CEOs Don't Need Another Class — They Need a Community
Everything I've learned that really matters was shared in a Vistage room.
Not in a book.
I've read the books. I still do. Marcus Buckingham, Lencioni, Jim Collins, Brené Brown — I've dog-eared and highlighted and taken notes in margins for decades. And I value every bit of it.
But there's a kind of learning that books can't touch.
The kind that happens when someone sitting across from you — someone who runs a company, makes payroll, carries the weight of other people's livelihoods — takes off their mask and tells you the truth about the worst decision they ever made.
What it cost them.
What they'd do differently.
And why they're telling you — a room full of peers — so that maybe it costs you less.
That's not content. That's community.
Here's what I've noticed after years of sitting in these rooms and watching what happens when leaders finally feel safe enough to be honest:
We wear our masks so long we forget we have them on.
The polished CEO. The confident executive. The person who always has the answer and never lets them see you sweat. We build that identity slowly, over years, and somewhere along the way we start mistaking it for who we actually are.
Until someone else takes theirs off.
That's the moment everything changes. When one person is brave enough to say — this didn't work, I was wrong, I was scared, I didn't know what I was doing and it almost cost me everything — the whole room exhales. Permission spreads. And suddenly people who walked in performing start talking like humans.
Vulnerability is contagious in the best possible way.
That's what community does.
That's what no course, no book, no podcast can replicate.
And once you've experienced it — once you've sat in a room where the masks come off and the real conversations start — you realize how much you were carrying alone that you never had to.
Nancy Girres is an executive coach and Vistage Chair based in Fort Collins, Colorado. She's been in those rooms for over a decade. The best things she knows, she learned there.