Greg Stevenson presents the CEO Readiness Map, a self-assessment across three dimensions: Self, People, and Complexity. Your lowest score becomes your ceiling. The test asks specific questions about your blind spots, whether you know what drives your direct reports, and if you solve root causes or repeat problems.
Most executives preparing for the CEO role do not know where they actually stand. Not because they are not self-aware, because no one has given them an honest framework to assess themselves against. Today I want to change that. I'm going to walk you through a self-assessment called the CEO Readiness Map. By the end of this video, you'll know exactly where your gaps are across all 3 dimensions of the Interior Game. Not a vague sense of where you need to grow. A specific, honest picture. Readiness is not a feeling. It's a specific, accessible state across 3 dimensions. You can know where you stand right now. Most people are avoiding knowing. How to use this assessment. For each dimension I'm about to walk you through, I want you to score yourself honestly 1 to 10. Not how you'd score yourself in a performance review. Not your best day. Your honest, private assessment. The one you would give if no one was looking. Dimension 1, Self. The questions to ask yourself. Do I know specifically what drives my decisions? Not what I say drives them, but what actually does drive them. Can I name my 3 most significant blind spots right now? Do I know what I bring into a room before I say a word, and is that what I intended to bring? Am I aware of the patterns I've been running since early in my career, and which ones are still serving me? If you cannot answer these questions specifically, not generally, your self-dimension has a gap. That gap will show up in high-pressure decisions. It will show up in your relationship with the board, and it will show up in your relationship— how your team experiences your leadership. Dimension 2, people. These are the questions to ask yourself. Can I name specifically what drives each of my direct reports, not professionally but personally? Do I know what the gaps are that they have not yet shown me? When I read a room, am I reading it right or am I projecting myself onto it? The People Dimension is where most Technical executives underinvest. They focus on what people produce, but the CEO recalls— the CEO role requires who people are. Those are different capabilities entirely. Dimension 3, complexity. These are the questions to ask yourself about complexity. When a problem presents itself, do I work to understand the root cause before designing the solution? Are there problems I have solved more than twice? When I look at the challenge— challenges on my plate right now, am I addressing the cause or the symptom? Do I have the discipline to stop in a high-pressure moment and ask why before I ask how? Complexity is the dimension that separates executives who are reactive from executives who are strategic. It is not intelligence. It's a specific developable discipline, and most executives have never been taught it, to work at that level. Reading your scores. Look at your 3 scores. The lowest score is where your ceiling is. Not your weakest skill. Your lowest score is the, the lowest score is the Interior Game dimension. Because the CEO role does not average your dimensions, it tests all 3 simultaneously. The gap in one dimension will show up across everything. If your Self score is low, it will show up in every decision, every relationship, Every moment of pressure. If your people score is low, it will show up in every team dynamic, every board conversation, and with every hire. If your complexity score is low, it will show up in every strategic challenge, every problem that keeps coming back, every situation where you're working harder than the outcome warrants. What to do next. Now you know— not a vague sense, a specific picture of where the work is. The next question is, what do you do about it? You can work on this alone, as most people do. It takes longer. The patterns that create blind spots are invisible from the inside, your own experience. That is what makes them blind spots. Or you can work on it with someone who has been in the room at your level and knows exactly what the interior game looks like under that kind of pressure. That's the work that I do privately, one-to-one, with a small number of executives at any one time. If your scores told you something today, book the conversation. The link is below. We'll have a 30-minute conversation. We'll be honest about whether I think I can help you or not. Subscribe for more on the interior game of executive leadership.
