflex leaders reach for when they feel exposed. Show less, and show the connections. With that in view, the fires stop looking like ten separate wars; most share a source, and a source can be fixed once.
3Peak Wisdom
Nobody signs up to run a war on every front, and no leader earns this by being weak. The siege is what an unmapped organization feels like from the inside, especially for a conscientious leader who keeps absorbing the gaps because someone has to. Relief comes from two moves, and neither is a victory. The first clears the fog the company made for itself: the picture goes on one page, and the question shifts from who is to blame to what do we actually know now. The second is quieter. A growing company is never done being uncertain, so the deeper change is how a CEO meets the not-knowing, holding it steadily instead of going to war with it. The exhaustion was always in the fight to escape the unknown, and that fight cannot be won. The turn usually comes from one small, visible decision made in the present. What would change if you stopped fighting the not-knowing and started drawing the map that connects the fires?
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does leading suddenly feel like fighting fires on every front?
Usually because the company outgrew the point where everyone could see how the work connected. Once handoffs cross functions that no longer sit together, and no one holds the whole map, ordinary coordination turns into collision. The fires feel personal and unrelated, yet most trace back to one thing nobody can see cleanly: who owns what, and what depends on what.
Is feeling this overwhelmed a sign I am not cut out to be the CEO?
Rarely. Research on stress finds that uncertainty activates people more than difficulty does, so a leader who cannot see where the next problem will come from carries a nervous-system load unrelated to capability. The overwhelm is information about an unmapped structure. It reads as a verdict on the person, but it describes the terrain they are crossing.
How do I tell a structural problem from a personal one?
Look at repetition. A personal issue tends to be specific and resolvable, while a structural one keeps returning in different faces regardless of who is involved. If the same conflict recurs across different people, or two capable functions keep colliding at the same seam, the fault line is in the design rather than the personalities. Structural problems survive every honest conversation.
How do I stop the fires from multiplying?
Stop fighting them one at a time and make the structure visible instead. On a single page, in the present tense, lay out the current status, who owns each piece, what is blocking what, and the one specific ask that would unblock it. A fire fought without seeing its wiring leaves the cause intact to spark again elsewhere. A shared, current map lets you find the shared source and fix it once.
