The Four Stages of Leadership Maturity: Why the CEO Must Change Before the Company Can

In the acquisition entrepreneurship ecosystem, it’s perfectly well understood that the companies that we acquire often undergo change, maturation, and evolution under the watchful eye of the new CEO. What we may under appreciate, however, is the change, maturation and evolution required of the CEO herself. When I think back to the CEO that I was in my sixth year, that person is almost unrecognizable relative to the CEO that I was in my first 6-12 months at the helm. That evolution wasn’t just specific to commercial considerations, though there were plenty of examples of those – a lot of it concerned the personal, psychological, and emotional realities of being both a leader and an entrepreneur. My guest today, Jennifer Garvey Berger, is the Author of “Changing on the Job” (among several other books), and has introduced a framework that shows what she thinks are the four rather predictable stages of leadership maturity. In our discussion today, we discuss what those stages are, what fundamentally changes from one stage to the next, why it’s important for a leader to know which of the 4 stages that they’re currently in, how to self-diagnose, where she most commonly sees high-performing executives or new leaders get “stuck”, and whether leadership maturity is simply a function of the passage of time. Episode Link: https://mineolasearchpartners.com/2026/02/19/the-four-stages-of-leadership-maturity-why-the-ceo-must-change-before-the-company-can/