14 key skills to become a great CEO

In startup and unicorn land, we all like to keep telling over and over that the founders team is the key factor of success in a startup venture. And after 10 years working as a VC, entrepreneur and advisor, I also trully believe this.

Founders, and especially CEOs, became somehow the contemporary heroes!

It’s quite a pressure and responsibility. But what we all tend to forget is that none has been a great CEO from day 1. Like any top athlete. Famous CEOs we know faced the same issues to become successful entrepreneurs.

Of course not everyone can be a superhero, but I believe best entrepreneurs have a common mindset that makes them eager to learn and improve, so they acquire the knowledge and key skills necessary to become great CEOs.

And this mindset can be enhanced with a simple routine. It first requires to be concious of self strengths and weaknesses and then to train daily to improve on key skills to become a better CEO along the way.

My humble hope is to help entrepreneurs to become great CEOs. May this article be a contribution in that prospect. First, I share a simple self-assessment framework that could help entrepreneurs face their strengths and weaknesses to improve their skills. And then, I dig into some explanations on why these skills are key for great CEOs.

A skill “framework” to assess your skills as a CEO

I would recommend you to have a try with this simple framework to assess formally your founder/CEO skills : HERE. It’s not rocket science at all :) but it could help you underline your strengths and weaknesses as a CEO or founder.

It’s a good start to improve yourself as a CEO. Being aware of your stengths will help you gain confidence, while facing weaknesses will help you to work them out.

I would also recommend you to fill this small framework for each founders and by all founders of your team, so you can compare assessments. It’s interesting to do a self-assesment, but it’s even more interesting to understand how people see you, because perception is reality. Of course, it can be a touchy exercice, but it’s a powerful one to improve and reinforce you team, as a sum of talents and as a whole.

When you’ve done this small assessment, make sure you transform it in an actionnable plan to help you improve yourself on the skills you might need to level up as a priority. Don’t try to work them all at the same time. Focus on one or two skills, with short term cycles (weekly actionnable plan with a step back at the end of the week, for instance). Having a coach can also be a powerful help for you in this exercice.

I would recommend you to do this little exercice on a regular basis and do this assessment like once a quarter to help you face your improvement and update your actionnable plan. Of course rating yourself is not an end but a mean to help you quantify yourself. It’s then easier to measure progress along the way.

The startup venture is also a fulfilment journey for founders and CEOs :)

Now, let’s dig deep into these “14 key skills to be a great CEO” to better understand what it means and requires.

8 Individual skills

First, a great CEO has unique individual skills that trully make him an impressive talent and startup founder.

Confidence : It’s an essential skills for any startup CEO. Being an entrepreneur requires to quit confort and take risks. CEOs have also to face lot of difficulties and reluctances from peoples, institutions and markets. Thus, any great CEO needs a high level of self confidence to launch and build a successful startup. Do you believe you have such confidence to jump into startup journey and assume the CEO role ? If so, try to reinforce progressively your own confidence with all the small successes you achieved.

Ambition : Best CEOs are fueled with ambition for their startup. Ambition is a key source of motivation to help surpass yourself and build high growth startups. This skill also helps CEO to create a unique attractiveness around a startup, because most employees, customers, suppliers or investors are thrilled with flourishing perspectives. But beware, ambition may sometimes lead to mistakes or foolishness… Remember “Festina Lente” (Hurry slowly), as Romans used to say. Ambition should be breaked down into small actionnable and iterative goals. Ambition is powerful but needs to be controlled with realism. As a CEO, do you cultivate your ambition and do you make sure you transform it into a realistic plan ?

Curiosity : Startup venture always starts from the ability to be very curious and challenge status quo. Curiosity is often the starting point of new businesses. It’s also a powerful skill for CEO to remain wide open to learn and make the most of business opportunities. CEO needs conviction, but always with openness in mind. Nothing is worse than sufficiency and certainty for a CEO. Do you cultivate a learning mindset ? Do you foster your curiosity ?

Hard-worker : Being a startup CEO is not easy. It‘s an exciting journey, but that really requires hard-work… It’s a 200% engagement for founders and CEOs to build sucessful startups. Again, it’s a race against time and competition. And CEO handles most responsibilities. I’ve witnessed a great correlation between success and level of hard-work. Yet, it’s also very crucial for founders to find time for breaks, to help taking a step back and recharge batteries. Do you work hard enough and rest regularly to succeed ?

Organized : Building a startup requires so many things to do and to delegate at the same time. I’m convinced great CEO need to be very well-organized people to face all these tasks and challenges… Otherwise things quickly become overwhelming, and execution start to slow-down and become fuzzy. Have you set up an organization framework to optimize your efficiency ?

