The Quiet Drift
Notes on the phase that has no name
Hans Vandenberghe
Trusted partner to management teams and CEOs
I
A composure that hides something
A CEO sits across from me. Late forties. Three to seven years of consistent growth behind him. His company employs just over a hundred people. Revenue figures the bank likes. A management team in place. A second home, perhaps. The right watch.
The first thing I notice is that he is composed. Straight back. A measured smile. Optimistic tone. He greets me, settles into the chair, and is ready to put his CEO-ship to work. Whatever the agenda is, he can carry it.
But he is not at rest. He is alert in a particular way. His eyes hold a low-grade scan, as if a part of him is still tracking situations down the hallway, in the management team, on the floor. He has come to talk about leadership, about his team, about a difficult colleague. What he has actually brought into the room, without saying it, is a hum that no longer resolves.
I have learned to notice this hum. It is not anxiety, not exhaustion in the usual sense, not strategic confusion. It is something quieter. A drift. The first wind that built the company has flattened, but the second has not arrived. The work continues. The numbers keep going. The hum continues with it.
This essay is about that hum. About the phase between the company being built and the company being something else. About what tends to happen in that phase when no one names it, and about a few things that begin to work when someone does.
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II
The phase that has no name
There is a vocabulary for the early years of a company. We call it founding, building, scaling. There is a vocabulary for endings. Exit, succession, transition. There is even a vocabulary for crisis. Burn-out, breakdown, restructuring.
What there is no vocabulary for is the long middle stretch, after a company has succeeded by traditional measures and before the founder or CEO has decided what comes next. The company is still growing. There is no fire. There is also no fresh air. The CEO walks through weeks that are full. He himself is half-elsewhere.
He has arrived in a place where his old motor no longer
drives him. He has not yet found out what does.
I have noticed a few common signals.
He says he gets his energy from things that are not going well. He means it. Crises animate him. When his team functions, he feels hollow. When something burns, he is alive.
He is the busiest person in his company. His calendar is fuller than anyone’s. He works ten or twelve hours a day. He has not followed a thought of his own in some time.
He has a management team that, in his own words, does not entirely follow him. He cannot precisely say why. He has half-tried to address it. Most attempts taper off without resolution.
He has a few difficult conversations he has been postponing. Not for weeks. For months. With people close to him. He says he knows the conversation has to happen. He also says he knows how it will end.
He talks vaguely about taking distance from the company, perhaps moving to a board role, perhaps a sabbatical, perhaps something different. Then he says: “but a lot still has to happen first.” There is always more to fix before he can step away.
None of this is failure. He is not in crisis. He has not lost his way. He has simply arrived in a place where his old motor no longer drives him, and he has not yet found out what does.
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III
The stories they bring, and the stories underneath
When CEOs in this phase reach out, they almost never name the drift. They name something else. A specific person.
“My CFO was great in the early years, but he is not the right profile for the phase we are in now.”
“My right-hand has lost the energy. We work around her.”
“My management team does not follow. I have to repeat myself, week after week.”
The first sessions are about that person, or those people. The CEO can describe in precise detail what is going wrong with them, what they are doing or not doing, what should be different. He has been mentally writing this assessment for months.
If you stay with this story long enough, something else surfaces. The frustration with the CFO is, on closer inspection, frustration with himself for not having had the conversation. The complaint about the management team is, on closer inspection, a complaint about his own inability to ask them clearly for something he has not yet asked himself.
Irritation outward, question inward.
This is the pattern. The CEO believes he has come to talk about other people. He has actually come, without knowing it, to talk about himself. About what he wants now, in this phase of his life, that he no longer knows.
I do not introduce this insight. I let him find it. It usually lands somewhere in a sentence that begins with “Now that I say it out loud...” or “Now that I am thinking aloud here...” Those are the moments the work begins. He hears himself for the first time in a while. Whatever he says next is closer to what is actually going on than anything he has said in months.
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IV
Why the standard responses fail
Most CEOs in this phase try the standard responses first. Some try them for years.
