Why Senior Leaders Lack Mentors & How to Fix It | Key Search

Two thirds of CEOs receive no outside coaching, despite every single one saying they’d welcome it
Power itself makes advice-taking harder
The higher you get, the fewer people there are who’ve actually solved your problem
Busyness is a real barrier, but it’s also a very reasonable-sounding cover story for something else

Two-thirds of CEOs receive no outside coaching or leadership advice.

David Larcker at Stanford and Stephen Miles surveyed over 200 CEOs in 2013. Every single one said they were open to coaching. Every single one said they’d welcome honest feedback. And then two thirds of them weren’t getting any.

I’ve thought about that gap a lot.

The psychology nobody names

Leigh Plunkett Tost, Francesca Gino, and Richard Larrick ran four experiments on how power affects advice-taking. Same result every time: feeling powerful causes people to discount advice, even from recognised experts. The driver is competitiveness. High-power individuals become more focused on maintaining their position relative to others, and accepting input starts to feel like a concession.

A related study by Kelly See and colleagues found that power raises confidence while lowering accuracy. So in other words, the most senior decision-makers become simultaneously more certain and more wrong. This might explain a thing or two about what’s going on in the world..

Daniel Goleman and colleagues called the end state of this “CEO disease” in Primal Leadership. The higher you climb, the less accurate your self-assessment tends to be. Research from the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence, examining over 1,000 professionals, confirmed it: the higher the rank, the wider the gap between how leaders rate themselves and how others rate them.

Most senior leaders have heard some version of this. They nod. They move on.

The structural problem

RHR International surveyed 83 CEOs and found half experience genuine loneliness in their role. 61% said it was affecting their performance. Among first-time CEOs, that climbed to nearly 70%.

More recent research from HEC Montréal, published in Harvard Business Review in late 2024, surveyed 109 CEOs and found that over 55% described significant, recurring loneliness. What drove it was the weight of decisions that had nowhere to go.

Part of this is structural and worth discussing. The higher you get, the fewer people there are who’ve actually faced the issues you’re facing. At mid-management level, there are hundreds of people in your orbit who’ve navigated similar challenges. At the top, that pool shrinks to close to zero. The challenges become more specific, more contextual, more unusual. And the people who might understand them are running their own organisations, sitting on their own boards, carrying their own full diaries.

On top of that, finding a mentor at this level requires an energy and initiative that most executives don’t have bandwidth for. You have to figure out who to approach, how to frame what you need, how to organize the conditions that allow for a meaningful exchange. When you’re already operating at max capacity, that process is easy to postpone. Most people do postpone it. Indefinitely.

The information problem

Your board has governance obligations. Your team is conscious of being evaluated. Your peer network is mostly people in competing positions. None of these relationships are designed for what you need.

A mentor from outside your organisation, with nothing at stake in the outcome, offers something different. In Suzanne de Janasz and Maury Peiperl’s two-year study of 45 CEOs with formal mentoring arrangements, total confidentiality came up again and again as the non-negotiable requirement. The main need was having space to think out loud without the filter.

84% of those CEOs said mentors helped them avoid costly mistakes. 69% said it improved their decision-making. 71% believed company performance had measurably improved. For organisations that measured it, Manchester Inc. found an average return of 5.7 times the initial investment in executive coaching. MetrixGlobal put it at 529% ROI in a Fortune 500 study.

The network question

Herminia Ibarra at London Business School has spent years studying how senior leaders reinvent themselves. One of her findings is uncomfortable: the people closest to you at the top aren’t neutral observers. They have a version of you in their heads, built over years, and they hold you to it without meaning to.

Anyone who has tried to change something significant about themselves will recognise this. It is genuinely easier to become a different version of yourself around people who don’t know the old one.

McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook’s 2001 research found that homophily, the tendency to connect with people like yourself, is the single strongest and most consistent pattern in human relationships. Senior leaders are often more susceptible, because the pool of people at their level is small and skews toward shared backgrounds and shared instincts.

A leadership team that thinks similarly and has known each other for years will get very good at agreeing quickly. Which feels great. However, McKinsey have tracked this across industries for over a decade: companies in the top quartile for diversity consistently outperform their peers, and this research has been repeated many times over. Homogeneous teams are slower to spot risk and faster to converge on the wrong answer. In other words, what looks like alignment is often just the absence of useful friction.

The uncomfortable bit

Success signals you’ve been getting it right. Getting it right, over a long time, makes it progressively harder to seek input on whether you still are. And genuine busyness gives that reluctance a very reasonable-sounding cover story.

Who in your current professional life has told you something you didn’t want to hear, but needed to? If it takes a while to answer that, it’s probably worth sitting with.

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