Nobody gets to the top alone
Reflections on the first Paceworks female CEO roundtable
Being a CEO can be a lonely experience. That was the provocation that opened the evening, and it landed instantly. You're the visible one. The one standing at the helm, accountable for everything that happens below deck, and yet there's a whole category of conversation you simply can't have with the people around you. You're peerless, after all.
That premise is what brought us together for our inaugural Paceworks roundtable, The ‘kitchen cabinet’: why every smart CEO needs one. In a room full of founders and C-Suite leaders, from industries as different as seaweed biotech and B2B media, trust technology and premium food brands, crisis simulation and foreign direct investment, one theme kept surfacing above everything else: nobody gets to the top alone, but most of us take too long to admit it.
About the evening
We gathered in London on a gloriously hot July evening, with a group of female CEOs and leaders spanning a breadth of sectors. Some were running businesses from pre-revenue through to exit-ready, some had recently stepped into new leadership roles and some were navigating the messy reality of boards that weren't fit for purpose.
Our guest speaker was Tamara Littleton, co-founder of crisis simulation company Polpeo and exited co-founder of Social Element, the social media agency she built from scratch in 2002 and sold in late 2024 after growing it to more than 300 people.
The evening's theme was the ‘kitchen cabinet’: the informal group of trusted advisors who operate outside your business, with no stake in telling you what you want to hear. What followed was one of the most honest conversations about leadership we've been part of in recent memory.
What came up
The loneliness is structural, not personal
The higher you go, the less unfiltered information reaches you. It's not that the people around you don't care. It's that they can't afford to be completely straight with you. Your team takes its cues from you, your board evaluates you and your peers are navigating their own agendas. The gap that creates, between what's actually happening and what reaches the top, is bigger than most leaders expect.
Several people in the room described the moment they realised this was happening. For one, it was when her team agreed enthusiastically with a direction she'd set, only to find out later (after things went wrong) that they'd had serious reservations they hadn't voiced. Another talked about a board that was so focused on operational detail it had lost the ability to ask the harder strategic questions.
The fix isn't only to create an internal environment where people feel they can be honest with you as CEO, but it's also to engage with people outside the business, who have no reason to filter what they tell you.
Asking for help is harder than it looks
This was the thread that ran through the whole evening, and it actually disproved a theory of ours that women are better at asking for help than men. In some cases, that may be true, but even in a room of women who broadly believed in the value of external advice, several admitted they'd been slow to build a kitchen cabinet for themselves and hadn't been asking for help. The conversation really got them thinking about why this was. One participant posited that perhaps being the person others rely on makes reversing the flow feel awkward, wrong or unnecessary.
She added that she gave advice to other founders for a living, but had never really applied the same thinking to her own business. There were nods around the table.
A consensus did emerge: asking for help isn't a sign of weakness. In fact, it might actually be the most strategically intelligent thing you do. The leaders who move fastest are the ones who stop pretending they've got every angle covered.
The best cabinet members are the ones who scare you (just a little)
What came up several times was the profile of the people who'd made the biggest difference to the women in the room. Not the cheerleaders or the yes-people, it was the ones who were exceptional at what they did and completely honest about what they heard and observed.
One person described looking for advisors who were fierce. Another talked about wanting someone ‘slightly scary, brilliant at their job and absolutely straight with me.’ The common thread, the best advisors are people who have no interest in sugar coating a hard truth that needs to be delivered.
Women find their people and go deep
We had a lively exchange about whether women are better at asking for help than men. The honest answer: not necessarily. But there was a pattern. When women do ask for help and find the right peer group, trusted advisor or trusted circle, they tend to go deep fast. Several in the room described virtual or offline groups of female peers, sometimes built over many years, that had become genuinely transformative at critical points
The generational dimension matters too. The reward systems that shaped leaders who are now in their forties and fifties, were built around knowing the right people (or being part of the ‘club'), always being seen as outwardly confident and having all the answers.
If you were in the club, the club looked after you. For most women of that generation, that wasn't an option, which meant finding their own way through without the informal support structure that men around them often had, but didn't even realise the full benefits of.
Younger executives are working in different value systems with more diverse leadership teams, however. There was cautious optimism in the room that the picture is shifting, if slowly.
Four things we took away
1. Never do this alone. Start building your kitchen cabinet before you need it. And be open to who earns a seat at the table, because some of the most valuable people in it will be ones you hadn't met yet when the moment arrived. And always remember that someone who'll lend an ear for 15 minutes or an honest hour is closer than most leaders think. All you need to do is ask.
2. Look for battle scars, not just credentials. The most valuable advisors have been through multiple scenarios at different stages and in different sectors. Their toolbox is bigger. One person described them as "Swiss Army advisors", people who've seen enough to calibrate, not just advise.
3. Create an environment where challenge is welcome. If the people around you aren't willing to tell you something might be going wrong, that's a leadership problem, not a people problem. What you accept sets the culture, not what you say you value.
4. Think in categories, not just names. Finance, brand/marketing, product, governance, fundraising, leadership. A kitchen cabinet works best when you've thought about the gaps you're trying to fill. One of the participants likened it to a top sports team lineup.
We also strongly recommend filling your kitchen cabinet with people you actually like, but they should be there because they're the best at what they do in their area of domain expertise.
If you're a first-time C-Suite leader and this is a conversation that resonates, we'd love to hear from you. If you’d like to find out about future events like this one or read more of our insights, please follow us on LinkedIn.