It’s time to stop calling women ‘accidental CEOs’

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO ! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of  Inc.  and  Fast Company . If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can  sign up to get it yourself  every Monday morning.







During a recent interview with Ariane Gorin, the new CEO of Expedia Group, I asked when she realized she was “CEO material.” Speaking in front of a crowd of Expedia Group business partners, she recalled a moment earlier in her career at Expedia when a top executive, asked to assess Gorin’s talent, told her then-boss: “She wants your job.” Put another way, other people identified her as a candidate for the top position even before she considered it a possibility.



I nearly blurted out, “So you’re an accidental CEO!” I wisely reconsidered. Gorin most recently was president of Expedia for Business, which reported $3.4 billion in revenue last year, and held senior leadership roles throughout her 11-year tenure at the travel technology company. Before that she spent 10 years at Microsoft and worked at Boston Consulting Group. Her ascent may not have been calculated, but there’s nothing accidental or random about it.



It’s no accident



The term “accidental CEO” is a shorthand way to describe an executive who has taken an unlikely path to the corner office. David Novak, the former CEO of YUM! Brands, wrote a book called The Education of an Accidental CEO, chronicling lessons from his peripatetic childhood and meandering career, which included stints as a door-to-door salesman, a hotel clerk, and an advertising copywriter.



But the phrase is disproportionately applied to women—and often it is the CEO herself who embraces it. “The Accidental CEO” was the headline of a 2003 Fortune feature story on Anne Mulcahy, who turned around Xerox in the early 2000s. “I never expected to be CEO of Xerox. I was never groomed to be CEO of Xerox. It was a total surprise to everyone, including myself,” Mulcahy told writer Betsy Morris. There are dozens of TEDx talks and podcasts featuring women leaders suggesting that their professional success was somehow happenstance. I’m guilty of this, too. The very first Modern CEO newsletter , published on January 30, 2022, opens with the sentence: “I am an accidental CEO.”



Own your role



I now think it is time to retire the trope. Self-described accidental CEOs may not intend it, but we can come across like we’re apologizing for or tempering our professional successes—or that our boards or shareholders somehow made a mistake in naming us to the role. Quite the contrary, women CEOs who arrive via circuitous or surprising routes should take great pride in their unconventional backgrounds. Diane Hoskins, global co-chair of Gensler, the architecture firm, has talked about her wide-ranging experiences—she worked in architecture, interior design, and real estate—and credits her “off track” career with giving her a range of skills and an understanding of how different industries fit together.



In recalling her own journey, Expedia’s Gorin—one of just four dozen or so women currently running a Fortune 500 company—says with each promotion she not only had to learn new skills but also had to figure out what responsibilities to let go. And she noted that a friend helped unlock her professional aspirations. The friend told her: “Talent without ambition is like a bird without wings.”



What terms would you retire?



Have you ever called yourself an accidental CEO? What other leadership tropes or archetypes should we retire? Send me your anecdotes and ideas. They may form the basis of a future newsletter.



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