The 5 Roles of a CEO
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“You need to have to have a breakthrough leadership team so you could evolve into the role you need to be at as a CEO.”
–Mike Goldman
Understanding the CEO Role: Beyond the Day-to-Day
- The CEO role evolves from hands-on tasks to strategic leadership as the company grows, shifting focus from working in the business to working on the business.
The Five Key Roles of a CEO
Visionary: Crafting and communicating a clear, future-oriented vision for the company.
Ambassador: Acting as the face of the company both internally (culture and morale) and externally (industry representation, client relations).
Team Builder: Assembling and maintaining a high-performance leadership team.
Accountability: Setting and modeling expectations for performance across the organization.
Self-Care: Prioritizing personal well-being to effectively lead others.
Building the Right Team: The Foundation of Effective Leadership
- Emphasizes the importance of having a trusted, capable team to enable the CEO to focus on strategic roles without being drawn back into day-to-day operations.
- The shift to strategic leadership roles is crucial for long-term success, enabling the CEO to guide and inspire the company effectively while also enjoying the role.
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Once again, I've got to thank one of my clients for giving me a podcast episode on a silver platter. I never have to think about these things. I just have to pay attention to what my clients are doing, what my clients are asking. And, you know, I think you probably know at this point, I coach leadership teams as a group and then I coach my, my CEOs one on one and I was on a coaching call with one of my CEOs just yesterday.
And he just looked unhappy, felt very guilty, felt like he was being an absentee CEO and he needed to apologize to his, to his team. And he wanted to talk to me about what he could do about it, that, you know, what was going on? Why was he kind of AWOL from his normal CEO job? So I said, well, tell me, what are you actually doing?
That makes you feel this way. And he said, well, I've been, you know, first I've been doing a better job taking care of myself. I've been exercising where I haven't before. I'm playing more tennis. I'm, you know, doing these things and, uh, okay, what, what else are you doing? Well, you know, I was at an industry conference for a little while, helping, you know, represent, you know, our company and, and helping represent the industry.
you know, I met a few, Clients, long term clients, but I didn't really do any work, just kind of shook their hands and had some lunch with them. you know, walked around the office and one of the job sites and, and, you know, said hi to some of the workers and talk to them for a little while. But, you know, I haven't, I haven't gotten involved in any detailed customer service issues.
I'm not closing deals. You know, I feel like an absentee CEO. Like I should be doing more what's stopping me.
And I kind of laughed and said, you're doing the job you need to be doing. Well, all those things you're doing, including taking care of yourself, that's an important job of a CEO. And you know, I see CEOs struggle with this all the time and it causes confusion for them.
It causes stress on their team. The role of the CEO is not very straightforward. To most entrepreneurs who become CEOs. I mean, most entrepreneurs started off As did, you know, this CEO, I was talking to most entrepreneurs start off with their sleeves rolled up. They are doing all of the work themselves.
You know, if they're in marketing, they're coming up with the marketing communications and the graphic design. If they're roofers, they're hammering nails up on a roof. They're doing the work themselves. And as, The company grows and becomes more complex and as their vision grows and becomes more complex, some of those same CEOs keep doing the same job they always did.
They're working in the business. They're not working on the business. And while I don't think most CEOs would admit to this, most CEOs that I speak to. Believe their job is to do everyone else's job. I was talking to a different CEO just the other day about key performance indicators for his team. What were the two or three measures of success that were critical for each of the members of his team?
And he was having no problem going through that. And then I said, what about you as CEO? What are your measures? And he said, well, I guess my measures are just to make sure everybody else is meeting their measures. No, that's not the role. Yes, that's important. That's part of what you do, but the CEO has a very important, very different role than just making sure everybody else is doing their job.
So what I want to share with you in this episode is, is my view of. Five key roles of a CEO. Now, these five roles are critical, but depending on where your company is in its maturity, You may or may not be filling all these roles or if you're not the CEO and you're thinking about your CEO, your CEO may or may not be filling all these roles right now because they're spending so much of their time with their sleeves rolled up working in the business.
And these five roles I'm going to talk about are all about working on the business. So this is an evolution because early on if you are a. You know, 2 million company. And you're a CEO with maybe a leadership team, maybe a bunch of helpers around you. Yes. You've got to have your sleeves up working in the business.
