What Should a CEO Actually Be Doing?
A Practical, Research-Backed Playbook for CEO Mindset, Strategy & Tactics, and Activity
Most of the CEOs I work with do not have too little to do. They have more to do than they can do.
Long lists. Important decisions. Clients. People. Sales. Delivery. Money. Problems. Opportunities. Things they want to change. And usually a sense that the business is not moving as quickly as they want.
Bottom line: if you are a CEO, there is a lot on your plate, and the research suggests that is partly the nature of the role. CEOs are responsible for direction, financial performance, leadership, organizational clarity, customers and the market, growth opportunities, resource allocation, consequential decisions, and execution.
For fast-growing middle-market companies, add another layer. Strong sales capability, market expansion, marketing and communications, talent development, investment, and increasingly capable operating systems all matter to growth.
The answer is not to keep adding more CEO responsibilities. It is to get clear about what a CEO should actually be doing to create the result.
One of the highest-leverage things a CEO can do is get clear about what actually matters now, what requires CEO involvement, what should be owned by someone else, and what should not be done at all.
That last part matters.
Your time, money, attention, and energy are resources. Every yes is also a no to something else. Learning to say no to work you do not want and do not need to own, work that does not require you, and work that is not a cause of the result you are trying to create may be one of the most valuable CEO skills there is.
The question is not simply:
What should a CEO do?
A more useful question is:
What do I need to be thinking about and doing as CEO to create the result I want, and what do I need to stop doing because it is not a cause of that result?
That is the question this article and the CEO Mindset, Strategy & Tactics, and Activity Playbook are designed to help answer.
The CEO Job Changes as the Business Grows
There are things that remain CEO responsibilities regardless of company size: direction, results, leadership, important decisions, resource allocation, customers, and external stakeholders.
What changes is how the CEO performs those responsibilities based on the maturity, scale, and goals of the company.
McKinsey’s CEO research organizes the role around six broad responsibilities: setting direction, aligning the organization, mobilizing through leaders, engaging the board, connecting with stakeholders, and managing personal effectiveness. Its research base includes more than 20 years of data on 7,800 CEOs from 3,500 public companies, so it is useful but weighted toward larger organizations.
Smaller and middle-market CEOs operate closer to the work.
Research on successful midsize companies found that CEOs were often their companies’ primary external contacts and directly influenced customer relationships and company capabilities. In firms from roughly $2 million to $20 million, CEO relationships were especially concentrated around important customers. From $20 million to $50 million, growth increasingly depended on proven relationships, reputation, trust, and organizational capability. At $50 million to $250 million, those relationships and capabilities became broader alliances, integrated solutions, and more institutional ways of creating growth.
Those levels reveal something important: the work changes. The CEO should stay close to the work that matters to the goal, not stay involved simply because the company has always depended on them to do it.
The skill is to become increasingly clear about where your involvement creates value, where another capable person should own the work, and what capability the organization needs to build next.
Patrick Lencioni makes this point from an organizational-health perspective. He argues that CEOs must own building a cohesive executive team, creating clarity and alignment around strategy and priorities, communicating that clarity, and making sure the organization’s systems reinforce it.
Netflix approaches the same issue through context and ownership. Its operating philosophy emphasizes giving capable people enough context, clarity, information, and ownership to make good decisions while expecting leaders to remain involved and actively coach rather than becoming hands-off.
The goal is not to remove the CEO from the business. The goal is to build a more capable business and deploy the CEO where CEO involvement matters.
The CEO Mindset, Strategy & Tactics, and Activity Playbook
Purpose
The purpose of this playbook is to create clarity about what CEOs need to be thinking about and doing to create the results they want.
This playbook brings together the Mindset, Strategy & Tactics, and Activity required to create results, grow the business, lead effectively, and use CEO time where it matters most.
The work changes as the business grows. The point is to understand what matters, what requires CEO involvement, and what needs to happen consistently to create the result.
Positive Intention: Help CEOs.
Goal: Create clarity and simplify what CEOs need to be doing to achieve a result.
Key Move: Tie what a CEO wants (goals) to the Mindset, Strategy & Tactics, and Activities required to create it.
1. CEO Mindset
Mindset is how you think, feel, speak, and operate your body. It shapes how you interpret what is happening, the decisions you make, the actions you take, and the results you create. Thoughts and action work together.
Understand Mindset: Develop awareness of what is happening internally, feel and process emotions, use Mindset tools when useful, and choose thoughts and actions that support what you want. Learn how to integrate new thoughts and change beliefs to match your desire.
Own the Result: Take responsibility for creating the result. Ownership does not mean doing everything yourself. It means taking responsibility for making sure what needs to happen happens.
Know What You Want: Get clear on the result you actually want to create. Make sure you want it enough to change, adapt, and grow in the ways required to create it.
