Your kitchen cabinet: build it NOW
There's an idea that comes up again and again when we talk to leaders about what's actually helped them. Some call it a "kitchen cabinet," others call it their inner circle, and plenty haven't put a name to it at all, they've just noticed that their clearest thinking happened in the moments when those people were "on call."
So what is a kitchen cabinet? It’s a group of external experts whom you bring in at key inflection points in your business or to help you navigate a particular challenge, perhaps on a topic outside of your own area of expertise. These are people with no stake in the outcome, no agenda, and no need to sugar coat things for you.
We explored this at our inaugural female CEO roundtable, with a group of founders and executives building businesses across biotech, B2B media, trust technology, food and beverage, membership organisations, foreign direct investment and more. It was too good a conversation to keep to ourselves.
Why the people inside the business can't give you this
The structural reality of leadership is that almost everyone around you has a reason to manage what they tell you. Your team wants to project confidence upward, your board is evaluating you and your peers are navigating their own positions. Everyone, even the most well-intentioned, is filtering in some way.
This isn't cynicism; it’s experience, and it's just how organisations work. It means that the higher you rise, the narrower and less accurate the information that reaches you tends to be.
The response to this isn't to demand more honesty from the inside, it's to have people on the outside who have nothing to lose by being straight with you. Yes, of course, you should create a culture of openness and honesty, but that's only part of the answer.
One attendee described bringing in advisors with impressive credentials who turned out to be frustratingly surface-level. They'd run one or two versions of the same playbook and weren't much use when the situation didn't match. What she was actually looking for, and eventually found, were people with the battle scars won across multiple industries and company stages.
She wanted to turn to trusted advisors who'd seen enough different scenarios that their toolboxes were genuinely large. Swiss Army advisors, if you will. Not necessarily specialists in your exact problem, but people who'd been deep enough in different problems to know the difference between a real issue and a recoverable one.
What good looks like
A few consistent themes emerged around the topic of who actually makes a difference, and should be part of your kitchen cabinet:
People with different shapes to yours. One attendee talked about thinking of her advisory network like a sports team. Her advice was not to collect people who look like you, but rather to think of it as if you're filling positions on the playing field, whether that’s finance, brand/marketing, product, leadership, governance or something else. The goal is to have people who can help you see around corners and give you X-ray vision into things you don't naturally see. Where you have blind spots, a kitchen cabinet can bring clarity.
People who've made mistakes. Not failure for failure's sake, but advisors who've been through genuine setbacks tend to calibrate better than those who haven't. They know the difference between a real crisis and a recoverable setback, and can help you keep your nerve or tell you when it's time to move faster.
Someone who just understands. Several attendees mentioned the particular value of having a peer or two at roughly the same stage of the journey. Not so they can be told what to do, but to be understood by someone who knows what the weight of it actually feels like, and helps you to think more clearly on the hard days.
The toxic positivity paradox
One of the most unexpected topics that emerged during the roundtable was a phenomenon one participant described as ‘toxic positivity’: being so relentlessly positive and forward-looking as a leader that the team around you becomes reluctant to raise problems, for fear of dampening spirits or being the nay-sayer.
The scenario discussed was a new market expansion entered into with energy and optimism, but without adequate due diligence. When it didn't work, several members of the exec team admitted they'd seen it coming, but hadn't wanted to be the negative voices in the room. They'd been watching the CEO's enthusiasm and didn't feel it was their place to introduce doubt.
The response, in this case, was to bring in outside help, as well as to work on team culture explicitly and rebuild an environment where challenge was welcomed and encouraged. The business grew as a result.
For new leaders, this risk is acute. You arrive with things to prove; the energy is high and caution can easily look like a lack of conviction. The leaders who grow fastest, however, tend to be the ones who build honest feedback loops early, before the pattern of polite agreement has had time to settle in.
If the people inside your business aren't willing to tell you when something might be going wrong, the problem isn't them. And it’s not entirely that you’ve somehow signalled to them what you want to hear. It’s that, sometimes, to get the unvarnished truth, you need external experts or a kitchen cabinet to turn to.
