Essential Business Leadership Advice for Today’s CEOs

Craig Weber routinely speaks with groups of small- and midsize-business CEOs, and over the past 25+ years, he’s heard a range of answers to the question of their biggest challenge.

Finding talent. Building culture. Navigating technology.

In 2026, he sees all organizations confronting a common challenge: uncertainty.

“People just aren’t sure where the world is going,” says Weber, a Vistage speaker for more than 26 years and author of “Conversational Capacity. The Secret to Building Successful Teams That Perform When the Pressure Is On.” “There’s political uncertainty, economic uncertainty, and technological uncertainty. As a CEO, you need to build a team that can thrive in uncertain circumstances.”

February 20 is National Leadership Day, providing SMB CEOs an opportunity to reassess how well prepared they are to lead amid uncertainty. By focusing on 5 essential leadership priorities — clarity, culture, talent, decision-making, and change leadership — CEOs can grow as individuals and recalibrate how they lead their companies.

Leadership Principle #1: Recommit to Clarity in a Noisy World

In the long list of CEO responsibilities, David Friedman insists there is a clear top priority. CEOs must provide clarity within an organization — even in times of uncertainty.

“The job of a leader is to have a clear direction of where we are going, what our priorities are, and then making sure everybody is absolutely crystal clear about it and lined up behind it,” says Friedman, a former Vistage Speaker of the Year.

A lack of clarity — or rather, ambiguity — creates company-wide conflict because the business’s direction is unclear. This often happens when CEOs get bogged down in day-to-day crises. Their focus shifts to short-term firefighting at the expense of long-term vision, making it nearly impossible to steer the company in a strategic direction.

Leadership Advice: Focus ‘On the Business’ versus ‘In the Business’

Friedman said managers should spend 80% of their time on day-to-day issues in their department and 20% focused on building their team so the department can grow.

For CEOs, the ratio should be reversed.

About 20% of their time should be dedicated to client interactions and business processes, with the rest devoted to strategic thinking about where the company is going and what needs to happen to get there.

Friedman had a glass-covered desk during his first tenure as CEO, and beneath it, he slid a sheet of paper to remind him of his role.

“There were four things that I had listed: I am a thinker, I am a learner, I am a teacher, and I am a leader,” he says. “That’s what my job was, and that’s what I needed to be doing. None of those are putting out a fire.”

Leadership Principle #2: Build a Culture of Ownership, Not Compliance

The key for SMB CEOs to have the time and ability to focus on long-term clarity is a culture where employees feel trusted and empowered. The best organizational cultures are those that possess what Weber called high conversational capacity — the ability to engage in constructive, learning-focused dialogue about diverse subjects and challenging circumstances.

It’s a pivotal variable that Weber believes most leaders overlook.

“If you’ve got a team with high conversational capacity, they can step into a really messy, uncertain situation and perform really well trying to figure it out,” he says. “For a team with low conversational capacity, a minor disagreement will often throw the team off its game.”

Imagine a marketing company that lost a major client. With high conversational capacity, team members would come together and strategize how to sustain the business. If the company had limited conversational capacity, employees would bicker over who to blame and complain about decisions that may have led to the client’s departure.

Leadership Advice: Focus on Fostering Engagement

A common theme among organizations with high conversational capacity is that employees are engaged in the business. They feel a sense of ownership and autonomy in their work, rather than being compliant and doing only as told.

After Friedman launched RSI, an employee benefits consulting and brokerage firm, he spent the next 27 years ensuring his employees felt empowered to make their own decisions. He recently had dinner with his former leadership team at the company, where he shared how their expertise enabled him to focus on big-picture thinking.

He vividly remembered one customer service manager who embodied this, including the time she informed him of an employee who abruptly resigned.

“She said, ‘I have a plan in place and here’s what we’re going to do. I got it all handled; I just want you to be aware of it,’” Friedman recalls. “She wasn’t coming to me asking what to do now. She just let me know and then got it handled.”

That example is one Weber believes demonstrates the power of invested employees.

“You want people to feel engaged and an active part of the process, not a passive part of the process,” Weber says. “You want people to feel actively engaged in the work that’s being done in a way where the business is benefiting, but they’re also growing as employees.”

Leadership Principle #3: Treat Talent as a Strategic System, Not a Series of Hires

When a CEO has clarity on long-term plans, they can be strategic about the roles and personnel needed to achieve those goals.

“As I think about the future of the organization, in order for us to get where we’re trying to go, there are roles that we don’t have right now that are going to need to be identified and filled, and skill sets that we don’t have right now that we’re going to have to recruit and develop,” says Friedman. “If I’m thinking strategically, I’m identifying those things, and we’re gradually building those pieces, as opposed to just filling a quick need right now because something happened.”