Know What You Are Building: Understand the type of business you are building and operate accordingly.
Know Where You Are & What Matters Now: Understand the current situation and determine what deserves your attention now. Different results and different stages of the business require different priorities.
Money Matters: Money is good and necessary. It supports people, funds the business, creates options, and makes change possible. Own the desire to make more money and create more revenue without apologizing for it.
What Got You Here May Not Get You There: What worked before may not be what is required next. Your role, capabilities, people, systems, Strategy & Tactics, and Activities may need to change as the business changes.
Thoughts & Action Work Together: Results happen when Mindset, Strategy & Tactics, and Activity are aligned and consistent.
Research Validation: Mindset is sometimes treated like positive thinking or motivation. That is not what I mean here.
The CEO Genome project analyzed more than 17,000 C-suite executive assessments, including more than 2,000 CEOs. It identified four behaviors associated with stronger CEO performance: decisiveness, adaptability, reliable delivery, and the ability to engage stakeholders effectively. The researchers describe these as developable behaviors rather than fixed personality traits.
The emotional side of leadership is real too. Harvard Business Review has documented the emotional labor CEOs carry when making difficult, divisive, or unpopular decisions. More recent McKinsey work connects sustained leadership performance to a leader’s ability to manage how pressure affects attention, judgment, relationships, and behavior.
That is why Mindset belongs in an operating playbook. What happens internally affects how you interpret what is happening, which conversations you avoid, which decisions you delay, where you overreact, what you believe is possible, and whether the Strategy & Tactics you choose ever become consistent Activity. Mindset is part of cause and effect.
2. CEO Strategy & Tactics
Strategy & Tactics are the choices, priorities, approaches, and methods used to create the result. The CEO does not need to personally execute everything, but they need enough understanding to determine what matters, allocate resources, build the required capability, and stay involved where CEO involvement creates value.
Roles & Priorities as a CEO
The CEO owns the result without needing to do all the work. Understand what the CEO is responsible for, where your involvement matters, and what should be owned by other capable people. Focus on the few things that will create movement toward what you want.
Drive growth of revenue & profit.
Set direction, goals, priorities, standards, and create organizational clarity and context.
Build and lead a cohesive leadership team and organization.
Stay meaningfully involved in customers, sales, and the market.
Build important relationships and represent the business.
Understand the market and identify, select, and cultivate strategic growth opportunities.
Allocate time, money, people, and resources toward what matters.
Make important decisions, create context for others to make good decisions, and ensure execution.
Scale Note: As the business grows, move work that other capable people can own away from the CEO and become increasingly deliberate about where direct CEO involvement creates value.
Scale Note: As governance becomes more formal, including PE ownership or an active Board of Directors, working effectively with the board becomes an important CEO responsibility. Build trust and transparency, create clarity about board and management roles, keep the board appropriately informed, and use it as a source of perspective and accountability.
Research Validation: The research is remarkably consistent on the importance of direction, organizational alignment, leadership, stakeholders, resource allocation, and execution.
Two findings from the validation materially strengthened the CEO Roles & Priorities: organizational clarity and context, and market and opportunity selection.
Lencioni argues that creating clarity and intellectual alignment among the executive team is work only the CEO can truly own. Netflix provides a practical example at scale: leaders give people context, information, and explicit ownership so good decisions can happen closer to the work without leadership becoming disconnected.
The fast-growth data also made clear that strong CEOs are not only running the company they have. They are actively looking for where meaningful opportunity exists.
The board responsibility is another example of why scale matters. It may matter very little in a smaller founder-led company without meaningful governance and become significant in a PE-backed company or one with an active Board of Directors.
Build CEO Capacity
The CEO role requires increasing capacity as the business and the results become more significant. CEO capacity grows through use and practice.
Financials: Understand the numbers and economics well enough to make good decisions.
Conversations & Relationships: Have the difficult, important, sales, money, and leadership conversations rather than avoiding them.
Decisions: Make increasingly consequential decisions with appropriate speed and ownership.
Leadership & Delegation: Build capable people, give them meaningful responsibility, and let them own results.
Being Seen: Show up where your presence, credibility, expertise, and relationships matter.
Complexity: Handle increasing complexity without losing sight of what matters.
Research Validation: The CEO Genome findings reinforce that many of the capabilities CEOs need are not fixed traits. Decisiveness, adaptability, execution, and stakeholder engagement can be developed.
Growth also tends to expose the capabilities a CEO has been able to avoid developing. A CEO may need to become more comfortable with financials, harder conversations, delegation, visibility, larger decisions, sales, or simply holding more complexity without losing clarity. You do not have to naturally enjoy all of it. If the result requires the capability, build the capability.
Scaling & Operating
Build the operating capability required to make sales, help clients, grow deliberately, and operate a stronger business without unnecessary dependence on the CEO.
