For the CEO
Is it lonely at the top? Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but no matter what, the CEO is alone in overseeing the entirety of the organization—all of its potential and all of its challenges. It’s a unique perspective that brings immense responsibility: navigating complexity, maintaining focus, and driving decisions that can profoundly shape the company’s future. (See “The Evolving Role of the Modern CEO.”)
The Evolving Role of the Modern CEO
Mix in climate change, divisive political landscapes, generative AI, cybersecurity risks, tariffs and other supply chain disruptions, and macroeconomic challenges, and you get a sense of the weight on CEOs’ shoulders today. They must act not just as decision makers but as stabilizers, energizers, unifiers, and sources of inspiration for the entire organization.
They must juggle these many obligations while performing to the continued drumbeat of quarterly investor expectations, in addition to pressures related to climate actions, social responsibility, employee inclusion, and employee upskilling—often being pulled in different directions at once.
Bruce Henderson, BCG’s founder, once noted, “Leadership is about navigating through uncertainty and ambiguity with clarity and conviction.” While the CEO’s role is more essential and nuanced than ever, the core task is the same: to chart a course with clarity and conviction.
CEOs need a clear conviction about where they can most effectively direct their efforts to shape their organizations. It’s not just about which challenges they have the ability to address; there would be too many to count. It’s about understanding where they—as CEOs—are uniquely positioned to make a critical difference.
From working closely with more than 1,000 CEOs through our CEO Advisory programs and events—and through in-depth conversations with former CEOs—we’ve distilled rich insights into six moves that the chief executive can make to effect change.
Move #1: Create Purpose and Clarity
Purpose should be at the heart of every organization, its raison d’être. At its best, purpose is deeply rooted in the organization’s distinctive ability to tackle unmet needs in the world. Activating, and sometimes even defining, an organization’s purpose depends on the CEO above everyone else. Organizational purpose is most effective when it’s embedded in every corner of the company—people and culture, strategy, operations, branding, communications—so the CEO, with a holistic perspective, is best positioned to enable its full integration. When fully embraced, purpose guides decision making and inspires and energizes the organization.
Purpose should also be the starting point for shaping a company’s strategy, which the CEO must articulate with clarity and specificity. A well-crafted strategic narrative links purpose to ambition, priorities, and measurable goals, along with the capabilities and culture required to succeed. Early in their tenure, CEOs should capture these strategic narratives in documents that can be easily drawn on to create alignment internally and understanding among investors. In addition to providing clarity about which actions the organization will take, the strategic narrative implicitly clarifies the goals and actions the company won’t pursue.
CEOs will know they have been clear about strategy when employees, customers, and shareholders can articulate not only the organization’s ambitions but how delivering these ambitions links to specific value creation objectives for key stakeholders.
Move #2: Create Focus
With that clarity of purpose and strategy, the CEO can make sure the organization is focused on what’s most important for the business, translating vision into actionable priorities to ensure that time, resources, and energy across the company are aligned for maximum value creation. The CEO must also guide the organization toward knowing what to drop or not even begin to pursue. When the company has the right focus, the force of its efforts will harness disproportionate impact.
Deborah Ellinger, serial CEO, uses “now, next, never” as a prioritization framework that forces teams to sort initiatives into three buckets based on their impact and ease of implementation:
- Now = What needs action immediately?
- Next = What can wait?
- Never = Which initiatives, no matter how tempting, should be discarded entirely?
Prioritizing initiatives—and adjusting as contexts and strategies change—ensures the team is focused on work that drives results. The CEO is in the position not only to approve new initiatives but to know when to pull the plug, driving impact without creating too much bloat.
Effective prioritization requires the courage to say ‘no’—not just to your team but to your boss or board. It is critical to focus the team where they can have impact and not let them be distracted by low-value projects. — Deborah Ellinger
Knowing which actions will bring outsize results is essential, whether the desired outcome is profitability, deeper customer relationships, accelerated productivity, or positive societal impact. CEOs play a vital role in identifying these levers and committing the organization’s resources—and their own attention—to maximizing results.
CEOs also have the optimal cross-functional perspective to be able to make tradeoffs in resourcing, starting with financial and human capital allocation, so the company can deliver the current plan while investing to create longer-term value. This allows the enterprise to balance short-term performance with prudent capital stewardship and investments in renewal and innovation.
Occasionally, the CEO faces transformative decisions —“moments of truth”— such as major acquisitions, divestitures, corporate restructuring, or taking on significant debt to seize an opportunity. These decisions carry the potential for enormous value creation or destruction, and the CEO is essential to guiding their outcomes.
With this mindset, the CEO has a unique role as the ultimate decision maker and simplifier: focusing and prioritizing; shaping the big moves; and making critical decisions about operating budgets and capital investment plans.
Move #3: Create Capacity
Executing a great strategy depends on the organization’s capacity to do so. This means thinking beyond the headcount and creating an organization with the skills, resilience, and awareness, combined with the critical technology platforms, needed to deliver on priorities.
