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Most CEOs spend their days in firefighter mode: An exec wants you to weigh in on a decision. Sales wants you on a call with a big prospect. A major customer is having issues and would really feel better hearing from the CEO. There’s a civil war on the engineering team over the product roadmap, and both sides want you to settle it. Oh, and your EA is asking about an invitation you got to speak at a conference.
This kind of juggling act comes with the job. Much of it feels like leadership because it is hard and feels urgent, and people are grateful when you show up! Firefighting also gives you a rush. You get addicted to swooping in and being the fixer.
But I’m here to tell you, that stuff is not the CEO job.
Some CEOs never realize that at all, and their tenure as a highly paid first responder is usually short. The fundamental issue is that the CEO role is not a supercharged version of a functional executive role. Instead, the CEO job is a balancing function, a mediating role that spans the whole organization. Trying to do that with a tactical, in-the-trenches mindset does not work, even when that mindset got you where you are now.
If you spend a lot of your week in firefighting mode, like many CEOs do, there are concrete steps you can take. Below I have put together a short plan to work on over the next ninety days. These actions will give you more time for strategic leadership—the real meat and bones of your job.
Years ago, I read a line that has stayed with me since. The CEO’s job is not to fight fires. It is to build fire stations. This is the blueprint for your fire station.
1. Diagnose.
Before you change anything, notice the nature of the fires and where they are coming from. In this week, log each fire, with “fire” defined as an urgent-seeming task, often unplanned, that only debatably requires your direct involvement.
In your log, note which departments and which leaders these fires often originate from. Did someone bring it to you, or did you seek it out yourself? Note what is asked of you and how much time it takes to put them out.
At the end of the week, sort your list of fires into two columns: the ones that really did require you to come in and pinch-hit for the good of the company, and the ones that likely would have been fine without you. For most CEOs the second column is considerably longer.
2. Get the priorities onto one page.
Saying “no” to firefighting requires knowing your real priorities. The most powerful tool for this is the 1-Page Strategic Plan. Get down your mission, vision, differentiating values, and strategic objectives for the next two to three years, all on one page. There is no need to belabor this or turn it into a two-month planning exercise. Rather, the 1-Page Strategic Plan is an anchor and a recentering tool, something you can turn to when a new request lands on your desk.
As fires spring up, you can silently consult it, asking if that request or commitment fits into the picture of what you are trying to achieve as CEO of this company. If it’s a maybe, it’s probably a no.
3. Ensure each part of the business has an owner.
There are six core functional areas in any company at scale: sales, marketing, product, finance, human resources, and customer success. Ideally, one executive holds responsibility for each, with all six of those executives reporting to you. If one of those seats is empty, you are the de facto head of that department whether you have admitted it to yourself or not. This means you will naturally be dealing with more fires from that area.
But when you do have great leaders at the head of all six departments, you can start to draw healthy, clear lines around their authority. You can work with each to understand which decisions are fully in their authority to make, and which special few require your input as CEO.
4. Coach people when they bring you fires.
When someone shows up at your door or in your inbox with a decision they want you to make or a problem they want you to solve, the CEO’s natural instinct is to go ahead and do it. In these ninety days, stop doing that reflexively. Instead, if you believe the matter is within their authority, simply ask what they think is the best decision or solution. Listen to their reasoning, then reinforce the fact that this issue is fully within the realm of their responsibility.
Do not do so dismissively or appear annoyed. Listen to what they have to say, and let them know that you trust them to make the right call. If you did not, they would not be on the team. These coaching sessions will require some time in the first couple of months. But the beauty is that, the more you do them, the more people will feel empowered to act on their own, only escalating to you when it’s something that really does exceed that person’s circle of authority or is below the waterline.
5. Schedule strategy time with yourself.
We have been talking about ways to stop firefighting, but what do you do with the time you have freed up? A practice I recommend to all CEOs is blocking out 1–2 hours on their calendar each week for strategic thinking. Same day, same time, and treated not as an optional practice but like they would treat a board meeting.
You can use this time for the opposite of firefighting: the longer look at the horizon that helps you steer toward the future. In this weekly block of time, you can review progress against those strategic objectives and where the business needs to be in two to three years. You can update yourself on your market and the industry, thinking about what it means for you. You can stress-test your assumptions, examine emerging threats and opportunities, and make predictions about the company’s future.
This is the vital core of what CEOs do, and it’s the same stuff that falls by the wayside when a CEO is in firefighter mode.
6. Clear out the queue every week or two.
The steps so far build a basic system: executives who own their areas, a habit of handing decisions back to the people they belong to, and protected time to think. That system slows the inflow, but the queue is always going to fill back up, sure as gravity. Make a habit of emptying it.
Each week—maybe anchored to the strategy block, at the start of the session or the day before—get every “fire” out of your head and onto a single document. Every commitment, every half-promise, every task that feels urgent. Then triage what you find. Eisenhower’s grid still works well for this: what is urgent and important, what is important but not urgent, what is urgent but unimportant, and what is neither. Be ruthless about the bottom half.
A word on delegation, since that is where much of this list is headed. For a lot of CEOs the hard part is handing something off knowing it will not be done the way you would have done it, and possibly not at the same quality, at least at first. Mastering that discomfort is most of what delegation actually is. Giving someone a task that sits a little beyond what they have handled before is how they stretch into the next level of their job. You get the hours back and they grow, which means next quarter there is more you can hand off.
7. Put AI to work on the strategic core of the job.
A capable AI system can handle the meeting brief, the first pass at a board package, the summary of a long report you did not have time to read. That is real time back. But what has me most interested right now is AI’s ability to reach the part of the job that has always been hardest to support, which is the strategic thinking itself.
That is the problem I am working on with ChatCEO. It includes a CEO coach built around the actual demands of the role rather than treating a chief executive as a generic manager, and it is designed specifically to pull CEOs out of firefighter mode. It will push back when a strategic assumption has gone unexamined too long. Ask it to stress-test a decision and it will argue the side you were hoping not to hear. It can build the agenda for your weekly strategic session so you walk in with something to work on instead of an empty hour, and run the competitive and market research that feeds it. Hand it the queue from the last step and it will tell you which items belong to somebody else.
None of this replaces the CEO’s judgment. What it does is make the strategic work as easy to pick up as the tactical work has always been, which is mostly why the tactical work wins.
8. Consider operational support.
The New York Times covered CEOs getting chiefs of staff recently, and the growth is real. Since 2021, the number of people holding the chief of staff title in North America has more than tripled, according to Live Data Technologies.
Companies are not adding the role because CEOs enjoy adding headcount. A good chief of staff runs the operating rhythm, keeps meetings honest, and chases the follow-ups. But for a CEO trying to get out of firefighter mode, the most valuable thing they do is act as a gatekeeper—someone who knows how you think can give people the answer you would have given without you ever entering the conversation. And because they spend their days in those conversations, they come back with the intelligence about what is really happening inside the company, the kind of thing CEOs tend to lose access to as the organization grows.
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Here is my rule of thumb for a proper tactical and strategic balance. Assuming you are CEO of a mature business with a full executive team, about 20 percent of your time should be devoted to the tactical, with the remaining 80 percent being strategic.
Yes, that is a lot of time on strategic issues. But one of the most widespread CEO failure modes is having this flipped, spending 80 percent or more of their time in reactive mode, fighting fires, getting hands-on when others at the company should be handling it.
You will know the shift has taken when the fires that used to reach you get resolved a level down, and you hear about them in the weekly meeting instead of via an urgent text or a worried knock at the door. That’s the sign you have properly built your fire station.