The 6 Things CEOs Must Juggle Every Day

Brief 

CEOs have six key high-level duties involving purpose, alignment, stakeholders and their personal effectiveness, writes McKinsey senior partner Scott Keller. “This is actually quite a liberating idea, because being great at being the CEO does not mean you have to be great at any one thing — you just need to be great at managing across them,” Keller writes.

Insight

Scott Keller is a Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company. He is the author of six books, including Beyond Performance: How Great Organizations Create Ultimate Competitive Advantage. Carolyn Dewar is a Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company.

She has published over thirty articles in the Harvard Business Review and the McKinsey Quarterly and is a frequent keynote speaker. Vikram (Vik) Malhotra is a Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company where he has worked since 1986. He has served on McKinsey’s Board of Directors and as McKinsey’s Managing Partner of the Americas.

Below, Scott shares 5 key insights from their new book, CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest. Listen to the audio version—read by Scott himself—in the Next Big Idea App.

1. The CEO role is more important than ever

According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, trust in CEOs to help us navigate pandemics, disrupted supply chains, labor shortages, geopolitical instability, and climate events has increased. But for government leaders, religious leaders, community leaders, and media leaders that trust has decreased. So there’s a strong mandate for CEOs to step up and make a difference on a broad societal stage.

And if you take a financial look at things, you see that high-performing CEOs, as you’d expect, definitionally, perform better—but to the tune of three times more total return to shareholders within an industry.

If you look at the top quintile, the top 20 percent of value-creating companies across industries, they create over 30 times the economic value of the next three quintiles combined. That translates into jobs, GDP growth, and wealth creation for pension funds. So overall the CEO job is a really important role, probably more important than ever.