But even there, we ought to be spending some of our time working on the business. Now, if you're a 30 million company or a 50 million company, you need to be spending most of your time working on the business and you should be fully transitioned into these roles that I'm going to lay out. So let me take these one at a time and lay out these roles.
So remember there are five.
The first one in no particular order is the role of being a visionary. For the business. The role of a visionary means that as the CEO, you own making sure there is a crystal clear vision of the future 10 to 15 years out, five years out, three years out, one year out, what is your company going to look like, taste like, smell like, sound like, feel like, and some of those things you've got to make sure you are.
Thinking about, deciding on, communicating, or things like, what's the core purpose of the business? What's the why of your business? Your core purpose is not what you do, it's why you do it. So if you think about Starbucks, their core purpose is not a cup of coffee. Their core purpose is to be a third place.
Some place that's not home. It's not work. It's this third place that people could escape. Disney's purpose is happiness. So, as the visionary, you need to decide what's the purpose. Of your company. What's your 10 to 15 year big hairy audacious goal that flag on top of the mountain, like Kennedy JFK in 1962 saying by the end of the decade, we're going to put a man on the moon.
What's your version of man on the moon, your version of flag on top of the mountain, what's your three hag, your three year highly achievable goal financially in terms of big initiatives, what are you going to look like three years from now? What are things going to look like one year from now? So as the leader of leaders, as the CEO, you need to own that vision.
Now, by the way, that doesn't mean you need to come up with that vision. By yourself, if you're surrounding yourself with the right team, with the right leadership team, you've got a bunch of folks that you should be collaborating with on that. But at the end of the day, you as the CEO need to own that vision and you need to make sure everyone on your leadership team that they are all evangelists of that vision.
So ultimately the whole company understands that vision and understands their role in the vision. That's a. Big job. And when you're busy working in the business, it's easy to forget that job, get caught up in the day to day, and there's no clear vision of the future. So job number one that the CEO needs to evolve into is visionary job.
Number two.
I'll call the ambassador and I'll thank my friend Brad Giles who wrote a book called Made to Thrive about the role of the CEO. He was on an earlier podcast. I'll thank him for that term. The ambassador role is really a twofold role. There's the internal ambassador and the external ambassador.
So from an internal ambassador standpoint, it's the role of owning culture, owning a set of non negotiable core values within the organization. It's the role of communicating the vision internally to your team. It's the role of keeping your, your fingers on the pulse of morale and passion and engagement.
Within your organization, one of the measures of that might be an employee net promoter score and ambassador to the organization means even though you may not have your sleeves rolled up working in the business as much as you were before, that doesn't mean you're not. Talking to your people, meeting with your people, making sure you, again, have your fingers on the pulse of, of what issues are out there that, that, that need to be dealt with.
People ought to see you. You ought to be shaking hands within your organization. And showing people that you're still there and you're still leading. You're just leading in a different way. So there's the internal ambassador role where you own culture and morale is that by the way, that's not owned by HR.
It's easy to pawn that off on HR. HR may be responsible for a lot of things in getting that done, but living the culture within the organization, the morale of the organization, the CEO is the model. So there's the internal ambassador role, and then there's the external ambassador role. External ambassador role is, has different components as well.
It's you're the, the ambassador to your clients. You ought to be out there having lunch and dinner with your clients, shaking hands with your clients, making sure your clients are happy, finding out what else your clients need with your prospects. You may not be the one identifying the new prospects and closing the deal anymore, but where, and when might you be needed to be that final that final event that closes the deal, that prospect that that's kind of hovering on the wall, but now you as the CEO, we're going to go in and close the deal.
So part of the external ambassador role is clients prospects. There's an industry, industry role. When you are out at industry meetings, association meetings, that's not a waste of time. You should be out there in your role as, as ambassador fighting for the industry. Fighting for, you know, regulations within the industry or the lack thereof, you know, fighting for your company within the industry.
the external ambassador role is being an ambassador with your key vendors as well. It's also, you know, from a public relations standpoint, what could you do to be out there? You know, press, media, whatever it is, getting the word out about your company, about your industry. So the ambassador role is job number two, and that's both internal and external.
Number three, I'll just call the team builder role. And by team builder, I do not mean trust fall exercises, holding hands. That's not what I mean by team building. I literally mean you own building the right team, surrounding yourself with the right people, creating what I always call a breakthrough leadership team.
The CEO owns that role, the whole idea of making sure you have the highest performing, most talented team, improving what I call talent density, increasing your talent density indicator, which is your percent, high performers minus your percent underperformers.
