Chief Executive Officer Job Description

A Chief Executive Officer holds final operating authority in an organization and answers to a board of directors or a similar governing body. O*NET defines chief executives as the people who determine and formulate policies and provide overall direction of companies or private and public sector organizations within guidelines set up by that board. Day to day, the work splits into four jobs: choosing the strategy, funding it, picking the people who carry it out, and reporting the results to the owners.

Strategy and capital. The CEO decides which markets, products, services or programs the organization will chase and which ones lose their funding. Those calls show up in two documents: the annual operating plan, which sets revenue, cost and headcount targets for each unit, and the capital budget, where every request for equipment, software, buildings or acquisitions competes for the same pool of cash. The CEO negotiates or approves acquisitions, divestitures, major leases, credit facilities and large customer or vendor contracts. Where the board has adopted a delegation-of-authority policy, that document sets which commitments the CEO can sign alone and which go to a board vote.

The executive team. Reporting to the CEO are the functional heads: chief financial officer, chief operating officer, general counsel, the head of people, and the leaders of sales, product, operations or programs. BLS points out that other chief executives, such as COOs and CFOs, manage a specific part of the organization, which leaves the CEO as the one executive accountable for all of it. The CEO hires those leaders, sets their goals, runs the weekly staff meeting and the quarterly business review, settles disputes between functions, and replaces executives who miss.

The board. The board hires the CEO, approves strategy and the budget, sets executive pay through a compensation committee, and can fire the CEO. The CEO prepares the board book, walks directors through results each quarter, flags risks early, and brings forward any decision above delegated limits. A CEO who also sits on the board, or who serves as chair, carries both roles in the same meeting.

Outside relationships. The CEO is the organization's public face to investors, lenders, major customers, regulators, donors, unions and the press. O*NET lists representing the organization or promoting its objectives at official functions among the job's tasks, along with conferring with board members, officials and staff to resolve problems. Earnings calls, lender meetings, legislative testimony and the annual donor dinner all fall here.

Settings. The title covers very different jobs. A CEO might run a family-owned distributor, a venture-backed software company, a regional hospital system, a trade association, a community foundation or a holding company with dozens of subsidiaries. At a nonprofit the same role may carry the title executive director or president, and the board usually serves as volunteer fiduciaries rather than shareholder-elected directors. At a small firm the CEO may also own the business, run sales and sign payroll; BLS reports that self-employed workers accounted for 27% of chief executive jobs in 2025.

Crisis duty. A product recall, a data breach, a lost lender, a lawsuit, a strike or the sudden exit of a key executive lands on the CEO's desk, along with the call on what to tell employees, customers and directors, and when to tell them.

No license or exam is required to hold the CEO title. Boards and owners hire on record: what a candidate has run, how large it was, and what happened to it under their watch.

Education. BLS says top executives typically need at least a bachelor's degree and considerable work experience, and that top executives of large corporations may hold a Master of Business Administration. O*NET places chief executives in Job Zone Five, its highest preparation tier, where it notes that most occupations require graduate school. Useful undergraduate majors include business, finance, accounting, engineering, economics and pre-law, and in a technical company a computer science or engineering degree is a credible foundation alongside or instead of an MBA. In hospital systems, universities and public authorities, an advanced degree in the sector, such as health administration, public administration or law, can stand in for the MBA.

Experience. As a rough guide, a first CEO role at a mid-sized organization follows something like 15 to 20 years of work, including several years running a business unit or a whole function with its own budget. The pieces boards look for are concrete:

• Profit and loss ownership. Having answered for revenue, margin and cash, not just a cost center.
• Leading leaders. Managing managers, building a team from scratch, and removing people who did not work out.
• Board exposure. Presenting to a board as a division president, CFO or COO, or sitting on an outside or nonprofit board.
• A turn through trouble. A downturn, restructuring, failed launch or crisis that tested judgment under pressure.
• Capital decisions. A record of deciding where money went when there was not enough of it.

Common routes in. Typical paths include promotion from COO, CFO or division president; an outside hire from a peer company; a founder who grew into the role; and, at portfolio companies, an operating executive placed by a private equity owner. In the nonprofit sector, executive directors may come up through program leadership, development or finance.

