I often ask myself what my job is as a founder and chief executive.
I have bought and read books about the responsibilities of a CEO. Some were useful, while others made the role sound more complicated than it needed to be. Over time, and particularly as my company has grown, I have arrived at three responsibilities that explain much of what I should be doing.
My job is to ensure that the leadership team moves as one unit, reduce uncertainty across the company and remove the obstacles preventing capable people from producing results.
These responsibilities appear simple, but none of them is completed once. They are continuous work because organisations naturally drift toward silos, confusion and delay. The chief executive’s work is to keep bringing the company back into alignment and forward movement.
1. Make the leadership team move as one unit
A leadership team can contain intelligent, hardworking people and still function poorly as a unit.
Each leader may focus on the objectives belonging to a particular department. Product is concerned about the roadmap, engineering is concerned about delivery, marketing is concerned about demand, sales is concerned about conversion and finance is concerned about cost. These responsibilities are legitimate, but the company begins to fragment when leaders treat departmental success as separate from the company’s overall outcome.
One team may achieve its target while creating a problem for another team. Engineering may deliver a feature without giving marketing enough information to communicate it. Marketing may generate leads that do not fit the customers sales can close. Sales may promise something operations cannot deliver. Every team can present a convincing report about its activity while the company misses the result.
This is why I increasingly emphasise that leaders should own outcomes rather than tasks.
Owning a task means being able to say, “I completed my part.” Owning an outcome means asking whether the company achieved what the work was intended to produce. If your work is required for another team’s objective, the responsibility does not end when you send a document, release a feature or attend a meeting. It ends when the dependency has been resolved well enough for the wider outcome to move.
When leaders think this way, blame becomes less useful. Instead of explaining which other department caused the delay, they begin asking how the leadership team can solve the dependency together.
Creating that behaviour requires continuing effort from the CEO. Leaders will naturally return to their immediate pressures, especially when performance reviews and incentives are organised by department. The CEO must keep reminding them that they are not a collection of functional representatives negotiating with one another. They are one leadership team responsible for one company.
The most important problems should therefore be visible to the entire leadership team. If customer retention is falling, it is not merely a customer-success problem. Product, engineering, sales, finance and operations may all possess part of the explanation. If revenue is weak, sales cannot be the only department in the room. The product may not be compelling, the pricing may be wrong, onboarding may be slow or the company may be targeting the wrong market.
A company becomes more intelligent when its leaders can apply their different perspectives to the same problem without turning the conversation into a defence of departments.
Communication is operating infrastructure
Leaders cannot move as one when information moves selectively.
I once had two members of my team who communicated extensively with each other but did not communicate adequately with the wider team or even with me. Their private coordination may have worked for them, but it created an unhealthy information structure for the company. Important context remained inside one relationship while other people were expected to produce results without access to it.
We had to address the problem decisively.
Communication is not simply a matter of sending more messages or holding more meetings. Too much communication can create noise without creating clarity. The real objective is to ensure that the people responsible for an outcome have the information required to make good decisions, understand their dependencies and know when circumstances have changed.
The CEO must watch for communication obstacles that are easy to mistake for personality differences. Are two leaders interpreting the same objective differently? Is a difficult conversation being avoided? Is information being retained because someone believes knowledge creates power? Are people communicating upward to the CEO but not sideways to colleagues who depend on their work?
When every disagreement must be resolved by the CEO, the leadership team is not yet functioning as a team. Leaders need the maturity to communicate directly, clarify expectations and solve ordinary conflicts without forming political alliances or using the founder as a messenger.
The CEO still has an important role in creating the conditions for this. Objectives must be clear, decision rights must be known, meetings must produce commitments and unresolved disagreements must have an escalation path. Unity does not mean everybody agrees with every decision. It means that disagreement is processed honestly and that, once a decision is made, the leaders can move together.
2. Reduce uncertainty
The second responsibility I have identified is reducing uncertainty.
Startups naturally contain uncertainty. We do not know exactly how quickly the market will develop, which product decision will produce the greatest value or which opportunity will become important in six months. The founder cannot remove all uncertainty, and attempting to create certainty where none exists can produce false confidence.
However, the CEO must ensure that the organisation is not carrying avoidable uncertainty.
People should understand where the company is going, what the present priorities are, what results matter and how their work contributes to those results. They should know which decisions they can make independently and which ones require broader approval. They should know what has changed and why.
Without this clarity, employees begin to make private interpretations of strategy. One leader believes the priority is growth, another believes it is profitability and a third believes it is product rebuilding. Each person may work hard in a different direction, and the company becomes less effective as effort increases.
Reducing uncertainty begins with making choices. Strategy cannot be a long list of everything the company considers important. The CEO must determine what matters now, what can wait and what the company will deliberately refuse to pursue.