That's your job as the CEO. Cause by the way, if you don't surround yourself with the right people, you're going to wind up getting pulled back into the business. So job number three is team builder.
Job number four is you need to set them, but be the model for accountability, accountability at many different levels, accountability by function.
Making sure each major function, sales, marketing, finance, technology, research and development, talent development, operations, etc. That each function knows what's expected of them, knows what their specific measures of success are, and they're being held accountable for that. So there's accountability for function.
There's also accountability for major priorities and initiatives. There is, there's accountability down at a task level. Not that you have to be involved in every task, but as the leader, you get what you tolerate and you are the model. There is no way your company, your team members are going to be accountable and hold themselves accountable if you are not being accountable to the things you commit to.
You as the leader need to set the model for that. It also means you own what I call the planning and communication rhythm.
annual planning meetings, quarterly planning meetings, monthly check in and education, weekly accountability meetings, daily huddles. From an accountability standpoint, it's the weekly accountability meetings that are most important. You need to, set the agenda. You need to set the environment and set the tone for holding people accountable to what they commit to.
You get what you tolerate. So job number four is all about accountability.
Job number five is as my friend coach, Kevin Lawrence, who was also on a earlier podcast episode would say, you've got to put your oxygen mask on first. Job number five is, Taking care of yourself. So when I was talking to my client CEO, that I mentioned earlier, and he was saying, well, I'm spending more time exercising, I'm playing tennis.
I'm taking care of myself. I'm spending more time seeing the family. That's part of your role. That's not being an absentee CEO. That's putting your oxygen mask on first. You can't take care of others until you get good at taking care of yourself. Mind, body, and spirit. So taking care of your mind, your emotional wellbeing, your intellectual wellbeing, reading books, whatever it takes to take care of your mind.
Again, emotionally, intellectually, your body. And this is always the toughest area for me. And I've gotten a little better recently. Thank God. My wife is a health coach now, so it makes things a little easier. But. You know, exercising. You know, getting out there, you know,playing pickleball, you know, or tennis or walking or running or going to the gym or whatever.
Exercise is not only good for the body, it's good for the mind. And that's, I've been disciplined in so many areas of my life, but I've been so crappy about keeping with an exercise program. And now that I've been doing it regularly just for the last bunch of months, I feel such a difference. and my ability to take care of the things I need to take care of.
So there's mind, body. And then of course there's spirit, having a set of personal values that you live by that I hope align with your company values, having a life's purpose that again, I hope aligns with your company purpose. And maybe for you, part of the spiritual nature of things is religion, whatever it is for you.
Putting your oxygen mask, oxygen mask on first around mind, body, spirit. That is part of your role as CEO. So again, the five roles, number one is visionary. Number two, ambassador with an ambassador that's both internal and external job. Number three is team builder. Job number four is you're setting the model for accountability.
Job number five is put your oxygen mask on first. Take care of yourself.
Now, in order to maintain these shifts from working in the business to on the business, you've got to have the right team. If you don't have the right team around you and you decide to spend your time being the ambassador, being the visionary, you know, all those things and you don't have the right team, you're going to find yourself getting pulled back into working on the business and it's going to be very frustrating and if you spend time being the ambassador and the visionary and you're not Taking care of the business and nobody else's, your business is going to crumble.
So in order to make these shifts, in order to evolve into the role you should have as a CEO, number one, you've got to have the right team around you. People you trust. People who could work in the business while you're working on the business. You need what I call, of course, a breakthrough leadership team.
I have a book that I happen to have written based on that. it's somewhere here. Here it is for those of you watching on video. If you need it, read this book. It talks about all this stuff. But you've got to start making that shift. And even if you're the CEO of a one million dollar, or you're trying to get to your first million, you need to start planning and preparing to make these shifts.
They're not all going to happen at once. They're going to evolve at different stages of the maturity of your company, but you need to make these shifts. You need to have to have a breakthrough leadership team so you could evolve into the role you need to be at as a CEO.
And frankly, a role. You will, once you get used to not feeling guilty, it's a role you will love.
It's a role you'll have that you can go on vacation for two weeks and the company could be better without you because you're getting out of everybody's hair and they could do the job without you because you provided all this guidance and vision for them. So, as I always say, you can't have a great company without a great leadership team.
Can't have a great leadership team without a great leader, without a great CEO. Let's go make it happen.