How Peer Groups and Outside Accountability Make Better CEOs
Leading a business is isolating in ways that are hard to explain to people who haven’t done it. The higher up you are, the fewer people around you are willing to tell you what they actually think. The team has a stake in your approval. The board has its own agenda. The people closest to you personally may not understand the business well enough to help. And the peers who might understand are running their own companies and dealing with their own problems.
That isolation is one of the most underestimated risks in a growing business. Not because it feels bad, though it often does, but because it leads to worse decisions. Leaders who aren’t getting honest input from people without a stake in the outcome start to rely entirely on their own judgment. And even the best judgment has blind spots.
Slade McLendon built his career around solving this problem. In a recent episode of The Fast Slow Motion Podcast: How a Third-Generation Family Business Built Something Worth Passing Down, he described the network of peer groups, coaches, and mentors he has assembled over the years — not as a professional development exercise, but as a survival strategy for leading well over the long run.
What a Good Peer Group Actually Does
Slade is a member of C12, a peer group for Christian CEOs and business owners. He joined several years ago and describes it as one of the most formative decisions he has made as a leader.
The value isn’t primarily the curriculum, though C12 has a structured monthly program. The value is the room. A group of non-competing business owners who meet regularly, who know each other’s businesses and lives well enough to ask real questions, and who have agreed to hold each other accountable to standards they’ve set for themselves.
Once a year, Slade’s C12 group conducts a formal audit of his leadership. They survey his team. They interview people inside the organization. They bring back what they find, and the feedback is unfiltered. His C12 chair also meets with his wife with nothing off the table. That level of access is unusual and intentional. Slade has decided that the people who give him feedback need to be able to see his whole life, not just the version he presents in a business setting.
That’s not easy to agree to. It reflects a conviction that the cost of comfortable feedback is higher than the cost of honest feedback.
The Executive Coach Who Wouldn’t Tell Him What to Do
Slade also hired Doug Hurley of Rethink Work as a personal executive coach. Doug is a former combat pilot from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, who flew missions for SEAL teams and Delta Force before transitioning into leadership coaching. That background isn’t incidental. It shaped how Doug thinks about pressure, decision-making, and what it means to lead under difficult conditions.
What Slade got from Doug wasn’t a playbook. Doug consistently pointed Slade back to listening before deciding, to pausing before acting, to bringing the same discipline to leadership that elite military operators bring to high-stakes missions. He recommended A Tale of Three Kings by Gene Edwards, which landed hard enough that Slade knows other leaders who read it annually. The book is about power, leadership, and what happens when strength goes unchecked — a conversation Slade needed to have with himself.
Doug also introduced Slade to the idea of spear throwing — the way leaders sometimes protect themselves and direct others to do the same, often without realizing it. Recognizing that pattern in himself was uncomfortable. Changing it was the work.
Strategic Coach and the 10x Principle
Slade also joined Strategic Coach with Dan Sullivan, which he describes as stretching him in areas he needed to grow and showing him how far he had to go in places he thought he was already strong.
One of the concepts from Strategic Coach that hit hardest was the 10x principle, developed further in the book 10x Is Easier Than 2x. The idea is that aiming for 2x growth keeps you in the same basic mode — doing what you’ve always done, just more of it. Aiming for 10x forces a fundamentally different kind of thinking. You can’t get there by working harder. You have to think differently about what the business is, who does what, and what you’re actually building toward.
For Slade, that framing clarified a tension he had been carrying for a long time: the pull between being a lifestyle business and being a growth impact company. He chose growth impact. And that choice has shaped every subsequent decision about structure, people, and what he asks of himself as a leader.
Why Outside Voices Matter More Than Inside Ones
There’s a pattern across everything Slade describes: the most important feedback he has received has come from people outside his business. Not because the people inside aren’t capable, but because they have a stake in the outcome. They work for him. They depend on him. That dependency, however well-intentioned on both sides, shapes what people are willing to say.
An outside coach, a peer group, a trusted advisor who has no financial relationship with the outcome — these people can say things that no one inside the business will say. And the things no one will say are usually the things most worth hearing.
Slade’s father used to say: don’t let dust settle on you thinking you’ve arrived. The moment you do is the moment you start going downhill. The peer groups and coaches Slade has surrounded himself with are, in a real sense, the infrastructure that keeps that from happening. They are the people who won’t let dust settle.
Building Your Own Accountability Infrastructure
Not every CEO needs C12, Strategic Coach, and a personal executive coach simultaneously. But every CEO who wants to lead well over time needs some version of outside accountability. The form matters less than the function: people who know you well enough to give you real feedback, who have no stake in telling you what you want to hear, and who will show up and say the hard thing when the hard thing needs to be said.
Slade asks a question he returns to often: who are your six? The six people who will carry your casket. The six who will step into the danger zone and speak truth even when it’s painful. If you can name them and you know they’re in your life, you’re building the right kind of accountability. If you can’t, that’s worth paying attention to.
For more on the peer groups and coaches that shaped Slade’s leadership, listen to The Fast Slow Motion Podcast episode: How a Third-Generation Family Business Built Something Worth Passing Down.
Listen to the full podcast episode here.