So I work for a large bank in the United States. Me and my coworkers always joke that whenever something bad or inconvenient happens it’s the CEOs fault. Though it’s just a running joke it got me thinking, on a day to day basis what does a CEO actually do? I get the “Chief Executive Officer” nomenclature means they more than likely make executive decisions but what does that look like? Are they at their desk signing papers all day? Death by meeting?
Edit: Holy crap thanks for all the answers I feel like this sub always pulls through when I have a weird question. Thanks guys!
In: 1423
If the company was a ship the CEO is the captain. They ultimately decide who gets to be on the ship, where the ship should head, and what they plan to do when they get there.
Obviously for a big company, there are tasks that need doing that the CEO cannot do by themselves, or require expertise the CEO does not have. So they hire people to do that for them, and the CEO tells them the high-level overview of what they need to get done so the whole company can be moved in the direction they want it to move.
For a hypothetically small company, a CEO could maybe do this job directly 1-on-1 with every hired person. But in almost every case, any company large enough for us to even be talking about CEOs in the first place is so large that there’s no way in hell the CEO is going to be able to personally direct *everyone* like that. So they hire middle management positions to do it for them. Like little mini-CEOs responsible for a specific sectioned-off chunk of the company. The CEO tells them what the CEO wants. The middle managers then decide how they’re going to accomplish that and steer their department by telling their underlings what they want done, and so on, until you work down the chain of command.
The monkey’s paw in all of this is that when you delegate responsibility to someone below you like that, you have to get constant feedback to know that they’re on course. That is usually delivered in the form of meetings. So, a very large company’s CEO is pretty much gonna be death by meetings of endless status reports on the health of different sectors of the company, as reported by the CEO’s underlings, and deciding when to take action and what actions to take based on those reports. They have to be vigilant that the people they entrusted in middle management to keep an eye on whatever chunk of the company is doing their job correctly. Otherwise, that chunk of the company could fail, which could domino effect into the CEO failing.
That would be bad for the CEO, because despite being head of the company in basically every way, the CEO *does* actually have a boss to answer to: the owner. The owner literally owns the company and, within extent of the law, can do basically whatever the flip they want with it. Thing is, though, that the owner may not be cut out to be a leader in the way a CEO needs to be. Moreover, if the company is publicly traded, the company would likely have owner**S**, and a lot of them. Too many cooks in the kitchen is not a good thing, and the owners know it, so they’d prefer to hire one dedicated leader to captain the ship, and give that leader the keys to the kingdom to be able to do it on the owners’ behalf. That’s what a CEO truly is: a leader-for-hire. And like any hired help, they can be fired, too.
Outside of death by meetings, another somewhat unwritten duty of some CEOs is to broker business partnerships with other companies. In typical top 0.1% fashion, this can involve a lot of schmoozing over fancy dinners and drinks, brushing shoulders with other top brass at other powerful leaders, and shaking over informal deals in smoky backrooms (oh, and more meetings, of course). I don’t want to paint a picture here that CEOs are somehow breaking their backs over cushy cocktail parties, but the names of the game in leadership are connections and appearances, and a lot of it is tied to all of that pageantry.
Latest Answers