Get to know your Chief Executive Officer
Throughout my career, I have had the honor to work with some of the most inspirational Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) in the industry. They have built massive multibillion dollar businesses, positively impacted their employees lives, made their customers successful, defined market categories, and made investors a substantial amount of money. Today’s post will frame the role of the CEO so that executives and employees can better understand their top leader.
Understanding your CEO
CEOs will tell you that their role is a lonely one. The responsibility is vast and stressful. But experienced CEOs realize that it’s not a one person show. They build a highly effective leadership team and apply a level of emotional maturity to lead the company through, well, everything. After all, the Chief is ultimately accountable for the company’s success or failure. To better understand the top job, let’s break down their responsibilities into foundational and operational functions.
Foundational
Foundational functions enable your CEO to establish the company’s focus, behaviors, maneuvers in the market, and capital management. Regardless of size, your top executive obsesses over six core foundational functions. He or she needs to:
- Define the culture by setting an example through his or her own behavior
- Build an executive team that is aligned with their value system
- Set the vision for the company
- Know your market category and ecosystem extremely well
- Effectively understand what investors expect at every phase of the company’s growth
- Be hyper aware of your friends and enemies in the market
Experienced CEOs never lose sight of these foundational functions at every stage of growth. As one CEO explained to me, “defining the foundational functions of the business are straight forward, managing them is the hard part. That’s what requires the ongoing attention of myself and my executive team.”
As an executive supporting the CEO, it is important to identify and communicate what foundational areas you can contribute and drive as the company evolves.
Operational
Operational functions are tactical activities that drive accountability, actionability, growth, and predictability in the business model. Successful CEOs manage these operational tactics with:
- Speed and urgency on things that are important
- Actionability versus “analysis paralysis”
- Accountability and empowerment at all levels of the company
- A solid investor pipeline for funding
- A clear model that drives top line growth
- Predictable forecast for growth and expense
Experienced CEOs effectively empower their executive teams to pay attention to the operational functions of the business. As one top executive told me, “when I was young, I micromanaged my executive team. But as I’ve become more experienced, I’ve realized that micromanagement does not scale nor does it attract the type of executive talent I want. Learning to empower my executive team while holding them accountable has been key to my success,”
As an executive, it is important to provide a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) and a plan that you can share with your CEO to earn their trust and empowerment, so you can effectively tackle the tactical areas of your domain.
Summary
A famous CEO once shared with me that, “contextualizing the difference between foundational and operational functions has enabled him and his executive team to make better decisions faster.” I hope this framework helps you better understand and support your CEO moving forward.
Here are ten questions to help you better partner with your CEO.
- What is the company vision?
- What are five words that define our culture?
- What three qualities do we value in our team the most?
- What three characteristics should our customers have?
- Who are our top three friends and foes?
- What three things do we need to accomplish for our next funding milestone?
- What are our ARR and revenue growth targets?
- What are three things impeding our growth?
- What are the three most unpredictable variables of our business model?
- What are three things I can do in the next quarter to support you?
Freddy Mangum has held various C-level roles in high-growth companies that have experienced successful exits. The intent of this blog is to help the fellow leaders better understand one another so that they can execute more effectively and build great businesses. Freddy currently advises C-suite staff on go-to-market and mentors founders through programs like the Stanford Incubator (StartX).
Want to read other blog posts in this series? See Freddy Mangum’s articles on Medium here.