They hire a new CFO, or a new COO, or a new commercial director. They reorganise the management team. They invest in leadership training, sometimes their own, more often their team’s. They engage a strategy consultant. They block out a retreat.
None of these actions are wrong. Some are useful. Most miss.
They miss because the issue at this phase is not a knowledge gap. The CEO already has the knowledge. He has been managing for fifteen years. He has read the books. He has taken the programmes. What he is missing is not information.
They miss because the issue is not a people-management gap, either. The frustration with the CFO will not be solved by replacing the CFO. The next CFO will, within eighteen months, generate a similar frustration. The problem is not the person. It is the relationship. And the relationship is shaped, more than anyone wants to admit, by the CEO’s own accumulated concessions, his own avoided conversations, his own quiet acceptance of behaviour that does not match the DNA he wants the company to live by.
They miss, finally, because the issue is not even strategic. The CEO usually has a strategy. What he does not have is a personal answer to the question of what he wants the next five years of his own life to be about. Without that answer, every strategy he sets becomes a way of staying busy, not a direction worth following.
The phase asks for a different kind of work. Not more management of others. Management of the self. Of one’s own emotions, thoughts, assumptions, and concessions. Of the gap between what one says and what one tolerates. The work of leadership in this phase is the work of relationship, with one’s team, but first and foremost with oneself.
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V
The fixer trap
Some CEOs in this phase are, in fact, full of energy. Not all drift looks the same.
A particular type of CEO never stops moving. He is not bored, he is not flat. He is everywhere. He runs three companies at once, takes on the operations of one of them when a senior leaves, signs off on the legal letters at midnight, and tells his wife on Sunday evening that next week he has eight things to wrap up.
This CEO is alive. But the aliveness is fragile. It depends on continuous emergency. When there is no fire, there is something close to dread underneath the calendar.
I once asked a CEO of this kind what he would do, who he would be, when there was no crisis to manage. He sat with the question for a while. Then he said: “That is a good question.” He did not have an answer. He had spent twenty years not needing one.
This is the Fixer Trap. The CEO derives identity from solving things. The system around him learns this and feeds him things to solve.
Problems migrate towards him because
problems are how he is loved.
The team unconsciously sets him up to rescue, the suppliers learn that the way to get a decision is to escalate, and the family adapts to a husband or wife whose presence at the dinner table is a function of which fire is currently the largest.
Stepping out of the trap is not done by hiring a COO. It is done by sitting with the question the CEO has been outrunning for two decades. Who am I when there is no crisis to manage. What animates me when nothing is on fire. What kind of life would I be choosing if my own competence were not constantly being summoned.
The CEOs who break through this phase do not break through because they finally find the right number two. They break through because they begin, slowly, to answer that question.
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VI
The identity fusion
There is one further pattern, more common in family businesses and founder-led companies, that makes the drift particularly hard to leave.
Over the years, the CEO and the company have fused. The DNA of the company is, in significant part, the DNA of the CEO. His tone, his preferences, his pace, his standards. People who join the company say “this is a Thomas company” or “this is a Caroline company” without thinking about it. The CEO has shaped the culture so deeply that the culture is now indistinguishable from his presence.
This fusion is not always a bad thing. It is often what made the company succeed. A coherent identity, lived from the top, is rare. It attracts the right people. It produces a recognisable product. It carries the company through cycles.
But when the CEO begins to think about stepping back, the fusion becomes the trap. He cannot find a successor who carries the same DNA, because the DNA is, in part, him. He hires someone who looks like a fit on paper, but within eighteen months he sees the new person trying to write their own story, and the story does not match. The succession fails. The CEO comes back in. The cycle repeats.
The way through this is not, as is often assumed, to find the perfect external successor. It is to do two things in parallel. First, to build a deeper layer of company identity, articulated and held by more than one person, so that the culture survives the CEO’s gradual exit. Second, and more difficult, to allow the CEO to begin loosening his identity from the company, so that his sense of who he is no longer depends on being at the centre.