On boards: when governance becomes the problem
The conversation at our roundtable eventually moved into territory that clearly touched a nerve in the room. What do you do when the board itself is blocking you?
This is more common than governance frameworks tend to acknowledge. Several attendees described boards that were operational rather than strategic, too involved in detail and resistant to change, even when the business case was clear.
A few approaches that came up in discussion:
The skills matrix. Map what the business needs to get to the next stage, then map what the current board actually brings. The gaps make the case for change without it being personal or political. You're not saying anyone's bad, you're saying the current bench doesn't match the onward journey.
Frame change as a commercial necessity. If the business needs to evolve the board to access the investment or expertise required, that's a business case, not a performance review. Framing it that way tends to defuse resistance.
Know your position. The board’s main duty is to represent shareholders and ensure the business is delivering against its strategic objectives, and the crucial relationship is between the Chair and the CEO. When this dynamic becomes less than constructive, it’s time to change.
The hardest scenario, as one attendee described, is when the Chair is a long-standing personal friend of the founder or major shareholder. In that situation, the most effective approach is often to build the surrounding board strong enough that the problematic individual becomes marginal rather than central. Pack the board with reasonable humans, as she put it. Let the numbers do the work.
None of this is easy. But the alternative, tolerating a board that isn't equipped for where the business needs to go, is a slow drain on every decision you make.
The gender dimension in asking for help
We spent time on a question that had been on our minds: are women better at asking for help than men?
The honest answer from the room: not necessarily. Even among a group of women who believed strongly in the value of external support, several admitted they'd been slow to build their own kitchen cabinet. There's something about being the person others rely on, that sense of being the trusted advisor to everyone else, that makes reversing the flow feel uncomfortable.
What the conversation did surface is a generational pattern. The reward systems that shaped executives who are now in their forties and fifties, particularly men, were built around tribal loyalty. Asking for outside help wasn't part of how success was gained or measured. Younger leaders are operating in different value systems, and the picture is shifting, if slowly.
One attendee made a point that left us all nodding along: high-performing women get targeted in ways that men typically don't. There are experiences that come with being a female leader at senior levels, from board dynamics to funding conversations to simply not being taken seriously. Most men will never have navigated these types of challenges themselves. If you want advisors who understand what you're actually dealing with, you want people who've been through some version of it. For many female leaders, that increasingly means other women.
The bottom line? Independent, capable women can be just as reluctant to ask for help as anyone. Competence and self-sufficiency are traits the room was full of, but those traits don't always make it easier to reach out.
Where to start
The conversation turned to how to select and build a kitchen cabinet. You don't need a formal structure. Some of the most useful kitchen cabinets are completely organic. But a few rules of thumb surfaced:
Don't wait until you need it. The hardest time to build trust with an external expert is when you're already under pressure. Start before the moment arrives, so the relationships are already in place. Of course, sometimes you don't know what it is that you are going to need until you need it but make sure you’ve got deep experience around the table. Find people that you actually like, as human connection matters just as much.
Think in categories. Where do you naturally have blind spots? Where do you lack operational experience? Where are you likely to face challenges you haven't faced before? Build cover in those areas specifically.
Find the ones who push back. Being told ‘you're right’ is comfortable. Being told ‘you're wrong’ at a key inflection point when you can still course-correct is valuable. Calibrate your cabinet around people who won't just tell you what you want to hear.
Revisit it as you grow. The advisors you need in year one are not the same as year five. Some will be for a specific phase, and some will stay with you for twenty years. Let the cabinet evolve.
And a few off-the-cuff, but memorable gems of advice:
Listen to your grandma!
The best skill you can have is being lazy
Find people who are scary, honest and amazing at what they do
Never do this alone
Above all, don’t be afraid to ask for help. One person in the room put it well: not asking isn't independence, it's just doing things the hard way.
This is what we do at Paceworks: we're the external, commercially grounded, zero-politics voice that new C-Suite leaders need in their early tenure. Not coaching, not big-firm consulting, just sharp, candid firepower exactly when it matters most.
If you're a first-time C-Suite leader navigating your first 180 days, we'd love to talk.