Your Peer Group Will Tell You What No One Else Will

I had a client who was stuck in a dysfunctional business partnership.

I'd been coaching them through it for a while. At one point I told the CEO pretty directly that if they and their partner couldn't make the relationship work, one of them might need to buy the other out.

The CEO heard me.

And didn't do anything.

Then after one of our CEO Peer Advisory Board meetings, a few of us went out for drinks. Peers started asking the CEO why they were still in this relationship.

Same basic message. Different source.

The CEO thought about it over the holidays. That conversation became the catalyst for buying their partner out. A couple of years later, the CEO owned the business outright and it was doing well.

I could help them think through the decision. I had experience. I knew the business. I had sat in a CEO seat myself.

I still wasn't a peer.

That difference matters.

A coach or advisor can help you work through the decision. A peer can look across the table and say, "I've been there. Here's what happened when I kept waiting."

Those land differently.

The Room Only Works If You Tell the Truth

I’ve been facilitating CEO peer groups for fifteen years. The biggest factor in whether someone gets value from a group is vulnerability.

Not performative vulnerability. The kind that costs you something to say out loud, the thing you'd rather not say because it makes you look uncertain, stuck, bored, scared, or wrong.

Years prior, I observed CEO peer groups where almost everyone seemed to be chest-pounding. Kings of their own jungles. Nobody wanted to admit the company was struggling, that they didn't know what to do, or that something they'd tried wasn't working.

There wasn't much anybody could do for them.

You can't help someone who spends the meeting convincing you they don't need help.

I saw the opposite with one of my clients.

It was his first meeting with an established peer board. The group asked what issue he wanted to bring to the table.

He said, essentially: I'm bored. I don't think I like my company anymore. I think I want out.

Someone asked what he'd do instead.

"Buy a horse farm."

He didn't know anything about horse farms. He'd made it up on the spot.

What mattered was that his first instinct wasn't to impress the room. He was willing to say something he hadn't figured out yet.

That same group later became the group that pushed him to deal with his business partner.

The people who get the most from these groups aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest problems. 

They're the ones willing to let the room see the problem clearly enough to help.

Why Someone Else's Problem Is Easier to Solve

One big difference between individual and group work is that one-on-one work keeps you focused on your own patterns, your own decisions, your own blind spots. A group adds something different.

You hear somebody else describe a problem and you can see it immediately. They've got the wrong person in a leadership role. They're avoiding a hard conversation. They keep giving someone another chance because of history instead of performance.

From the outside, it looks obvious.

Then halfway through helping them think it through, something uncomfortable happens. You realize you're doing your own version of the same thing.

That dynamic comes up constantly in peer groups. At the end of a session, I usually ask everyone what they're taking away. More often than not, the biggest insight didn't come from the issue they brought into the room. It came from someone else's.

It's sometimes easier to process something when you're doing it on behalf of somebody else. Your ego isn't attached to their decision. You don't have ten years of history with their employee. You don't have to go home and live with the consequences.

You get to see the pattern before all the emotion gets wrapped around it.

Then you turn the lens back on yourself.

Eventually the Group Stops Helping You Think

I had a CEO in one of my groups who had a toxic senior executive.

He knew there was a problem. The group knew there was a problem. We'd talked about it more than once.

He kept coming back with the same problem.

By the third month, the group was done helping him reframe it. They told him: don't come back to the next meeting without having dealt with this.

A few days before the next meeting, I followed up. He was firing the executive the next day.

And he did.

That's peer accountability.

The group doesn't have formal authority over you. They can't fire you. They don't own your company.

You've asked them to invest in your problems, though, and eventually they expect you to do something with what they give you.

I once observed another group that had been together nearly ten years. One member kept bringing back the same issue month after month. The group kept engaging. He kept doing nothing.

Eventually they told him not to come back unless he'd taken action.

He came back.

He hadn't.

They voted him out.

A decade together.

That sounds harsh until you think about what the other people in the room were giving him. Their time. Their experience. Their own mistakes, told out loud, because they expected the same in return.

You don't have to follow every piece of advice. You do have to engage with it.

Come back and say you looked into it.

Say you tried it and here's why it didn't work.

Say you thought about it and you disagree, and here's why.

That's participation.

Bringing the same problem back untouched is something else.

A Good Peer Group Shouldn't Look Like You

The composition of the room matters.

Many CEOs want peers who are further ahead. If you're running a $10 million company, you assume the most useful person in the room is running a $20 million company.

Sometimes.

But the person running the $2 million company might be wrestling with something you solved five years ago and quietly let creep back in. They'll see it faster than anyone because they're still in it.

The larger company shows you what's coming. The smaller one shows you what you stopped paying attention to.

If everyone in the room has the same background, same strengths, same blind spots, they'll look at your problem the same way and tell you the same thing.

That's not a peer group. That's an echo chamber.

My rule: if ten people in the room agree, nine of them are unnecessary.

You need enough common ground to trust each other. Enough difference to actually challenge each other.

Most people optimize hard for the first one at the expense of the second.

"I Don't Have Time" Is a Real Objection

The most common reason I hear for not joining a peer group is time.

I get it.

A useful group asks for commitment. You have to show up. You have to prepare. You have to spend time on other people's problems instead of only your own.

For a CEO who already feels like there aren't enough hours in the week, that's a real ask.

The question to ask is whether the time pays you back. An ROI.

One better hire. One hard conversation you stop avoiding. One decision that takes three weeks instead of six months because someone in the room has already lived through it.

That's where I think CEOs sometimes do the math wrong.

They count the hours they'll spend in the meeting. They don't count the hours they're already spending carrying problems that aren't getting solved.

There is another cost too.

You've spent years being the person everyone comes to for the answer. Genuine participation in a peer group requires you to occasionally walk into a room and say, "I don't know what to do about this."

That can be uncomfortable.

It's also where the value starts.

If the group is doing its job, the time investment builds capacity.

And then it gives back time.

Then Something Else Happens

The groups that last tend to become something more than business meetings.

People go to dinner together. They call each other outside the meetings. Some end up taking vacations together with their families.

The vulnerability that felt risky at the beginning is often what creates the relationship.

That makes sense.

It's hard to build something real with someone who only ever shows you the highlight reel.

You walk into a peer advisory group because you want better thinking.

If it works, you end up with people who know what it feels like to sit in your seat. They know enough about you to notice when you're rationalizing, remember what you said three months ago, and have already told you where they screwed it up themselves.

And eventually, when you bring the same problem back one more time, they can look across the table and say:
We've heard this before.
What are you going to do about it?