HANS SMELLINCKX

Leadership communication is often discussed in terms of speaking well. How to frame a message. How to inspire. How to announce change. How to reassure. How to choose the right tone. All of that matters. But one of the most underestimated communication risks for a CEO is not poor speech. It is silence.

Sooner or later, every CEO has a first real conflict. Sometimes it comes in week one. Sometimes after a month or two. But it comes. A disagreement around a key decision, tension in the management team, a misalignment with a founder, a clash around role expectations, a person issue that has been simmering for too long.

A CEO’s first all-hands meeting often gets loaded with far too much symbolism. Boards see it as a leadership moment. Communication teams see it as a key narrative moment. Employees see it as an opportunity to get a first real feel for the person who will now shape the company. The CEO often feels all of that at once.

There are few things more deceptive in leadership than a calm management team. From the outside, calm looks healthy. Meetings are respectful. Nobody interrupts. People are aligned. There is no visible conflict. Everything seems professional. And yet many CEOs are leading teams where that calm is not a sign of trust. It is a sign of caution. People edit themselves. They choose what is safe to say. They challenge around the edges but not at the centre.

There are companies where the brand is mainly a communication layer. A story you tell the outside world. And then there are companies where the brand feels more like an extension of the internal culture. Not because every employee can recite the positioning by heart, but because the way people work, think and collaborate clearly influences the work that reaches customers. That is one of the reasons the LDV United story is interesting for CEOs.

One of the most uncomfortable realities of leadership is that people do not respond to your intentions. They respond to your behaviour, your tone, your timing and your patterns. That sounds obvious, but it is easy to forget, especially once you become CEO. From the inside, your leadership feels coherent. You know what you mean. You know the pressure you’re under, the context behind your decisions, the care that sits underneath your frustration, the logic behind your silence

A lot of CEOs spend years trying to live up to an image of leadership that doesn’t quite fit them. They read about bold visionary founders, disciplined operators, charismatic public leaders or data-driven strategists, and somewhere along the way they start asking themselves a slightly dangerous question: “Which one of these should I be?”

CEOs say they want a more agile company. Leadership teams talk about agile ways of working. Boards ask for faster execution and more adaptability. But when you look at how many SMEs and scale-ups are actually organised, you often see something else

In practice, many CEOs are leading companies where the formal structure and the lived reality have drifted apart. The chart says one thing, the business does another. And as long as growth keeps happening or operations keep running, that mismatch is often tolerated for far too long.

The hard truth is that in dynamic environments – and if you’re operating in today’s markets, yours is dynamic – you will almost never have 100% of the information you’d like. And if you wait for it, you’ll often discover it only arrives after the window of opportunity has closed.

Decision-making in that environment is not straightforward. But the real problem is often not the complexity itself. It’s how we respond to it.

In “100 Days to Make Your Mark as a CEO” I encourage CEOs to use their first or next 100 days to get a much clearer picture of how revenue actually happens.

your customers should act as a strategic radar: They reveal what really matters. They show where your positioning is strong or weak. They tell you where the market is moving before your reports do.

As CEO, your calendar is a strategy document. Not the one you present to your board.The one you live every week. If you lead a SME or scale-up in Belgium, the Netherlands or elsewhere in Europe, you probably know the feeling: back-to-back meetings, constant interruptions, little time to think, a sense that you are busy but not always on the right things.

Many CEOs of SMEs and scale-ups in Belgium and the Netherlands tell me they “have a management team”. When we look closer, what they often mean is: a group of senior people, each responsible for their own silo, who meet regularly to exchange updates. That’s not the same as a leadership team.

In your first 100 days as CEO, it’s tempting to dive straight into: strategy decks, numbers, organisational charts. All of that matters.But if you skip the right conversations, your strategy will be built on assumptions. Whether you’re taking over a SME in Flanders, leading a family business in Wallonia, or stepping into a scale-up in the Netherlands, the pattern is the same: Your first 10–20 conversations quietly define your reality.

Intro If you ask most CEOs whether they listen to their people, the answer is always: “Of course. My door is always open.” But when you talk to employees, managers or even customers in those same SMEs and scale-ups in Belgium or the Netherlands, you often hear a very different story: “We say things, but nothing changes.” “They’ve already decided before they ask.” “We only get questions when something goes wrong.” In “100 Days to Make Your Mark as a CEO” , I treat listening as

Your company cannot be structurally healthier than the person who leads it.

Becoming CEO is often presented as a promotion.In reality, it’s a change of species.

When you hear “storytelling”, you might think of campaigns, ads or brand videos. But if you’re the CEO of a SME or scale-up in Belgium, the Netherlands or anywhere in Europe, storytelling is first and foremost a leadership tool, not a marketing tactic.