by David McKillips, CEO, Topgolf Toptracer and Topgolf Swing Suites
Source
What my first 90 days as CEO taught me about the one leadership skill nobody interviews for. I’ve noticed something about the way we hire and evaluate leaders.
We interview for strategy. We interview for vision. We interview for experience, judgment, communication, culture fit — all the usual boxes.
What we almost never interview for — and what I’ve come to believe matters more than any of it — is a leader’s ability to keep leading when their plan disappears.
I learned this the hard way.
Six weeks in
On January 20, 2020, I started as CEO of CEC Entertainment, the parent company of Chuck E. Cheese and Peter Piper Pizza. I was ready. I had a hundred-day plan I was genuinely proud of. Brand-refresh initiatives. Guest-experience upgrades. A modernization roadmap.
Six weeks later, the world stopped.
By mid-March, every one of our locations was closed for inside dining. Nearly 12,000 employees at home, uncertain when — or if — they’d have jobs to return to. My hundred-day plan? Irrelevant. Every single line item.
That’s the moment I’m writing about today. Not the plan I had. What happened after the plan died.
What actually mattered
Most business writing about crisis is tidy. It has three neat lessons. The company either “pivots” or “adapts” and comes out stronger.
Real crisis is messier.
The first thing you lose isn’t revenue. It’s the plan you had five minutes ago. Every consulting deck, every strategy off-site, every priority sheet — irrelevant. And with the plan goes something more subtle: the feeling that you know what you’re doing.
For anyone whose entire career has been built on being the person with the plan, that vacuum is disorienting.
What I learned is that the leaders who navigate real crisis well aren’t the ones with the best plans. They’re the ones who can keep making decisions when nobody has one. Who can look at a landscape they don’t recognize and act anyway.
Communication as almost everything
Under normal conditions, communication is one of many things a CEO does. In a crisis, it becomes almost all of it.
I called our field leaders every week. Sometimes twice a week. Not to update them on strategy — most weeks, we didn’t have new strategy. To be present. To answer questions I didn’t have answers to. To acknowledge how hard the situation was without pretending I had a road map.
People can handle almost anything, as long as they know their leader is with them and is telling them the truth.
The credit belongs elsewhere
Everything that came out of those years — the Chapter 11 recapitalization, the safe reopening of every location, the Pasqually’s Pizza & Wings launch, the international expansion — was executed by the people at CEC and Chuck E. Cheese, not by any single decision at the top.
A lot of them are still there. Some left for other opportunities and are doing incredible work. All of them showed up during a period when they had every reason not to, and treated the guests — kids having birthday parties, families showing up on a Tuesday afternoon — like it was still the most important thing in the world.
Because to those guests, it was.
That’s what a real turnaround looks like. Not a hero CEO with a plan. A team of people who refuse to give up on the work.
What I’d tell any first-time CEO
If I could go back and coach the version of me who walked into that job in January 2020, I’d tell him three things:
- Have the mission unmistakably clear before anything else.
- Communicate more than feels necessary. Then double it.
- Trust the people doing the work. They will show up in ways you can’t script.
I hope no first-time CEO ever needs to lead through a real crisis in their first six months.
But if they do — those three things are what I’d want them to know.
