A CEO wears many hats—scientist, investor, operator—but their primary, non-delegable function is decision-making. This role requires integrating input from a leadership team that thinks at an enterprise level, enabling the CEO to make the final call on capital, strategy, and people.

McLaren's CEO Zak Brown re-frames leadership as a service function. His primary job is to ensure his 1,400-person team has the tools, funding, and motivation to succeed. He sees himself as one employee whose responsibility is to "keep them all fed and hungry."

Beyond simply hiring people smarter than oneself, a CEO's primary responsibility is to actively enable their success. This mindset shifts the focus from personal achievement to empowering the team, recognizing that the team's success is the ultimate driver of the company's and the CEO's own success.

The most effective leaders shift their focus from recruiting individual star performers to cultivating an environment where the entire team can innovate collectively. This subtle change in mindset from individual heroism to collective genius is crucial for sustained success.

Unlike a functional manager who can develop junior talent, a CEO lacks the domain expertise to coach their entire executive team (e.g., CFO, VP of HR). A CEO's time is better spent hiring world-class leaders who provide 'managerial leverage' by bringing new ideas and driving their function forward, rather than trying to fix people in roles they've never done.

True leadership success isn't about being indispensable. It's about building an organization, team, and infrastructure so robust that the company would be 'just fine' if you disappeared tomorrow. This 'hit by a bus' test is the ultimate measure of a leader's success.

Unlike a line manager who can train direct reports in a specific function, a CEO hires experts for roles they themselves cannot perform (e.g., CFO). A CEO's time spent trying to 'develop' an underperforming executive is a misallocation of their unique responsibilities, which are setting direction and making top-level decisions.

The CEO's role isn't to be the primary innovator but to enable a high-performing team. This "basketball coach" model focuses on providing the resources, culture, and strategic direction for the experts on the team to succeed, rather than trying to score all the baskets personally.

The definition of a top-tier hire isn't just about skills, but also the confidence to operate autonomously and make decisions as if they were the CEO of their domain. The goal is to build a team of empowered leaders you can unleash, not a team of employees you need to constantly manage.