This second task is the one most CEOs underestimate. It is also the one no business school teaches.
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VII
Coaching, not rescuing
Here is one observation that surprises CEOs in this phase, when they begin to notice it.
When a CEO is fully present, fully on point, his inbox quietens. His team takes ownership. People stop bringing him problems they could have solved themselves. The number of decisions waiting for his approval drops by half. Meetings end on time.
When the same CEO is in drift, the inbox fills. Problems migrate upward. Decisions stall. The team becomes reactive. Meetings overrun.
The same CEO. The same team. The same week. Different states.
What is happening in this difference is the shift between coaching and rescuing. When the CEO is on point, he asks questions instead of giving answers. He resists the urge to take a problem off someone’s plate. He sees that a colleague is struggling and lets the struggle continue, because he knows the struggle is the work. He says: “What do you think we should do?” And he means it.
When the CEO is in drift, he rescues. He takes the problem onto his plate because that is the fastest way to get it done. He answers the question before it is fully asked. He cannot bear to see a process slow down on his watch, so he speeds it up by becoming its bottleneck.
The CEO who rescues feels useful. The CEO
who coaches feels, at first, almost obsolete.
The team learns whichever pattern the CEO is offering. Both are learnable. The team that learns to be coached develops; the team that learns to be rescued atrophies.
Most CEOs in this phase have, without quite knowing it, been rescuing for years. The shift to coaching is not a technique. It is an internal posture, possible only when the CEO has done some work on what he himself wants and what he is willing to let go of. It cannot be faked.
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VIII
Three openings
Every CEO in this phase finds a different way out. There is no method to apply. There are, however, three openings I have seen work, often in combination.
The first opening is a question that someone has not yet asked the CEO out loud. Who are you when there is no crisis to manage? Or: What do you want the next five years of your life to be about? Or: If everything you have built were running smoothly tomorrow, what would you do with your Wednesday afternoons? These questions are simple. They are also, for a CEO who has been running on momentum, extraordinarily difficult to answer. The first response is usually silence. The second response is often a partial answer the CEO has not allowed himself to take seriously. The work is in not letting the question close too quickly.
The second opening is a shift from managing others to managing oneself. This is the work that no MBA prepares anyone for. It is the work of noticing what one is feeling, what assumption one is operating on, what concession one is making in this specific meeting, what conversation one is avoiding. It is the work of catching oneself in the act, gently and frequently, before reacting. CEOs in this phase often discover that they have been managing other people’s experience for so long that they have lost contact with their own. Reconnecting is not therapy. It is a leadership practice.
The third opening is the slow inversion from rescuing to coaching. This one cannot be willed. It happens as the first two openings begin to land. The CEO who knows what he wants and who can manage himself begins, almost without noticing, to ask different questions of his team. The team responds. The inbox quietens. The hum, the drift, the half-full chest, begin to clear.
None of this happens in a day. None of it happens in a workshop. It happens in conversation, sustained over time, with someone whose only role is to hold the questions open and refuse to provide premature answers.
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IX
A note on conversation
The fact that I have written this essay is itself an invitation, but a particular kind of invitation.
The CEOs I work with most often arrive at this phase quietly. Not in crisis. Not desperate. Often at the top of their game by external measures. They reach out because something is no longer adding up, and because they have realised, sometimes after years, that their own management team is not the place where this conversation can happen. The team is part of the system. The conversation needs to happen elsewhere.
What I offer is that elsewhere. No agenda, except the one the CEO brings. No method, except the questions that emerge from listening. No promises, except that I will not let the easy answers close the conversation prematurely.
If you have read this far and recognised yourself in some of these descriptions, you are welcome to reach out. We will see whether a conversation makes sense. If not, you will at least have spent thirty minutes on a question you have been postponing.
That is also a result.
If this resonated, you are welcome to reach out: hello@hansvandenberghe.com
If you'd prefer the polished PDF version: email me and I'll send it.