The CEO's Job Is Not What You Think

There is a common misconception about what makes a good CEO. It is not knowing the answer to every question, being the smartest person in the room, approving every decision or having a finger in every part of the business. It is certainly not doing everyone else's job. After more than 20 years leading organisations through growth, turnaround, transformation and value creation, across startups, scale-ups, billion-dollar enterprises, government, associations and not-for-profits, I have come to believe that the real job of the CEO is much simpler to describe, but much harder to do: creating organisational alignment and value.

Every organisation has competing priorities. Sales wants growth, finance wants control, operations wants stability, technology wants investment, workers want job security and higher pay, customers want the best quality and top service and shareholders wants higher and higher returns. None of these things are necessarily wrong, but they cannot all be the number one priority. The CEO's job is to bring them together into a coherent direction and make sure people understand where the organisation is going, why it is going there, what matters most and, importantly, what is not going to get done. Alignment does not mean everyone agrees with every decision. It means people understand the direction, understand their role in delivering it and are pulling in the same direction.

I have seen this play out at very different scales. At BetterHR, for example, the challenge was not simply to generate more sales. We needed to align product, technology, sales, marketing, partnerships and operations around a scalable commercial model. The business ultimately doubled revenue and profit and grew to more than 60,000 users and 300+ partners. That did not happen because the CEO personally worked harder or became involved in every decision. It happened because we created an organisation that could execute and grow without everything having to pass through the CEO.

That is one of the biggest traps I see in leadership. CEOs can become the organisation's chief problem solver because it feels productive. Someone brings you a problem, you solve it and they go away. Then they come back with the next problem. Before long, everyone is waiting for the CEO to make the decision. That is not leadership. It is organisational dependency.

A CEO should be building leaders who can make good decisions without them. That requires clarity around accountability, decision rights and outcomes. If a senior executive owns an outcome, they need the authority to make the decisions necessary to achieve it. If they continually need the CEO to approve relatively minor decisions, something is wrong. Perhaps the person is not right for the role, perhaps the organisation has not given them sufficient authority, or perhaps the CEO simply has not learned to let go. Often it is a combination of all three.

This becomes even more important during a turnaround. When an organisation is underperforming, the temptation is to fix everything at once. Change the strategy, the structure, the systems, the people, the pricing, the sales process and the technology. I have learned that the first requirement is usually much more basic: get people aligned around what is actually wrong and what needs to change. At Zonda, we focused on the fundamental commercial and operational issues, aligned the organisation around them and then executed quickly. Within nine months, the businesses had moved from losses to a 34% gross profit position. The lesson was not that every turnaround can be completed in nine months. It was that clarity creates speed. When people understand the problem, the priority and their role in solving it, organisations can move remarkably quickly.

The other part of the CEO's job that is often underestimated is deciding what not to do. I have walked into organisations where there were dozens of strategic priorities. In reality, there were no priorities at all. Everything was important, which meant nothing was important. Strategy is not simply a list of things the organisation intends to do. It is also a decision about where the organisation will focus its limited time, money and people, and what it is deliberately not going to pursue. A CEO needs to be comfortable saying that something can wait, that an opportunity is interesting but not strategically important, or that a particular problem is not actually the organisation's problem to solve.

Ultimately, though, alignment is only part of the equation. The CEO has to create value. That might be revenue growth, profit improvement, increased enterprise value, stronger customer retention, improved productivity, a successful transformation, preparing a business for sale or building an organisation that can scale beyond its founder. The measure will vary depending on the organisation, but I think the CEO should continually be asking two questions: what are we doing that creates value, and what are we doing that consumes time and resources without creating enough value?

I have also spent a significant part of my career working with founders and owner-led businesses, and this is where the CEO role becomes particularly interesting. Founders are often the reason the business exists and have usually been central to every major decision that got it to where it is. They won the early customers, built the culture, solved the problems and carried the risk. But the operating model that gets a business from $1 million to $5 million is not necessarily the operating model that gets it from $5 million to $50 million. At some point, the organisation needs to become bigger than the founder. The role of a good CEO is not to replace the founder's energy or experience, but to harness it while building the leadership, structure and systems that allow the organisation to keep growing.

The CEO also sets the operating tempo of the organisation, whether they realise it or not. If every decision requires three meetings, people learn to have three meetings. If decisions take six weeks, people learn to wait six weeks. If poor performance is tolerated, people learn that accountability is optional. If the CEO constantly changes priorities, people learn to wait for the next priority before committing themselves. Culture is often discussed in terms of values and behaviours, but much of an organisation's culture is simply what happens repeatedly. The CEO has enormous influence over what gets repeated.

For me, one of the clearest tests of a CEO is what happens when they are not there. If the CEO goes away for two weeks and everything stops, the CEO has not built an organisation. They have built a dependency on themselves. The strongest CEOs create clarity, capability and accountability around them. They build leaders who can lead, systems that produce consistent outcomes and a culture where people know what is expected of them. They make the difficult decisions and then get out of the way.

That does not mean the CEO becomes less important. It means their time is being used where it has the greatest leverage. Strategy, leadership, capital allocation, customers, culture, risk, growth, transformation and value creation are all areas where CEO-level attention can have an enormous impact. Spending hours solving problems that should be solved two levels below you is usually not a sign of commitment. It is a sign that something in the organisation is not working.

After more than two decades in leadership, I think the simplest way to describe the CEO's job is this: the CEO's job is not to do more work than everyone else. It is to make the organisation capable of doing more.

That means creating clarity, alignment, accountability and capability, making the difficult decisions and continually looking for opportunities to create value. The best CEO is not the person who is involved in everything. It is the person who makes the organisation better because they are there, and strong enough to perform when they are not.

That is what I think the CEO's job really is.

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