Credentials worth knowing. None is required, but several help in specific settings:

• NACD Directorship Certification, awarded by the National Association of Corporate Directors, for executives who sit on or work closely with corporate boards.
• Certified Association Executive (CAE), awarded by the CAE Commission of ASAE, for CEOs of trade and professional associations.
• Certified Public Accountant (CPA), licensed by state boards of accountancy, for CEOs who come up through finance.
• CFA charter, awarded by CFA Institute, for chief executives of investment firms.

Skills that carry. Reading a balance sheet and a cash flow statement without help. Writing a two-page memo that a board can act on. Running a meeting to a decision. Hiring well and firing promptly. Saying no to good ideas that do not fit the plan. Speaking plainly to employees when the news is bad.

BLS projects employment of chief executives to rise from 291,600 jobs in 2025 to 300,900 in 2035, a gain of 9,300, or 3 percent, matching the 3 percent average growth rate for all occupations. O*NET puts projected openings for the occupation at about 19,100 a year on average, a figure that counts openings from both growth and replacement. Each opening is a single seat at the top of one organization, so candidates compete for it against sitting executives from inside and outside the company.

Turnover at large public companies picked up in 2025. The Conference Board, working from SEC Form 8-K filings through October 3, 2025, reported that CEO succession announcements in the S&P 500 drove the projected annual succession rate to 13% as of October, against 10% in 2024; in the Russell 3000 the rate stayed at 11%. Strong results did not protect everyone. In the S&P 500, successions at companies in the top three performance quartiles by total shareholder return rose from 7% in 2024 to 12% in 2025, while the bottom quartile ran at 14%.

Boards are firing as well as replacing. A Conference Board analysis posted in September 2026 found that roughly 1 in 7 CEO succession cases were forced in both 2024 and 2025. The Russell 3000 recorded 49 forced departures in 2024 and 55 in 2025. Underperformance rose from 31% of Russell 3000 forced departures in 2024 to 44% in 2025 and remained the largest reason category through August 2026. This year, through August 2026, the Russell 3000 recorded 20 forced departures, 9.9% of succession cases, and the S&P 500 recorded two, or 6.3%, a smaller share than in the prior two years. The report's governance takeaway is that boards need to be prepared for CEO transitions that may occur on a timetable they do not fully control, which also describes the exposure a sitting CEO carries.

Pay disclosure rules for public companies are under review. On May 19, 2026, the SEC proposed rule and form amendments that would extend current disclosure scaling and other accommodations to most public companies. According to the SEC fact sheet, those accommodations include no say-on-pay or say-when-on-pay shareholder advisory votes and scaled executive compensation disclosure, including no pay versus performance disclosure. The proposal would raise the public float threshold for large accelerated filer status from $700 million to $2 billion; if the amendments were in place today, the SEC estimated, 19.2 percent of current public companies would be large accelerated filers and 80.8 percent would be non-accelerated filers. The release set a July 20, 2026 deadline for comments. If adopted as proposed, companies below the new large accelerated filer threshold would give shareholders less executive pay disclosure and no say-on-pay vote.

Sector shapes the job. CEOs of hospital systems, school districts, credit unions and holding companies all carry the same title but answer to different regulators, owners and funding cycles. Candidates moving between sectors should expect boards to test whether their record transfers, and should be ready to show results in terms the new board already uses: margin and cash for a private company, mission metrics and fundraising for a charity, service levels and budget compliance for a public authority.

Dear Members of the Search Committee,

I am applying for the Chief Executive Officer position at Harborline Logistics. For the past six years I have been president and chief operating officer of Westfield Freight Services, a regional carrier and warehousing company, where I report to the CEO and present to our board every quarter.

When I joined Westfield, our warehouse network was losing money on two of its five sites and our largest customer had put its contract out to bid. I spent my first ninety days in the buildings and with the customer's operations staff before proposing anything to the board. The plan we adopted closed one site, converted another to cross-dock work, and moved account management for our top twenty customers under a single team that I hired. We kept the contract, won two more from the same customer's sister divisions, and returned both sites to profit within two years.

I have also learned what the job looks like on a bad day. When a ransomware attack shut down our dispatch system for three days, I ran the response with our general counsel and IT lead, called our ten largest customers personally, and gave the board a written update every evening until we were back online. Every customer stayed.

Harborline's board has said it wants a leader who can grow the dedicated-fleet business without losing the discipline that built the brokerage side. That is the balance I have been working on at Westfield: putting capital where the contracts are long and the margins are clear, and saying no to volume that does not pay.

I would welcome a conversation with the committee about the plan I would bring to my first year.

Sincerely, Jordan Avery