Spies and CEOs operate in different spheres, yet they face the same challenge: getting people to act in ways they normally wouldn’t.

As a former CIA operations officer, I was tasked with persuading strangers—who knew they could be executed if caught—to pass along Top Secret documents. A CEO’s role carries lower stakes but a similar shape: motivate employees to take calculated risks, embrace change, and foster innovation.

The difference is this: spies are trained to work with human nature, while CEOs often ignore it—and end up battling it without success. Think of spies moving quietly through people’s minds, creating psychological safety, building trust, and subtly influencing behavior. These “soft skills” of persuasion and influence are central to successful change. This is not to say that spies have all the answers, but CEOs tend to focus on the “hard” tools of leadership like KPIs, metrics, reorganizations, and policies rather than the people issues underneath them. They issue vision statements, announce cultural initiatives, and host town halls—yet are puzzled when employees still resist change.

Here’s what spies know that CEOs should know: when you want people to break away from the status quo, the first step is to understand how human nature actually works. Four things matter most:

1. Fear, which keeps people locked to the status quo
2. Certainty, which builds trust
3. Purpose, which gets people to go beyond what’s required
4. The trap of tangibility, which keeps most CEOs from addressing the three items above

Below are four lessons from intelligence work that CEOs can apply right away, along with operational tips that translate espionage tradecraft into leadership strategies.

1. Fear rules the brain

In intelligence work, you quickly see how fear and uncertainty shape human behavior. It happens unconsciously, yet people cling to a suboptimal status quo because it feels safer than change. CEOs often underestimate this deeply rooted resistance. They set strategies, targets, and metrics without addressing the survival instincts that make employees avoid risk.

The survival instinct operates on two levels: threat (fear) and reward. Spies focus on both. They try to alleviate an asset’s fears and, just as importantly, reinforce a sense of purpose and reward. Inside a company, the same two tracks are always running underneath the surface, whether a CEO is paying attention to them or not:

• Fear in organizations: In today’s workplace, nobody fears being attacked by a tiger, yet employees can still react intensely to social threats. Employees subconsciously ask themselves: Do my colleagues respect me? Will I embarrass myself in front of my boss? Is the leadership team planning a reorganization that could catch me off guard? These fears can shape behavior more than most CEOs realize.
• Reward in organizations: In business, leaders often neglect intrinsic motivators such as purpose, autonomy, belonging, and mastery. Instead, they rely on HR to overcomplicate extrinsic reward systems that rarely foster lasting motivation. Conversely, spies are motivated by purpose. An asset who believes, “The documents I provide will influence U.S. foreign policy,” is willing to take significant risks.

2. Certainty builds trust

If psychological fear is the enemy, certainty is the antidote. Spies understand that the mind longs for predictability. A foreign agent will risk his life if he trusts that his handler is reliable, honest, and consistent. The same rule applies in organizations: employees are more loyal and more productive when leaders minimize ambiguity.

This is local certainty, not strategic certainty. Employees do not expect a frontline manager to predict how AI will reshape the company or whether the market will turn. They need to know something closer to home: Is my boss happy with my work? Do my colleagues respect me? Am I contributing in the right way? Frontline managers create that day-to-day certainty.

Grand speeches don’t create certainty—it’s built through small, consistent actions as part of frequent, credible signals. In espionage, that could mean remembering an asset’s child’s name, asking open-ended questions, and keeping small promises or explaining why you haven’t. In business, it involves reinforcing clarity by offering feedback as advice rather than criticism and demonstrating consistency when circumstances change.

CEOs often focus on bold initiatives but overlook smaller behaviors. In practice, habitual acts—such as giving helpful advice, recognizing effort, and being transparent about decisions—are what truly build trust.

3. Purpose builds momentum

Fear explains why people stick to the status quo. Certainty explains how trust is built. But intrinsic rewards, such as a sense of purpose, explain why humans excel—why people go above and beyond.

Spies know that purpose helps overcome fear. A recruited agent might betray his country because he believes he is serving a higher good—whether it’s protecting his family, promoting democracy, or fighting an evil ideology or system. Where certainty reduces resistance, purpose provides drive and momentum.

CEOs often overlook this leverage point. Instead of enabling frontline managers to foster purpose among employees, they issue abstract corporate mission and values statements that have little effect. What truly works is much more specific: helping each person connect their daily work to something meaningful. Employees need to feel that their efforts are not just tasks to be completed but contributions to a larger purpose. When people understand the “why,” they can develop a good “how.”

4. Tangibility acts as a trap

Spies focus deeply on the soft aspects of human nature: motivations, fears, values, and relationships. They know that every operation can succeed or fail based on the psychology of a single person.

CEOs, by contrast, tend to focus on the “hard” side: financials, metrics, policies, and technology. They may say, “People are our most important asset,” but their calendars, budgets, and to-do lists tell a different story. They claim to hire frontline managers for people skills but often select based solely on technical skills. A well-documented cognitive glitch, the tangibility bias, drives this imbalance.

Tangibility bias is the documented tendency to give more weight to what is visible and measurable—budgets, costs, revenues, and outputs—while undervaluing what is abstract or harder to measure, such as culture, trust, morale, and innovation. This is why leaders default to working on what they can quantify, even if it isn’t a real lever of performance.

Intelligence training forces officers to pay attention to what this bias can cause leaders to overlook. They focus on the invisible: trust, certainty, purpose, and inclusion. CEOs can learn from this discipline. Test yourself: look at your to-do list for today. Is there a leadership item on it? If it’s all administrative tasks and no leadership actions, you’re caught in the tangibility trap.

Four practical tips for working with human nature

Each of these four habits is a small, repeatable behavior a manager can start this week, and each maps directly to one of the levers above: praise counters fear, check-ins build certainty, delegation supplies purpose, and leadership reviews force CEOs to confront tangibility bias.

What makes these habits useful is that they’re inexpensive to run and hard to fake. A manager can’t praise their way out of a real trust problem, and a leadership review will expose a hollow one within a few sessions. They function as diagnostics as much as fixes.

Start by finding the one habit your organization is weakest on and build it before adding the next.

Leading with human nature

Spies and CEOs share a mission: to influence behavior when the stakes are high. The difference is that spies start with human nature, while CEOs too often overlook it. Fear shuts people down; certainty opens them up; purpose propels them forward. 

Great leaders don’t coerce performance—they create the psychological safety and meaning that make people want to excel. 

When leadership actions align with human nature, resistance fades and innovation soars. Spies use this to recruit. CEOs can use it to inspire and transform.

Meet the Author

Mike Mears is a Catalant consultant and leadership theoretician focused on advanced leadership and management approaches for government and private sector organizations. He founded and led the CIA Leadership Academy and retired as the CIA’s Chief of HR. His book CERTAINTY: How Great Bosses Can Change Minds and Drive Innovation leverages neuroscience, psychology, and Mike’s experience in the CIA to offer practical leadership advice. He holds a Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School and a Bachelor of Science from the United States Military Academy at West Point.