Sustained growth is every CEO’s goal. But they can’t achieve it alone; growth requires a strong partnership with revenue-driving leaders across the organization, whether it’s a Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Growth Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, or another growth leader. Egon Zehnder recently surveyed more than 500 revenue-driving executives globally to uncover what’s behind sustained growth – and what holds it back.
One of the core elements behind rapidly growing companies was a CEO who truly partners with revenue-driving leaders, viewing them as strategic advisors, not simply operators. 43% of respondents described this type of relationship with the CEO. This is more than just a reporting line, although 68% of respondents say they report to the CEO. It’s a partnership that enables faster, better decisions, sharper priorities, and coordinated action across the business.
The key insight is this: Growth isn’t a function; it’s an organizational condition CEOs create – or block. Building on this, revenue leaders shared five actions CEOs can take to raise the ceiling on growth.
In our study, functional silos surfaced as one of the top growth killers. Different functions often operate with different goals, tracking systems, and incentives: marketing on brand and conversion, sales on monthly targets, and product on roadmap milestones. When CEOs allow ambiguity, or attempt to serve as the connective tissue, among the other hats they wear, opportunities stall, insights stay trapped in functions, and work becomes duplicative or even counterproductive.
To drive sustainable growth, CEOs should take a holistic view of the entire go-to-market ecosystem. That could mean uniting all commercial functions under a single owner, although only 37% of respondents in our survey say they have such a structure (63% reported multiple distinct roles, such as CMO, CSO, CRO). “Go-to-market orchestration is not optimal. It lacks cross-functional alignment and goal setting,” one respondent shared.
Where CEOs explicitly define decision rights across product, marketing, sales, and operations, leaders move in unison rather than re-optimizing for their own metrics. Shared KPIs or OKRs, used by 87% of respondents, regular cross-functional operating rhythms, and transparent dashboards further reinforce alignment.
Internal priorities often overshadow customer needs. In high-growth companies, customer proximity is a leadership requirement, not a functional responsibility. If customer insights never reach the CEO, they never become enterprise-wide decisions.
CEOs can institutionalize this by making customer relationships a standing agenda item in leadership meetings, joining client visits or account reviews, and embedding customer feedback into operating rhythms rather than treating it as one-off input. When CEOs model customer obsession, strategies are grounded in real needs, not assumptions.
Clear roles, decisions rights and escalation paths create an empowered organization that moves faster while maintaining accountability.
Most CEOs overestimate how well their technology stack supports revenue decisions. Technology should be a decision enhancer, not a complicator. Revenue leaders emphasized the need for real-time revenue and strategy dashboards, sharper forecasting, and shared definitions of success, all enabled by integrated platforms.
For CEOs, three imperatives matter most:
When CEOs sponsor tech simplification, commercial teams spend more time selling and less time reconciling systems. The most successful organizations regularly audit their tech stack for relevance and effectiveness, ensuring that every tool directly supports strategic objectives and delivers measurable value, especially as AI expands both opportunity and risk. A holistic approach to technology keeps the organization agile, market-responsive, and competitively sharp.
As companies scale, decision-making can become bottlenecked if too many choices are escalated to the CEO. Define which decisions only the CEO should make, and push everything else down. This elevates growth leaders to operate strategically while giving rising leaders the exposure and ownership they need.
When CEOs delegate with clarity, leaders rise and growth accelerates. Clear roles, decision rights, and escalation paths create an empowered organization that moves faster while maintaining accountability.
Culture is central to achieving sustainable growth, and CEOs must be a driving force in creating and maintaining a performance culture that informs the organization’s approach to talent. In our study, revenue leaders urge CEOs to openly recognize strong performance and be direct when performance misses the mark. As one revenue leader put it: “Be ruthless about taking out underperformers and elevating top performers.”
High-performance cultures depend on more than accountability; they also depend on psychological safety, transparency, and continuous feedback. CEOs must model what is rewarded, what is tolerated, and what is non-negotiable. When expectations are clear and reinforced consistently, performance can become self-correcting.
The most successful CEOs see revenue leaders as strategic collaborators who shape direction, not just operators who execute it.
While each of these five recommendations is important on its own, the real impact comes from combining them into a coherent operating system: aligned functions, customer-anchored decisions, simplified technology, empowered decision-making, and a performance culture. Getting it right depends on how the CEO thinks holistically about organizational growth. The most successful CEOs see revenue leaders as strategic collaborators who shape direction, not just operators who execute it. When this relationship is strong, companies move faster, make better decisions, and take advantage of emerging opportunities.
For CEOs, the mandate is to engineer conditions for growth to ripple across the company: clarify priorities, align incentives across commercial functions, simplify the tech stack, and set clear decision rights with real accountability. When these elements are in place, growth leaders translate strategy into execution, and results.
Growth is rarely the result of a single product or initiative. It is a reflection of the leaders of the organization and how they work together to set priorities, break down barriers, and focus on what matters most to the business. The CEOs who view growth as a “team sport” are setting up their organizations for growth in both the short and long term. When CEOs lead with intention, these five moves become more than actions; they become the momentum that carries the organization forward.
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