Ok so I will answer this first as a general CEO and then for my own basis as a CEO because they are slightly different due to business models and growth stage.
1) Buck stops with you
It is remarkably freeing to have no excuse ever.
All decisions are ultimately yours (though boards can direct you).
So you get to take the brunt of your bad decisions and share the credit with your team when you all win.
You have to make tough decisions quickly and regularly.
2) Less stress
While it can be incredibly stressful worrying about finances, having to lay good staff off, your decisions that impact shareholders, culture or leadership issues etc. (and this is a very real pressure!).
There are many studies showing that the higher up the management ladder the less stress you face.
This is because you have less people telling you what to do, more people to tell to do stuff and more freedom of thought. You have a lot more resources available to you also.
3) You get paid way more
You are now getting paid for the value your thinking and ideas can create, not how many tasks you can complete, so the ratio between what you get paid, is a lot more.
There are also a very small number of people who can successfully run a business so not only have you detached from a maximal possible task output model, not only can your ideas / strategy deliver way more value, you also have a small number of people who have say 15 years management experience in your industry, and who has not yet net their Peter Principle glass ceiling.
Also (and this is often forgotten when people gripe about CEOs salaries), a large part of the salary is a bonus eg you have a good salary, but a huge part of why you earn is decimated if you fail to hit certain targets.
You can also have shares which don’t allow you to vest for many years.
4) You have no life outside work
I don’t personally know of CEOs who do not work longer and harder than the rest of the company (and that is probably fair in that if someone expects a standard then it’s best to never ever drop below that level as a leader.
The CEO at Telecom Wholesale was on $1M and arrived at work at about 6:30am and left about 11pm mon – fri.
He had done that for 15 years well before being CEO.
5) A lot of what you do is thinking, socializing and meeting
There is far less of the “”pick up thing and do it” type tasks and far more of the “Ok I have an idea, call in my relevant team and tell them what I want, when I want it and how it has to work” then you at on a cycle of review meetings when you check that all the things you wanted to be made are done when you wanted it.
It is very important to get across your team and learn about how things are going.
6) Ivory towers and Emperors Clothes
It is almost impossible in a big organisation with layers, to not get some distortion of the issues and problems either due to the nature of board room meetings (formal, structured hierarchy), People protecting their reputation (middle managers), incompetence (middle leaders unaware of reality and seriousness of problems due to incompetence) etc.
Also because issues are summarized and simplified eg basic diagrams of department structures etc.
The best way to combat this is to ensure time on the front line – (watch Undercover Boss and tell me that is not the most productive weeks this bosses ever had!!), chat regularly to the front line staff, have skip meetings (eg without their direct manager present), reward and encourage bad news with solutions provided, anonymous suggestions, staff surveys, customer surveys.
Chat to your customers, answer emails for the Helpdesk etc.
Very rarely the real problem of productivity is due to a more efficient way to record their productivity and to punish an reward etc. It’s things like “our belt sander is broken cause we don’t order a certain bolt or something specific and detail heavy like that.
When you spend the day gazing at org charts etc you can lose site of the good stuff.
So in summary it’s more about leading, planning, tracking / checking, meeting, managing (money, time and people) etc.
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