Build for the business you want to operate: Develop the people, leadership, systems, processes, technology, and capabilities required to operate and grow the business you want and create the result.
Keep making sales and helping clients: Build enough client-acquisition and delivery capacity to continuously do both.
Map the client journey: Understand how a client moves through the business from the initial relationship through the sale, delivery, retention, and expansion.
Make repeatable work repeatable: Stop reinventing work that should be consistent, teachable, and easier to execute.
Turn individual knowledge into organizational capability: Get important methods, standards, knowledge, and lessons out of people's heads and into the business.
Create clear ownership, authority, and accountability: People should know what they own, what they can decide, and what result is expected.
Delegate outcomes and remove unnecessary work: Give capable people responsibility and authority for results. Simplify, automate, delegate, and use technology where useful so CEO capacity moves toward higher-value work.
Make important work visible: Know what is happening, who owns it, what is stuck, and whether it is producing the intended result.
Scale Note: More execution should move into capable people and systems as the business grows. CEO accountability for the result remains.
Research Validation: Growth exposes the operating model. Growth creates more clients, larger engagements, more work, people, handoffs, and complexity. Without stronger people, systems, and capabilities, the business can become increasingly dependent on the CEO, creating a bottleneck that slows growth.
Research on midsize firms shows that what creates success at one revenue stage may stop working at the next. Fast-growing middle-market companies show a similar pattern. Firms growing 30 percent or more distinguish themselves through stronger managerial talent, people development, investment, marketing, process effectiveness, and the capability to enter new markets. Scaling is not merely getting bigger. It is becoming more capable.
Market & Opportunity Selection
Understand where opportunity exists, decide which opportunities matter, and move resources toward the ones most likely to create the desired result.
Understand where demand and money are moving: Look for growing markets, industries, companies, needs, budgets, investments, and areas benefiting from change. Study fast growers and category leaders as evidence of where growth and investment are happening.
Understand who has the problem and money: Identify the people, companies, departments, and decision centers with the problem, resources, authority, and desire to act.
Pay attention to timing: Look for changes, priorities, initiatives, investments, events, or other situations creating a reason to act now.
Understand what the market is buying now: Know what customers are actively spending money on, what they value, and where demand is weaker.
Identify and evaluate growth opportunities: Consider new clients, markets, offers, capabilities, partnerships, acquisitions, innovation, and other ways to create the desired result.
Select the opportunities worth pursuing: Consider fit, timing, economics, ability to help, ability to win, required resources, and connection to what you want.
Move resources toward the opportunities that matter most and make sales: Put time, money, people, and attention behind the opportunities you choose to pursue.
Marketing & Brand Strategy
Create clarity about who you want to help, what you offer, and what you want to communicate, then use marketing to create engagement, conversations, and opportunity.
Know your Best-Fit Clients: Understand who you are best positioned to help and who you want to work with.
Develop your Offer: Be clear about the problem your client has, the result they want, how you help them achieve it, and the economics.
Develop your Messaging: Decide what you need to communicate and how to talk about it, so the right people understand and resonate with it.
Let the market inform your Brand Strategy: Pay attention to what clients want, what they buy, why they buy, what they do not buy, and where you create the strongest results.
Talk to the people who can buy: Build marketing around the people and decisions that matter to the business.
Speak at the level of the decision: Help buyers think about the business problem, available choices, economics, risk, and timing rather than only teaching the mechanics of the work.
Be a sense maker: Help people sort through information, understand what matters, and think more clearly about the problem, choices, and decision.
Remove fluff: Eliminate generic claims, unnecessary jargon, buzzwords, and language that could describe almost anyone. Say clearly who you help, what matters, and what you help change.
Use Marketing Plays to create engagement and conversations: Visibility is useful when it helps create meaningful interaction and opportunity.
Measure movement toward the result: Know what each Marketing Play is intended to cause, measure the right things, and give sound strategies enough time to work. Do not confuse activity or visibility with progress.
Research Validation: Fast-growing middle-market companies tend to be better at marketing and communications than slower-growing peers, and that capability works alongside sales and market expansion rather than as an isolated activity.
For expertise-driven B2B businesses, marketing also has to help people think. HBR’s work on B2B sensemaking describes buyers overwhelmed by information and struggling to determine what matters. Strong sellers help curate, clarify, and contextualize information so customers can make better decisions. The goal is not to sound impressive. It is to help the right person understand something important clearly enough to move.
Sales & Business Development
Sales creates revenue and moves money into the business. It happens by creating and having sales conversations with people who need help or want something. The CEO should develop real sales capability, understand and lead how the business makes sales, and remain involved where CEO involvement creates value. The CEO does not need to do all the selling, but sales cannot simply become someone else's problem.
