A Great Book On Your True CEO Role

In my recent article, "What’s the role of an effective CEO?," I talked about the critical shift needed to stop battling daily fires and start driving strong, sustainable, and predictable results. 

I defined the CEO's job not by solving problems for your managers, but by focusing on high-level results and proactive activities.

If that concept resonated with you, I want to share a powerful resource that provides a global framework for what we discussed: Brad Giles’s book, Made to Thrive.

Giles is a colleague of mine, and a seasoned entrepreneur and coach, who created this playbook to help small to mid-size companies like yours move from achieving "good" to achieving "great, enduring" results. 

The book’s core concepts reinforce, and have enhanced, the structure we recommended for becoming an effective CEO.

Lagging AND Leading Results

We emphasized that the ultimate goal is not just a strong P&L, but sustainable success. Giles's research confirms this, showing also that truly great results are directly supported by competent leadership practices.

Lagging Results like revenue and profitability are your score, but they only tell you where you have been. Giles’s entire framework is designed to lead to these results.

The real work is in the Leading Results. We identified crucial predictive indicators like customer loyalty, employee engagement, and the percentage of A-player talent on your team. Giles backs this up, listing key results of great leadership as a higher density of top performers, better retention rates, and consistent growth. 

The big takeaway here is clarity: If you’re not actively tracking and improving talent quality and engagement, your growth will be unpredictable.

The Six Areas of CEO Activity

The most powerful part of Giles's work is how his Five Key Roles—the blueprint for CEO effectiveness—align with the CEO’s Six Areas of Accountability we suggest to clients.

1. Strategy and Planning

Giles calls this the Strategy role, and it’s about more than just having a plan. It means you own the long-term vision and differentiation. Giles’s work reinforces that you must work with your executive team to translate this vision into quarterly and annual execution plans.

​2. Team Development 

Giles calls this the Accountability role. Accountability means more than just metrics; it’s about setting clear expectations, ensuring effective onboarding, and ultimately building a high-performing executive team. This is how you ensure the quality of the talent engine that drives your business. That said, our recommendation is to also focus on developing those leaders and building a unified team.

3. Organizational Communication 

While Giles covers this broadly under Accountability and Culture, our focus here is on the rhythm of execution. Your commitment to leading daily huddles, weekly meetings, middle-management meetings and company-wide town halls is crucial for keeping everyone aligned on the plan and progress.

​4. Manage the Culture

Giles confirms this as a distinct role: Culture. You are the chief champion of purpose and core values. Giles emphasizes that culture is the magnet for great people. Your job is to bring that purpose and those values alive by welcoming new hires, celebrating successes, and immediately addressing any breaches.

​5. Strategic Relationships

Giles calls you the Ambassador. This means managing the external ecosystem. You must cultivate your public profile, maintain key advisor connections, and, importantly, terminate underperforming partnerships to clear the path for growth. Giles’ work informed our decision to add some key activities to this area.

6. Continuity Planning 

Giles’s Succession Planning role contributed to us expanding this area. While he also stresses knowing leaders to succeed his team members, he also recommends appointing and developing an internal CEO successor. His work also contributed to us recommending his other business resilience activities, such as actively assessing at-risk products/services and evaluating new opportunities to replace revenue, ensuring the longevity of the business.​

The Path Forward

If you read our earlier article on the role of an effective CEO [link to What is the role of an effective CEO?] and found that you are "only doing a fraction of these things," leading to stress and unpredictable results, know this: you are not alone.

Yet Made to Thrive confirms that playing the full CEO role is not a fantasy; it is a discipline. It provides the step-by-step guidance you need to focus on these critical areas.

The question isn't whether you can do these six things, but whether you are ready to stop being the bottleneck and truly lead a thriving company, team, and life. 

If you're ready to create your CEO Job Scorecard, as we discussed in our last article, to put these proven frameworks into practice, let's talk.

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If you are a prairie CEO who wants to grow a thriving company, team and life more quickly, more easily and with less stress and headache, please contact me here