It starts with the CEO ensuring the diversity of the leadership team—not just a moral imperative but a competitive one as well. Organizations that draw on a range of perspectives and experiences deliver better outcomes, whether in innovation or problem solving.
The CEO must also focus on meeting the emotional needs of employees, including the organizational fatigue they may experience. In times of rapid change, teams can feel anxious or disengaged. CEOs need to understand their organization’s emotional baseline—what’s causing stress or anxiety or alternatively a lack of intensity and urgency—and address the issues head-on.
In today’s world, improving capacity is also about leveraging technology and AI to enable productivity gains and better decision making. Doing this will require more agile organizations and increased investments in employee upskilling to capture the full benefits of AI-driven workflows.
CEOs set the tone here. By actively championing technology, including
AI,
alongside employee development, fostering inclusion, and showing “heart behaviors”—such as empathy and recognition—they ensure the organization has both the ability and the momentum to succeed.
Move #4: Create Drive
Organizations move at the pace of their people. A CEO’s role in creating drive is to inspire belief in what’s possible and to set a cultural tone that motivates teams to achieve it.
Creating drive first requires stability. In uncertain times, people need reassurance that the company is on solid footing and headed toward sustainable success. But beyond stability, the CEO needs to inspire individuals and teams to believe they are capable of more than they initially thought. The CEO must also generate enthusiasm and energy among employees and cultivate a culture of individual and shared accountability for outcomes and a bias to action with speed.
The most effective leaders are those who can inspire others to think beyond their own limitations. — Bruce Henderson
Storytelling is a powerful tool in this context. By sharing personal examples of how they have “walked the talk,” CEOs reinforce a commitment to the company’s vision and inspire belief in it while pushing their organizations to go further faster.
Move #5: Reduce Complexity
In business, growth often brings complexity. New markets, products, and innovations add layers to strategy and operations. Organizational complexity can also be a problem, with unnecessarily overlapping roles and responsibilities and too many layers.
But complexity without value creates drag. Whereas focus and force involve zeroing in on where to allocate resources, reducing unnecessary complexity is about the need for CEOs to cut through the noise and get the right work done.
Cutting out complexity is harder than adding it in. — Frank Blake
Simplification is hard, but it’s essential for focusing the organization on what matters most. To make it happen, the CEO needs to adjust roles and responsibilities where there is overlap and systematically align projects with key strategic objectives, shining a light on what falls outside that alignment. This might involve eliminating products that aren’t core to the strategy and don’t enhance competitive advantage or realigning resources to better support strategic priorities. CEOs must absorb complexity and make the tough tradeoffs at the top rather than pushing them down the chain where they can lead to delay and frustration.
Move #6: Reduce Friction
Friction within teams can spark important conversations and innovation, but unconstructive friction does the opposite. Siloed thinking, misaligned priorities, and unresolved tensions among leaders slow progress and weaken trust. And any alignment or misalignment at the top trickles down to the rest of the organization.
If there is friction at the leadership team level, it’s impossible for the rest of the organization to move smoothly. — Pietro Satriano
The CEO should encourage genuine, open dissent or disagreement. But unhealthy or unconstructive conflict may be emotional, based in personal grievance or unresolved personal disputes, or forged out of abrasive communication.
CEOs can play a critical role in resolving these issues. The first step is surfacing friction: creating an expectation that misalignments can be addressed candidly along with the space for that to happen. Sometimes this involves reshaping the leadership team itself, prioritizing not just individual expertise but a commitment to shared values, collaboration, and mutual accountability.
Transparency is another powerful tool for reducing friction. One CEO we talked to explained how she shared her decision-making framework with her entire organization, demystifying how priorities were set and encouraging others to use the same principles. Actions like these depersonalize disagreements, reduce the possibility of misunderstanding, and foster faster and more durable alignment.
Why This Matters Now
For those standing alone at the top of the organization, it can be tempting to take on too much. Stopping to consider whether one’s participation will make a situation or decision better is often a wasted exercise because the answer is almost always “yes.” However, because their time is very limited, and the challenges they face are deeply complex, the more important questions for CEOs are:
- Will the CEO’s participation help foster purpose, focus, capacity, or drive?
- Can the CEO’s involvement help reduce complexity or friction?
- Are the CEO’s perspective and expertise essential to getting to the right outcome or reduced risk?
If not, the CEO should step aside and facilitate a clear and consistent runway for others to get the job done.
By homing in on these six areas of unique contribution, CEOs will empower their teams to navigate uncertainty with clarity, purpose, and resilience. The choices CEOs make—what to focus on, what to simplify, and where to lead from the front—will define not just their tenure but the long-term success of their organization, particularly in periods of disruption and rapid change.
BCG’s CEO Advisory supports the success of current and prospective CEOs through individual guided self-reflection and counsel as well as the convening of peer forums.
