45% - CEO controls typically accounts for 45 percent of a company’s total performance.

The CEO arguably has more potential for influence than anyone else in a company. But maximizing the role’s potential is extremely difficult. Just thinking about the responsibilities is enough to trigger spontaneous exhaustion. The CEO is tasked with forming a company’s strategies and then marshaling the resources to deliver on them.

And while other C-suite officers and employees help execute strategy, the CEO stands alone as the person ultimately responsible for its success or failure. What the CEO controls typically accounts for 45?percent of a company’s total performance. But these days, the role is more difficult—and important—than ever.

Industries are being transformed at a pace not seen before, and business leaders need to predict and respond to those changes with quicker-than-ever decision making. Not everyone succeeds. Just three in five newly appointed CEOs live up to performance expectations in the first 18 months on the job. And only one in 12 companies moves from being an average to a top-quintile performer over a ten year period. But even as the times change, some fundamentals of leadership remain the same.

How can CEOs lead their companies from average to outstanding performance?

Let’s be perfectly clear: taking a company from average to outstanding isn’t easy, and it’s not likely to happen. Many CEOs set a direction for their company based on increased investment in the most solid business cases. But research shows that strategies promising the hockey stick effect—an initial dip during the early months accounting for investment, followed by a steady rise in performance—often fail to deliver.

But just because it’s not easy doesn’t mean it’s impossible—and there are concrete things you can do to increase the odds. The most effective CEOs adhere to 18 practices, and this is divided into six key areas of the job.

Beating the odds

Vision: reframe what winning means. The most effective CEOs boldly reframe the definition of success by, for instance, adjusting the goal from being the top player in the industry to being in the top quartile of all industries.

Strategy: make bold moves early. Making one or two bold moves more than doubles the likelihood of rising from the middle quintiles of economic profit to the top quintile. Making three or more bold moves makes such a rise six times more likely.

Resource reallocation: stay active. Companies that reallocate more than 50 percent of their capital expenditures among business units over ten years create 50 percent more value than companies that reallocate less actively. In our interviews with CEOs for CEO Excellence, we didn’t find a single executive who felt they had been too active in reallocating resources.

Organizational alignment

Talent: match talent to value. The best CEOs take a methodical approach to matching the best talent with roles that create the most value. Equally important, they move quickly on addressing low performers in key roles when it’s clear a change is needed.

Culture: go beyond employee engagement. CEOs who insist on rigorously measuring and managing all cultural elements that drive performance more than double the odds that their strategies will be executed. They also deliver triple the total shareholder returns that other companies do. The best CEOs home in on one cultural aspect that could make the biggest difference to business performance.

Organizational design: combine speed with stability. Excellent CEOs increase their companies’ agility by determining which features of their organizational design will be stable and creating dynamic elements that adapt quickly to new challenges and opportunities.

Team and processes

Teamwork: show resolve. Successful CEOs quickly adjust team composition, which can involve making hard calls to remove likeable low-performers and disagreeable high-performers. They also put conditions in place for each team member to be successful, while maintaining distance to objectively judge and act on performance.

Decision making: defend against bias. No one is immune to cognitive and organizational bias—not even CEOs. Excellent CEOs try to minimize the effect of biases by ensuring they have a diverse team and striving for more objective group reasoning approaches, which have been shown to improve decision quality.

Management processes: ensure coherence. Management processes too often work at cross-purposes. Excellent CEOs should require executives to implement processes that mutually reinforce central priorities.

Board engagement

Effectiveness: promote a forward-looking agenda. CEOs should use their boards as a resource, channeling board members’ energies individually and collectively beyond traditional fiduciary responsibilities. CEOs should neither resist the board as a knee-jerk reaction nor blindly follow every suggestion.

Relationships: think beyond the meeting. Establishing good relationships and a tone of transparency allows the CEO to build trust and clearly delineate responsibilities between management and the board. Purposeful meetings in individual board members’ home environments can help CEOs work through topics that might be difficult for a larger group to address. Excellent CEOs also promote connections between the board and top executives, which gives both parties a more complete picture of the business’s performance and goals.

Capabilities: seek balance and development. CEOs can guide the board to help the business by ensuring it comprises people with relevant and diverse expertise and experience. When new board members join, CEOs can help improve the board’s effectiveness by providing a thorough onboarding program and creating learning opportunities on topics such as technology, emerging risks, competitors, and macroeconomic shifts.

External stakeholders

Social purpose: look at the big picture. The best CEOs spend time thinking about, articulating, and championing the purpose of their company as it relates to the big-picture outcomes of day-to-day business practices.

Interactions: prioritize and shape. Excellent CEOs systematically prioritize and schedule interactions with their companies’ external stakeholders and use these experiences to motivate action.

Moments of truth: build resilience ahead of a crisis. Most crises follow predictable patterns, even though each may feel uniquely unsettling. The best CEOs create crisis response playbooks to prepare for the worst.

Personal working norms

Office: manage time and energy. CEOs’ energy is just as important as their time. Maintaining—and renewing—their energy levels allows CEOs to set a marathon pace rather than a sprint pace that could lead to burnout. The most successful CEOs quickly establish an office that can help conserve their energy, often including at least one highly skilled executive assistant and a chief of staff, to help them spend their time doing work only CEOs can do.

Leadership model: choose authenticity. CEOs are people too. The best among them balance the reality of what they should do in their role with who they are as humans and what they personally want to achieve. By expressing their intentions as part of the rationale for their decisions and actions, CEOs can minimize the risk of unintended interpretations being amplified in unhelpful ways. One consumer goods CEO told us, “You are speaking through an extraordinary amplification system. The slightest thing you do or say is picked up on by everyone in the system and, by and large, acted on.”

Perspective: guard against hubris. I purposely save the best for last;

The best CEOs form a small group of trusted colleagues to provide unfiltered advice—including the kind that sometimes hasn’t even been asked for. They also keep in touch with rank-and-file employees. And, not to forget as well, they remind themselves that this role is temporary and does not define them.