Chief executives blame sleepless nights on their own senior team

An angry board, a languid share price, mutiny in the junior ranks. All things you would expect the fiduciary-responsibility-bound chief executives of major listed companies to worry about.

But new research suggests bosses at the helm of the world’s largest firms have a more immediate source of sleepless nights: their own leadership team.

According to a study from Boston Consulting Group (BCG), chief executives of firms with revenue north of $5bn (£3.8bn) selected their own ego-driven c-suite as being the element of work they stress about most, over and above meeting board expectations and sentiment among their wider staff.

Their main gripe is with beancounting chief financial officers, whom bosses from big firms earmarked as the biggest threat to their jobs.

But while leaders of large firms toss and turn over the contentedness of their senior leadership team, concerns over the morale of the employee-base at large are altogether less prominent. Fewer than half of chief executives said they were “concerned” or “very concerned” about employee disgruntlement, the study found, in a sign the cooling labour markets across the UK and US might be easing bosses’ fears over retaining talent.

Judith Wallenstein, managing director at BCG and the report’s co-author, said:  “There is tremendous awareness among CEOs that they rise and fall depending on their ability to align their top team behind a shared goal and strategic plan.

“Now, the expectation of the leadership team and the organisation to be convinced before they mobilise is much greater, versus in leadership teams in the past.”

Bosses back themselves and don’t worry about shocks

The study, which polled and interviewed more than 500 chief executives, found stress levels generally to be sky-high among the men and women at the helm of major companies, with more than seven in 10 reporting clinical stress levels.

Rising stress levels among chief executives has for years been a hot button topic in board rooms. In 2011, Lloyds’ Antonio Horta-Osorio famously took an eight-week leave of absence a matter of months after taking control of the lender. The banking luminary said severe sleep deprivation and “extreme exhaustion” lay behind the decision, and has since become a vocal advocate for mental health in the City.

In 2024, HSBC chief Noel Quinn quit his role as head of Europe’s largest bank abruptly, citing his desire for a “better balance between [his] personal and business life”.

Outside the very biggest firms, bosses singled out their ability to hit ambitious growth targets as the predominant ‘stressor’, while managing costs and meeting board expectations rounded out the top three.

Nearly six in 10 chief executives found near-term issues all-consuming, saying fire-fighting and time-sensitive deadlines hindered their ability to steer and develop the firm’s overall strategy.

And despite the prevailing view that many bosses are driven predominantly by ego and their own cache, ‘maintaining my reputation’ was just the eighth-highest stressor, behind overall workforce satisfaction and their ability to keep a lid on costs.

Reputational fears also came below bosses’ ability to manage geopolitical turmoil, which despite the barrage of recent shocks, including Donald Trump’s erratic tariffs, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the recent crisis in the Middle East.