We at BUILT TO LEAD love to study, learn, and apply new information and insights about anything dealing with excellence in work and life. We have studied thousands of individuals, teams, and leaders through research, reading, and direct observation.
A relatively recent insight that I have gained from research, cast against my own career experience, is a model of the four essential roles of the CEO. There is a fascinating commonality in thinking across many authors and experts regarding these critical leadership roles. These roles are important to understand. When they are ignored or minimized by real-life CEOs, their organizations suffer. That’s because no one else in the organization has the power, permission, or prerogative to fill these four roles. Let’s review what they are:
1. The Visionary: Responsibility for seeing and setting the foundation of action for the future. Not merely “the vision thing” but also harnessing through others the legitimate voice of the organization as to the purpose, values, and direction of the firm.
2. The Chief Cultural Officer: Accountability for whether the people in the firm are engaged with the purpose of the enterprise or not. Full engagement is the goal. This is gained through careful articulation of the purpose, values, and direction of the firm, concrete actions demonstrating the seriousness of those three aspects of the vision, and an insistence that recruiting standards screen carefully for wholehearted candidates who buy into the vision.
3. The Designer of Alignment: The hard-nosed, detailed, and ongoing focus on the efficiency of all core work processes in meeting or exceeding customer requirements. This “Total Quality Management” role also incorporates all supporting systems and processes, and subjects everything to a cost/benefit analysis to determine its necessity to meet the organization’s purpose, values, and direction.
4. The Taskmaster: The CEO is where the buck stops for all results, performance standards, goal achievement, and promised deliverables. This role also holds people to account for either making their goals, or not, and for ensuring that recognition and rewards flow accordingly, fairly, and transparently.
It is interesting to note in the research that the first two of these four roles are “right-brained.” They are on the creative side–more about possibility, and flexibility, with inherent demands to EVOLVE and ENGAGE. They inspire emotions more than pure logic. They appeal to our hearts first, then our heads. These are the TRANSFORMATIONAL roles of the CEO.
The second two of these four roles are essentially “left-brained.” They involve focus, responsibility, detail orientation, and accountability. They demand EFFICIENCY and EFFECTIVENESS, and naturally appeal to our heads first–our logic. These are the TRANSACTIONAL roles of the CEO.
BUILT TO LEAD prefers whole-brain thinking over half-brain thinking for everybody, and especially for CEOs who occupy the top spot in the firm and who almost always draw the top compensation, as well. It will not do to have someone in the top spot who cannot cover the field of both right- and left-brain thinking. This is often done through self-development and sometimes through creative co-leadership partnerships between the CEO and an effective COO.
However it is done, it is the clear responsibility of the CEO to ensure that it is accomplished.
Do you occupy the top spot in your organization? If so, what is your response to these findings? How do you cover the field of “whole-brained thinking?”
If you are not in the top spot (yet), tell us how your top leaders are, or are not, addressing these four roles. Share with us also how YOU will now prepare to assume top leadership responsibilities.
Tell us more.
Next time, I’ll revisit the critical FIFTH role only the CEO can accomplish. It is THE MOST IMPORTANT of them all. (Hint: read the blog entry “BELIEF” from a couple of weeks ago).
BUILT TO LEAD 
Nice Sully. Really nice…