Develop Sales Mastery: Understand, lead, participate in, and continually improve how the business creates sales and revenue while building an organization capable of making sales consistently and profitably.
Recognize, Qualify, & Resonate with your Best-Fit Clients: Know who you are looking for and focus sales effort where there is meaningful fit.
Create and have enough sales conversations to achieve the result: Consistently create opportunities to talk with important prospects and decision-makers, and have enough real sales conversations to support the revenue goal.
Build relationships with important clients, prospects, decision-makers, and centers of influence: Build relationships before you urgently need revenue.
Know how to have a sales conversation: Develop the skill to help people make clear decisions and determine whether you are a fit to help.
Move opportunities through a clear sales process: Know where opportunities stand and what needs to happen next.
Make sales, help clients, retain clients, and expand relationships: Treat the client relationship as more than the initial sale.
Use CEO involvement where it improves the result: Stay personally involved in Sales & Business Development where CEO participation creates meaningful value, including important customers, prospects, opportunities, and relationships.
Scale Note: CEO sales activity is generally more direct in smaller firms and increasingly selective and strategic as stronger sales leadership and organizational capacity develop.
Sales Mastery Note: A CEO with Sales Mastery can create the money the business needs when it needs it. They can create and have sales and money conversations without unnecessary resistance or avoidance. They know how to sell, know when they should sell, know when somebody else should sell, and can build the organizational capability required to make sales consistently and profitably. Sales Mastery is the capability required to bring revenue under command.
Research Validation: This was the part of the playbook I wanted to validate most carefully. I did not want to build my belief in CEO Sales Mastery into the research and then use the research to confirm it.
The sales data holds up. Among middle-market businesses growing revenue 10 percent or more, eight in ten rate their sales organizations as very to extremely effective, compared with 67 percent of slower-growing companies. The CEO-specific guidance is also clear: middle-market CEOs should remain close to customers, work with sales leadership, understand what is happening in the pipeline, and participate when CEO involvement can materially improve an important opportunity.
For expertise-driven professional-services firms, the case becomes stronger. HBR describes senior professionals as “doer-sellers,” responsible for both client work and business development. The strongest-performing rainmakers combine connected networks, collaborative value creation, and proactive, consistent business-development activity.
That does not mean every CEO should spend the entire day cold calling. It does mean Sales Mastery matters, especially for CEOs of smaller and middle-market expertise-driven B2B businesses.
At smaller scale, that may include prospecting and direct sales conversations. At greater scale, it may mean important customers, strategic opportunities, partnerships, speaking, acquisitions, market relationships, or selling the company itself.
The tactics change. The need for sales capability and sales mastery does not disappear.
3. CEO Activity
Activity is about the behaviors, timing, and consistency of the work required to achieve the result. It requires developing skill around using your calendar, being your word, and doing what you say you will do. Mindset and Strategy & Tactics both require consistency. Activity is where the action happens. The specific Activities required depend on what you want, your current situation, and the Strategy & Tactics required to create the result.
Review the financials, goals, Activity, and business results.
Spend time with the leadership team creating clarity and context, developing leaders, and holding accountability.
Make consequential decisions that require the CEO and move other decisions to the appropriate people.
Do sales and business-development work consistently.
Review the market and strategic growth opportunities and move resources toward the opportunities that matter.
Communicate and reinforce what matters across the organization.
Protect time for CEO work, thinking, and personal effectiveness, and remove work that no longer requires the CEO.
Scale Note: The amount of time spent on each Activity changes based on what you want, the stage of the business, and what matters now.
Research Validation: At some point, the work has to show up in the calendar.
Lencioni argues that the CEO responsibilities that cannot be delegated require recurring CEO time, particularly leadership-team cohesion, clarity, communication, and organizational reinforcement. CEO Genome adds reliable execution as a distinguishing CEO behavior. Professional-services research shows the same pattern in business development: strong rainmakers build proactive and consistent BD into the way they work rather than waiting until the pipeline is empty.
That does not imply a universal CEO calendar. A CEO with a major sales gap needs a different mix of Activity than a CEO integrating an acquisition. The basic rule is simpler: if something matters to the result, the required Activity has to happen with enough consistency to create the effect.
CEO Game Plan
Bring Mindset, Strategy & Tactics, and Activity together around what you actually want. Determine the causes required to create the result.
What do I want? Define the desired result.
What is the current situation? Know what is true now.
Mindset: What Mindset is required?
Strategy & Tactics: What approaches, priorities, methods, and changes are required?
Activities: What actually needs to get done?
Decisions: What decisions need to be made?
Timing: When do I want to achieve the result?
Most CEOs do not need more things added to their list. They need clarity about what they want, what matters now, what requires them, what someone else should own, and what should not be done at all.
Then align Mindset, Strategy & Tactics, and Activity around the result.
The point is not to know more about being a CEO. The point is to create the result.