It goes back to Friedman’s belief of an 80-20 balance for CEOs. If a CEO has a strong leadership team in place, they can focus on strategy while the team executes day-to-day operations.

If the CEO is too focused on the business, there’s less time to consider which organizational gaps need to be filled.

Leadership Advice: Focus on Utilizing the Team’s Strengths

Weber acknowledged that hiring and retaining quality talent is an ongoing challenge for CEOs, but he also believes CEOs often fail to use the talent they assemble effectively.

“You spent all this time and money getting smart people around the table, but then you don’t create a conversational environment where you’re able to get access to what you’re paying for,” Weber says. “This makes no sense. What’s the value of hiring smart, capable people only to leave them feeling disengaged, uninvolved in vital decision making, and feeling as if they have a constrained ability to fully contribute?”

Leadership Principle #4: Upgrade Your Decision-Making Playbook

There’s an easy way to make people feel included in the decision-making process. Let them be part of the process.

Sure, there are many aspects of how a business runs that need to be decided by the CEO, but there are ways for others to be heard, even if they do not make the final call.

One of the best examples of this came from the CEO of an engineering firm who participated in one of Weber’s workshops. The CEO felt he’d spent a lot of time, energy, and money assembling a quality team of engineers, but he knew he wasn’t using their knowledge to the business’s advantage.

At his next staff meeting, the CEO did 3 important things:

• He admitted his previous mistakes.
• He asked for help.
• He left the room.

“He said, ‘OK, in the past I’ve done a terrible job at getting you all involved in my decision-making, and I want to change that,’” Weber explains. “‘I’m going to put an idea on the table, I’m going to explain it to you, and then I’m going to leave the room for 30 minutes. When I come back, let’s have at least three concerns up on the board and let’s work through one at a time.’”

And that’s just what the team did. The CEO left, and when he returned, he listened to their concerns, and then they worked through them as a team.

It became a habit whenever the CEO needed input from his engineers. Once the engineers recognized the move wasn’t for show and that the CEO genuinely wanted their involvement, they said he no longer needed to step out.

Leadership Advice: Focus on How You Present Your Authority

Prior to adjusting his decision-making process, the CEO failed to recognize how he exercised his authority. It’s a common misstep for many CEOs, Weber said.

“When the boss walks in the room, suddenly people are more careful, they’re more guarded, they’re more cautious,” Weber says. “You could be the warmest, most generous, caring, accessible human being on the planet outside the workplace, but when you show up to work, that authority is going to have a huge effect on the people below you. The trick is to carry your authority in a way that pulls people toward the table and doesn’t push them away from it.”

Leadership Principle #5: Lead Through Change with Humility and Visible Presence

The reality for CEOs is that no matter what, people do leave the table. Change happens — both internally and externally. How CEOs respond directly impacts how their teams — and their businesses — navigate the future.

The best way CEOs can lead through change is with humility.

“We don’t want to pretend we don’t make mistakes or that we’re not human,” Friedman says. “We want to model what it looks like to learn from our mistakes.”

Friedman works with clients to model this process — an approach he calls “blameless problem-solving.” When a problem arises, fix it first. Next, identify how and why it happened. Finally, identify what improvement could be made to prevent the problem from happening again.

The practice may sound easy, but Friedman said the biggest hurdle exists in the CEO’s head.

“For many people, ego gets in the way of doing the right thing,” he says. “They don’t want to acknowledge a mistake. They feel like they’re going to look less capable, less smart, and not as good a leader.”

Leadership Advice: Focus on the Importance of Change

Friedman believes one of the best ways CEOs can lead is by accepting the need to change their minds. The worst thing a CEO can do for their business is continue to lead it down the wrong path to “save face,” even when it’s clear that change is needed.

“One of the best examples of checking your ego at the door is the ability to change your mind about something,” Friedman says. “We reserve the right to get better. If we make a mistake, that’s alright. That’s how you learn. Being vulnerable about that is a really healthy thing.”

Why No CEO Should Lead Alone

Being a CEO can be a lonely position, and it can be hard to find a safe place to test decisions and get unfiltered feedback. Using a day like National Leadership Day to reflect on how you lead is useful, but real change happens through the decisions you make the other 364 days of the year.

Vistage peer advisory groups provide CEOs with a confidential forum to stress-test strategies, understand their leadership style, and stay accountable for the changes they want to make.

“You’re going to be surrounded by people who are going to push you, challenge you, and really spark a lot of learning,” Weber says. “It’s a good way to check your ego, learn and develop new skills, and get exposed to new ideas.”

Coupled with executive coaching and other resources, Vistage can help CEOs stay ahead of emerging challenges rather than react to them. As a Vistage member, you can make every day — not just February 20 — a leadership day.

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