There seems to be a confusion or overlap between what a CTO and a CEO needs to do in terms of leadership, they have different audiences. While CTOs are expecte

There seems to be a confusion or overlap between what a CTO and a CEO needs to do in terms of leadership, they have different audiences. While CTOs are expected to be heavily technical and fact based, CEOs often negotiate based on feelings, trust, wrong data and emotions with other parties (mostly non-tech) where it does make sense to open several options. Any engineer growing into leadership will increasingly need to deal with non-tech people that will find the strong engineering opinions as leaving them out of the decision process, and subsequently be offended by that fact. CTOs have little resilience to bullshit, they aren't known for soft-skills either and tend to be seen as leading the pack. There is a fine line of what being a leader means, depending very much on who your audience is.