Skip to content
It is never announced. It shows up as an absence.
It almost never arrives as a conversation.
Nobody calls a meeting to tell a CEO that something has shifted. There is no memo. There is no moment you could point to later and say, that was when it changed.
It shows up as an absence.
A project you hear about after it is underway. A working session that happened without you and nobody thought that was strange. An email thread you get added to on the fourth reply, where the decision is already mostly made.
And every time, the explanation is completely reasonable. She raised her hand first. It was a quick thing. We assumed you were across it.
The same three places, every time
In my experience, it shows up in three predictable spots.
The new technology. The AI pilot, the new platform, the tooling decision. It goes to whoever volunteered, and whoever volunteered is usually thirty years younger than you.
The new customer segment. The part of the market that does not behave like the part you built the company on.
And hiring people significantly younger than you, where someone else runs the process and you see finalists rather than the field.
None of those are a verdict on you. All three are places where the company is moving, and the pattern of who gets pulled in has quietly changed.
Why you cannot ask anyone about it
This is the part that makes it stick.
You cannot raise it with your team. Everyone reports to you, and the moment you ask, you change what you were asking about.
You cannot raise it with your peer group, because half of them compete with you and the other half will reassure you, which is worse.
And you cannot ask AI, because it is not an information problem.
So it sits there. Most of the CEOs I talk to have carried some version of this for six months or more before saying it out loud to anyone.
The question that actually has an answer
Here is where I want to be useful rather than just accurate.
Stop asking whether you are still relevant. That question has no answer, and it will eat your week.
Ask a different one. Which decisions do you want to be in, and which ones do you genuinely not want to be in?
Most CEOs have never made those two lists. And the drift that bothers you is usually not disloyalty or a loss of standing. Nobody in the building knows where the line is, including you.
Which means you are the only person who can draw it.
What to do with that
Say it out loud to your team. Not as a complaint, as a specification.
Here are the calls I want to be in. Here are the ones I am handing over on purpose. Here is what I want to hear about after the fact, not before.
That conversation takes twenty minutes, and it ends a problem most leaders carry for years.
And for the record, there is a version of this that is a win. If your team is making good calls without you, that is the thing you built. The question is only ever whether you meant it.
Lisa
If this made you notice something you haven’t said out loud yet, message me. Tell me what you noticed.