The era of the know-it-all CEO is over

Suzy Welch thought she and other leaders were experiencing decision fatigue during the pandemic, but it was something else, something new taking place in the C-suite that she thinks will ultimately benefit leaders.

“It was really learning fatigue, learning new things every day, and there are only so many new things you can process,” the management expert and CNBC Contributor said during a CNBC Leadership Exchange on Wednesday with CEOs across a wide range of industries.

“We will come out of it a lot smarter, but it’s a lot,” Welch said.

Even though many CEOs say business is great and the transformation during the pandemic went better than expected, they still feel as if there is a fog in decision making, especially when it comes to leading employees through a period of upheaval in the way we work.

Even leaders accustomed to a fast pace of innovation say what’s occurring now is unlike anything they’ve experienced in the past. “Things are happening so fast it’s like living in a world of dog years,” said Greg Becker, CEO of Silicon Valley Bank, which handles banking for over 50% of all venture-backed companies. Becker said that for his firm, and among many of its clients, “the biggest challenge is how fast things are accelerating. … feels like change is happening seven times the pace.”

“And seven or even seventy times less visibility at the same time,” Welch interjected. “Put those two things together, and there you are.”

The need to be more flexible than ever with decisions, including with a firm’s return to office strategy, is part of a landscape in which CEOs like Becker expect management choices to be quickly, and rightly, questioned. “Whatever we decide the path forward is, three months after that, we will be changing it again,” he said.

Some CEOs got their start during the early days of the pandemic, a crash course in the unprecedented, including Eric Starkloff, CEO of National Instruments. His first two tasks were setting up a crisis team and shutting down the engineering company’s operations in China. While business has been good since, in other ways he said it doesn’t feel like the situation has gotten much easier since the worst of Covid. “Predicting the future with the seismic shift of change is a fool’s errand,” Starkloff said. “Managing employees through that uncertainty is difficult.” 

There are clear benefits, according to Tom Leighton, CEO of Akamai Technologies, who said “a lot” of his firm’s employees will be working from home “forever.” And he added that “spending time on…