It also means converting ambition into nearer decisions. A ten-year vision may inspire people, but it does not tell a team what must be completed this quarter. Leaders need to understand the connection between the future the founder sees and the next measurable outcome the company must achieve.
Data helps reduce uncertainty, but data does not make the decision by itself. Dashboards can show revenue, customer behaviour, costs and operational performance. The CEO and leadership team must interpret what those patterns mean, determine which uncertainty is most dangerous and decide what experiment or action will reduce it.
The aim is not to make everybody feel that success is guaranteed. The aim is to make the next important move sufficiently clear.
3. Remove obstacles
The third part of my job is removing obstacles.
As a company grows, competent people will encounter problems they cannot solve within their existing authority, network, budget or organisational position. Some obstacles require a decision across departments. Some require a senior relationship. Others continue only because everybody assumes the difficulty is more substantial than it is.
I experienced this recently with an integration that had been delayed for months. The person responsible went on leave, and the issue came to my table. I had assumed the delay represented a serious integration problem.
When I examined it, I realised that the company was not in immediate danger because we already had another provider delivering excellent service. However, the delayed provider offered competitive pricing and potentially comparable service, so completing the relationship still had value.
I went to LinkedIn and discovered that I was already connected to somebody at the company. I contacted the team at approximately nine o’clock on a Friday evening. We discussed the opportunity, negotiated and completed the essential setup during the weekend. By Monday morning, we were ready to move.
An obstacle that had existed for months was substantially resolved in a few days.
The lesson is not that the CEO should personally take over every delayed task. If every problem requires the founder’s intervention, the company has not built a scalable organisation. The lesson is that leaders must distinguish between ordinary execution and a blockage requiring different authority, urgency or access.
Sometimes the CEO’s name, network or decision can unlock something quickly. Using that leverage is part of the job. The CEO should not leave the team struggling for months with an obstacle that can be removed through one conversation.
The more important question is what the company learns after the obstacle is removed. Why did the issue remain unresolved for so long? Was ownership unclear? Did the person responsible believe that completing the assigned activity was enough, even though the outcome had not been achieved? Was escalation treated as failure rather than as a normal part of execution?
Removing one obstacle without improving the system merely ensures that a similar obstacle will return.
Own outcomes, not tasks
Days before that integration was resolved, I had already begun speaking to my team about owning outcomes rather than tasks. The experience reinforced that message.
A task owner may say, “I sent three emails, followed up twice and am waiting for a response.” An outcome owner asks, “What result are we trying to obtain, and what other route can produce it?”
The second person may escalate, find another contact, propose a different provider, change the commercial structure or explain that the original outcome is no longer important. The work is not defined by the initial method.
This does not mean employees should ignore processes, exceed their authority or pursue results unethically. It means they should understand that a process is a route to an outcome, not a substitute for it.
For this culture to work, leaders must have sufficient authority to make decisions and must know when to seek help. The CEO cannot demand ownership while requiring approval for every meaningful action. Accountability without authority produces frustration; authority without accountability produces risk.
My responsibility is therefore to create clarity about the outcome, give capable leaders room to act and remain available when an obstacle exceeds their authority.
The CEO should not become the biggest obstacle
There is a tension in these responsibilities. The CEO is supposed to create unity, reduce uncertainty and remove obstacles, but the CEO can also become the company’s largest source of fragmentation, uncertainty and delay.
If the founder changes priorities constantly, the team cannot move as one. If decisions remain inside the founder’s head, leaders cannot achieve clarity. If every important action requires the founder’s approval, the founder becomes the obstacle everybody is waiting for.
This is why the CEO must continually examine whether personal involvement is accelerating the company or preventing other people from developing ownership.
In the early stage, direct involvement may be necessary because the organisation is still learning. As leaders become stronger, the founder’s work should increasingly involve defining direction, building alignment, making the few decisions only the CEO can make and increasing the decision-making capacity of the people around him.
The objective is not to make the CEO less responsible. It is to move responsibility to the level at which it can be exercised most effectively.
Make the company move
After reading different books and reflecting on my own experience, I no longer think the CEO’s role can be understood merely as attending meetings, approving budgets, raising money or representing the company publicly. Those activities may be necessary, but they are expressions of a deeper responsibility.
The CEO must make the company capable of coordinated movement.
That means creating a leadership team that sees the company’s outcome as a shared responsibility, reducing the uncertainty that prevents people from acting and removing the obstacles that capable people cannot remove alone.
When these three things are happening, communication becomes clearer, decisions become faster and departments stop protecting activity at the expense of results.
The founder does not need to personally complete every important task. The founder must ensure that the company knows what it is trying to achieve, moves toward it as one unit and does not remain unnecessarily trapped behind obstacles.
That is the work I now return to repeatedly: unite the leaders, reduce uncertainty and remove what is preventing progress.
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