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Esther Crew is the founder of Inclusion Live and Performance and Engagement and works directly with PE-backed CEOs and the firms that back them. She has led people at scale across several large organisations, including Morrisons, has worked alongside many PE-backed businesses, and made the move from the corporate world into a PE-backed business herself. She believes what’s possible in a leader is bigger than any assessment predicts.

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There’s a strong piece in the July-August issue of Harvard Business Review, by Samantha Hellauer, Dina Wang, Heidi Smith and Samantha Smith at ghSMART, on what it takes for a corporate leader to succeed as the CEO of a PE-backed business. It’s worth reading. Drawing on assessment data from 491 senior executives, they name five capabilities that predict whether the transition works, and they make a point that matters more than the list itself. When a leader fails to make the predicted leap, it’s rarely for lack of talent. It’s because the capabilities the role demanded were never fully understood or tested, on either side.

We work with PE-backed CEOs and the firms that back them, and I’ve lived this experience. The corporate pipeline into portfolio company leadership is now the majority route, not the exception, which means more first-time PE CEOs are arriving from environments that prepared them for a different job. The article is precise about what changes. The clock starts on day one. Authority is no longer inherited, it’s earned fast. Board contact goes from formal and episodic to direct, with near immediate reads on progress. Talent calls get made at speed with a small margin for error. These are real and they are specific and naming them well is genuinely useful.

Where assessment ends and development begins

Where our work begins is the part the assessment can’t reach. Knowing which five capabilities predict success tells a backer where a leader is strong and where they’re exposed. It doesn’t close the gap. And the article’s own evidence is that few leaders arrive strong across all five, which means selection alone leaves every CEO with something unbuilt at the exact moment the hold period starts counting. The price of play is performance. It gets you considered. What decides the hold period is whether you turn out to be bigger than that.

Capability is built, not found

The question we care about is not whether a CEO can deliver. They wouldn’t be in the conversation if they hadn’t shown they could. It’s who builds the capabilities they haven’t yet had reason to develop, and how. That’s the work we do, and we do it from a particular belief: what’s possible in a leader is bigger than what shows up when you assess them. Given backing and belief, people go further than any evaluation predicts. That isn’t sentiment. Our research across 593 UK PE-backed mid-market businesses shows that high-performing firms are 14x more likely to show mature inclusive leadership, and 5.7x more likely to scale quickly. By mature inclusive leadership the research means the behaviours that consistently create trust, psychological safety and clarity. The capability that decides the outcome is built, not found, and the conditions that build it are measurable. The research also surfaces a warning a new CEO should hear early. Senior leaders are over four times more likely than their people to believe the organisation empowers everyone to speak freely and challenge, 56% against 12%. The candour a board needs from its CEO, and the confidence that CEO needs from the people below them, aren’t a matter of luck or personality. They’re produced by conditions, and most leaders think those conditions are already in place when their people don’t feel it.

How we build leadership capability

How we build is the part that’s hard to put in a framework, so let’s describe it.

A CEO brings us a problem they want solved. We don’t solve it for them. We look behind the problem they’ve presented to the one underneath it, the priority that keeps slipping because two parts of the business want different things from it, the hire they keep delaying because the perfect candidate doesn’t exist. We challenge the assumption holding it in place so the leader can examine it again for themselves. We coach them to see where they’ve already succeeded in another setting and recognise that they hold the skill to solve this, once they’ve found the real thing to solve. And we build their confidence and their commitment to act. They leave having solved it and knowing they can solve the next one without us in the room.

Supporting CEOs through the hardest moments

This runs through everything, including the hardest moments a CEO faces. Keeping a senior person, and how you navigate that humanly, balancing the what with the how. A team conflict, sometimes about values, about the right way to do things, where you must keep the relationship intact and still own it authentically and find the path through. The reframing of an issue with an investor that must happen without breaking trust or their confidence in you. We don’t hand a leader a script for these. We create their insight into how they can leverage their own experience and skill, so they are handling the moment and carry that into the next one we never see.

If you’re the CEO in those moments, you’ll know the part the role doesn’t advertise. It’s more exposed than anything you’ve led before. Everyone around you is focused on the asset, the return, the timeline to exit, and rightly so, that’s their job. What makes the difference is having one person whose job is the opposite, focused on you, and on making sure you have everything you need to carry it. The Board can be supportive and still be the Board. The investors can believe in you and still be measuring you. That one person isn’t reporting back and isn’t keeping score. They can see what you’re carrying and help you carry it. Not someone to lean on. Someone who helps you find how you can do this, because you can.

Building the culture around the leader

Alongside this sits the other half of how capability gets built, which is the culture around the leader. A CEO can be backed brilliantly and still fail if they can’t take their people with them. That needs safety to challenge and trust to move fast, the conditions a leader can’t build alone and often doesn’t have time to. Through Inclusion Live we build those conditions across the whole leadership population at scale, in practical learning that fits a working day rather than competing with it. The CEO gets the deep one-to-one work. The workplace and culture get the conditions that enable their decisions to land. Both run at once, because the hold period doesn’t wait for one to finish before the other starts.

A value creation plan for the CEO

There’s a PE logic to all of this that we hold deliberately. A firm builds a value creation plan for their portfolio company. We build one for the CEO who must deliver it, with the same attention, focused on the leader rather than the company, because we take a CEO’s development as seriously as the firm takes the business. We apply the discipline.

If you’re an operating partner who has backed a CEO and wants to set them up to deliver, this is how you do it. If you’ve made the hire and you’re privately asking whether you got it right, we would ask: have you properly backed the leader you chose? And if you’re the CEO, and you’ve read this far, you can do the hardest job you’ve held with us in your corner, helping you lead at your best. Unlocking the capabilities you may not realise that you have. We’d be glad to show you how.

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Article referenced:
Making the Leap from Corporate Leader to PE-Backed CEO, Harvard Business Review, July–August 2026.
Read the HBR article.

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