Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.
Nitin Nohria has studied and educated CEOs for three decades. Since 1997, the former dean of Harvard Business School, now executive chairman of Thrive Capital, has taught the university’s New CEO Workshop, an invite-only program offered through its executive education arm. In 2018, he and economist Michael E. Porter authored a groundbreaking study on how CEOs spend their time. And last month he published a new book titled The CEO: The Role, the Reality, the Responsibility.
Given this body of work, I was eager to speak with Nohria about how the CEO role has changed over the past 30 years, especially when so many executives feel the job has become more complex and demanding. Nohria says the context in which CEOs lead changes all the time—technology, social mores, regulations all evolve—but the role remains largely unchanged.
“The role of the CEO is surprisingly enduring,” he says. “It’s still to craft a vision for how the company will navigate the moment. It is to select an extraordinary senior team, [and] it is to align the organization [to] allow everybody else to make decisions that you can celebrate.”
Refreshed leadership advice from CEO Stephanie Mehta
Same role, different demands
There’s also a consistency to the experience of becoming a CEO. Nohria says for 30 years he’s been asking newbies to identify the things that surprised them upon taking the job, and the same answers rise to the top: They’re unprepared to always be in the spotlight; they quickly come to the realization that they cannot run the company by making every decision themselves; and their schedules, already packed and demanding, become even more fragmented. Nohria says they need to remind themselves: “I can’t outwork this job. And my job is to shape the context where others can make decisions that I celebrate, as opposed to being the person who feels like they are driving the performance of this company.”
Nohria sees small differences in the way chief executives spend their time today. Post-pandemic, virtual meetings are more commonplace today than they were when his research about how CEOs spend their time was first published. Chief executives may find themselves engaging with regulators more than they did a decade ago.
Still, other stakeholders, such as customers and frontline employees, continue to get short shrift. (Nohria and Porter’s research, which entailed coding CEOs’ time in 15-minute increments, 24 hours a day, found that CEOs spent just 3% of time with customers.) “There are so many demands on a CEO’s time that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and these are the two [constituencies] that don’t always make demands,” Noria observes. His advice for CEOs who want to make customer and employee visits a priority: “Put it on your calendar. If it isn’t scheduled, the risk that it’s going to get lost is very high in a CEO’s life.”