Resilience : A CEO needs a great ability to resist to the emotional rollercoaster of the startup venture. Facing and going beyond all the difficulties and bad news of any startup is key to reach success. How do you reinforce your resilience? Do you step back regularly ? Have you tried to surround yourself with some trustworthy person with whom you can share your doubts and difficulties ?

Focus : This is one of the most important skill of a CEO. In a startup journey, there are hundreds of way to waste time, energy and cash. And because they are limited, this is the job of CEO to allocate efficiently these ressources of time, energy and cash to make their startup successful. Unfortunately, I’ve seen too many CEO wasting key ressources in too many directions… Startups have limited ressources, so they need to remain wide focused on what they do best. And this doesn’t mean CEO shouldn’t be curious and open to opportunities. Thus, they should stay focus on finding the perfect product-market-fit, even if it means pivoting, by listening to market needs and doubling-down on what is trully essential for their key customers. And once they find a perfect positionning, they should focus on building an efficient and scalable growth. Do you really do everything to stay focus on what matters ?

Smartness : This skill sounds quite obvious… and it is ! I’ve been really amazed by the ability of some incredible smart CEO to learn and understand soooo fast! Startup venture is a race to be first on an innovative trend, almost always adressed by many new incumbents. Smartness is a key asset to go faster and thrive among competition. It’s quite tough to improve this skill, but you can rather double-down on “hard-work”, “organized” and “focus” skills.

6 Social skills

Second, great CEOs share in common to have social skills that make them inspiring leaders.

Friendly : Startup journey is all about people. It’s not just business. CEO’s main job is to federate talents, customers, investors and partners around the startup vision and execution. Being friendly is a powerful skill as a builder and leader. It will help to create a virtuous circle around the startup. People rather like to work with friendly people. It’s often the base of a startup culture. Do you cultivate the right attitude to be friendly around you ?

PS : When I say “friendly” I don’t necessarily mean “cool”. I rather think of someone being nice, polite and optimistic.

Humility : Who like to work with arrogant people ? I guess not that much. As a CEO, it’s really important to stay humble, as you have to build trust and respect with people around you, but also because managing a startup implies to face difficulties somedays. People are more tolerant and respectful with humble CEO, in the good and bad days. And beyond this attitude, try as much as possible to manage your startup growth with the right balance between ambition and humility. Startup success is somewhere between ground and stars. Do you cultivate humility in what you do and with people you do it ?

Listening : CEOs have to learn quickly and manage people. Listening is key to succeed as a startup CEO, to get most of all information, advices and feedbacks people will give, from customers to employees and investors. Listening help CEOs foster curiosity, reinforce vision and gain trust of people. Best CEOs show care and interest, and people will show them respect for that. Take time to listen carefully and get the best of it.

Trustful : The startup venture is a people business. At the beggining the CEO may have to handle many tasks by himself. However, he will quickly have to surround himself with key people (CxOs) that will replace him on specific tasks and responsibilities. And for a startup to work and grow efficiently, CEO has to be trustful and able to delegate work and responsibilities. He has to find people better than him and trust them. His job is then to get all these talents work perfectly all toghether. Trust is essential to get the maximum of people engagement and retain talents. Make sure you cultivate a trutsful attitude.

Transparency : Being communicative is also very important for a CEO, to reinforce trust from people and to speed up learning cycles. That doesn’t necessarily mean a CEO should share any information to anyone… But for instance, great CEOs have a total transparency with their investors, by sharing both good and bad news. By so, they gain trust from them and they get better advices on how to handle issues. Again, CEOs that are communicative with employees will reinforce engagement and startup culture. Do you apply the right level of transparency with your founders, empoyees and investors ?

Leadership : Last, but not least. One of the top skill. A CEO needs to be a great leader. And this doesn’t mean being a despot, but rather a visionary with good execution skills and an amazing ability to federate people. Being a real leader requires all the previous Individual and Social skills. Individual skills give CEO the ability to be remarkable and respected for that. Social skills help CEO to build a powerful people business. Try to get feedback from people to help you improve your leadership.

By the way, all these Individual and Social skills are also great for any other co-founders! ;)

What about technical skills ?

Technical skills are also great assets for any founder, but I think they are not as important for CEO. Indeed, I believe that a great CEO should be able to learn quickly, challenge status quo and surround himself with best talents to handle operating execution (tech, business, marketing, finance, hr, …). Yet, CEO should have great sales abilities, because his job is mainly to “sell” the startup to anyone : co-founders, employees, customers, suppliers, investors, …

Of course founders, either solo or as a team, would better be able to handle most key technical skills required to launch and scale their startup. It helps building at least a first Minimum Viable Product and get the first customers on board. It’s then easier to raise funds from investors, and afterward to hire the best talents to start mastering operations.

In the end, what matters is to have a great CEO with great co-founders or team players that complement each other.