The CEO Mindset: Management, Leadership, & the Invisible 90%
Late last year we surveyed you, our dear readers, to ask what creative, small business topics keep you up at night. Of the 6 we proposed, 2 took the cake, by far: People (hiring, firing, culture) and CEO Mindset.
Over the past 6 weeks, we’ve been discussing what it looks like to be a small business or creative CEO, à la annual planning. So today, I’m going to shift gears and share about really stepping into your CEO role. What qualities and responsibilities must you accept? What actions will you take? Behaviors will you embrace? In other words: let’s talk about your CEO Mindset.
What Is CEO Mindset?
The CEO mindset is more than a fluffy… well, mindset. It’s a way you view the world. A mental model. Way of thinking that defines how you lead and manage a business. It’s about accepting the weight of responsibility to embrace challenge, make tough decisions, inspire, and do invisible hard work.
Many creative entrepreneurs start their business journey fueled by passion, creativity, and a desire for freedom. But to truly shift from solopreneur to entrepreneur, you must step into the CEO mindset. When you learn how to think and act this way, you’ll eventually reach the tipping point and move from overwhelmed to focused, energized, and clear & confident.
The Irony of the Transition
There’s a phenomenon I’ve watched play out over and over for the past 7 years. That is: how hard this transition to “power” is. (Note the word power in quotes – ha!). This isn’t just for stepping into the CEO Mindset; it also applies to anyone taking on true management or leadership responsibility. The “higher” you get, the less control you actually have.
This is really, really tough for people. So many of our clients – and their top performers – are stars. Many would describe themselves as “straight-A students,” in fact. But you know the saying: “What got you here won’t get you there.” There’s a huge action and mindset shift from do-er to “do things through others.” It’s a different skillset, a different mindset, and frankly: a different set of personal characteristics.
In this new role, those who have achieved things through banging out their to-do list will feel like they’re banging their head against a wall. High achievers who get their personal value through external achievements will deeply question their self-worth.
The good news is: these skills and traits are learnable. But it’s often a painful process. So I’ve learned (the hard way) to address it head-on.
Leadership Isn’t Management
I’ve observed that leadership is a word that’s often thrown around without real regard for what it means (like strategy!). It’s typically used interchangeably with management. I’m so picky about this, as they are not the same. To be a manager, you must be a leader. But to be a leader, you don’t have to be a manager.
However, to be a CEO – of any size business – you must be both a manager and a leader.
Management: the Weight of Responsibility
If I had to define the role of the CEO in one sentence, I would say it this way: your job is to manage your business.
You shouldn’t be managing every client, nor every detail, nor every person. But your responsibility is to manage your business. This looks like:
- Financial responsibility. I believe that financial responsibility is far and away, a Small Business CEO’s #1 responsibility (even if you’re a creative business; I know this is a hot take). But if you’re not financially viable, there’s no business.
- Decision making. You will have lots of hard decisions to make. To do so, you must become skilled in gathering just enough information to make decisions – especially difficult ones. Then, you must execute them swiftly and confidently, without turning back. You can and will make mistakes; but you must own your decisions, communicate them, and move in that direction without wavering.
- Balance risk & optimism. Plan for the worst but imagine what the best could be. Entrepreneurs rarely have issues with the latter. To be an entrepreneur is to have somewhat unreasonable expectations for what could be. It’s a beautiful thing! But you can’t have blind optimism for what you hope will happen. You should build alternative paths to protect yourself, your business, and your team and clients.
Leadership: the Enigma of Influence
The key difference between management and leadership is that in management, you have authority to directly affect change. For example, if someone isn’t doing their job, you have the authority to fire them. You’re still not directly controlling the outcome (humans can’t be controled), but you can control your lever to affect the outcome.
When it comes to leadership, you attempt to move actions forward by influencing others. This may seem confusing, as you think: “If I’m the CEO, I have the management authority to do whatever I want.”
Well yes… on paper. But IRL with real humans who have lots of emotions, motivations, and competing interests, it’s not so cut and dry.
You must become someone whom others want to follow. You don’t have to look or act in one particular way (people get tripped up on this), but you must have a clear personal value proposition that make others say, “I want to follow them.”
While some may be born as “innate” leaders, I contest that it’s more of a skill you build with lots of uncomfortable experience. If you want an excellent book about the technical side of leadership, we follow John Kotter’s Leading Change principles.
Being the CEO Is the Most Visible Role, Yet Invisible Job
One of the biggest misconceptions about being a Small Business CEO is that the stuff you see, is the job. Oh my gosh. It soooooo isn’t. I would go so far to say: if you rely on recognition for motivation, this isn’t a great job for you.
The image I choose to represent the CEO mindset is an iceberg. The part that others see above the waterline is the role. But in reality, that is only 10% of your job. The other 90% of your job is undetectable. It’s waking up in the middle of the night, thinking about how to solve a pending problem, absorbing stress to deflect it from others, or finding a solution to something coming down the pike before it becomes a problem.
A couple weeks ago, I was telling one of our teammates about an upcoming change and she said, “Oh! I didn’t know you were doing that.” I literally laughed outloud, replying: “I know you didn’t know. By the time I bring the team in on a change, I’ve already been working on it for months.”
The job is full of hard decisions—like restructuring, letting an underperforming employee go, or choosing long-term sustainability over short-term feels. Personally, I find the most painful to be when you make a fact-based decision that’s right for the business, but others panic because they can’t see the big picture. It’s not their fault, and you want to know those individual perspectives too. But your job is to do what’s right for the collective good, not an individual’s preferences. This is a longer topic for another day, but this isn’t to be confused with being unempathetic.
The best leaders are empathetic AND unafraid to make tough decisions. This is so much harder than being all facts or all feelings. You will go through periods of being deeply disliked. Yet you’ll have to remain steadfast.
How to Strengthen Your CEO Mindset
If you’re ready to shift from overwhelmed to clear and in control, here are some practices:
- Take full ownership. Of the good, bad, and ugly. Especially the bad and ugly. Credit your team with the good, and take the backlash of the bad.
- Prioritize strategy over busywork. Keep your spots straight.
- Embrace difficult decisions. They are part of the job. I recommend lots of working out and lots of therapy. The sting never subsides (it hasn’t for me, at least) but you can build literal and figurative muscle to absorb the shock.
- Build resilience. Work on your mental toughness. Seek out learning pits.
- Find advisement and community. Surround yourself with people smarter than you (like a small business advisor;)), and proactively find like-minded colleagues who are a couple steps ahead of you, on the journey. Ask them specific questions about your specific issues at hand.
Final Thoughts
Success doesn’t come from grand gestures; it comes from consistent, invisible, unglamorous work. It’s the meetings that didn’t need to happen because you preemptively solved a problem. It’s the smooth operations that no one notices because you planned ahead. The CEO mindset means embracing this reality— leading not for recognition, but because you’re committed to the mission and you’re committed to your team.
It’s not about having all the answers—it’s about embracing responsibility, leading with clarity, and making tough decisions that others might not see or understand. It’s about doing the hard work, on autopilot. Even when no one is watching. Especially when no one is watching.
PS – if you want to hear more about the CEO Mindset for creatives, give this podcast a listen, where Lauren Tilden from Making Good interviewed me on this very topic.
