Six steps to becoming a successful CEO: six issues demand major-league performance at the outset to successfully adapt to the highest corporate office.

• Author: Naples, Ronald J.

What follows is a view of the CEO's world from what is probably a somewhat atypical perspective. I was a relatively young chief executive--I got the job one month after turning 36. My company, Hunt Manufacturing Co., with 1983 revenues of $85 million, was hardly a giant among American corporations. What's more, the ownership of the company was not at all typical of a publicly held corporation: About 40 percent was in the hands of the founding family, and, importantly, it was not my family. So while the demands and pressures of my job might be quite different and my total experience must surely pale in comparison to the years of service and experience of many CEOs, I have labored to distill some lessons from my early years as a chief executive that provide another bit of insight into the life of the CEOs about which so much has been written recently.

A word of caution, though. No Universal Truths here, or, at least, none intended. If the truth be known, I have come to believe less and less in Universal Truths in any case and more and more in the situational relativity of things. So if I may borrow the remarkably apt term of one of my more memorable business-school professors, here are what I prefer to call some Currently Useful Generalizations.

1. Distance

   The newly minted chief executive has the problem of creating some distance between himself and those who were formerly his organizational peers. The reasons for this are many and, to a large extent, obvious. The CEO will be called upon to make decisions that will affect the lives of others. He will sometimes be the final arbiter of disputes. He is the judge in the competition for corporate resources. He must occasionally make unpopular choices. These and others are difficult functions, and they cannot always be done "among friends." This is not to say that the CEO cannot have friendships with associates, but simply that there are limits to which one must be sensitive.

   The route one takes to the CEO job is important. Distance may be built in: The new CEO is recruited from outside the company or previously occupied a position in the company's management hierarchy with few or no peers. In such cases "distance" is not a problem.

   The corporate management structure from which I became CEO was relatively flat, and my relationship with many of those who would now report to me had been of the "we're all in this together" variety. Somehow the message had to be conveyed that as a management team "we're still all in this together," but now our relationship had to be different.

   The need early on for a clear symbol of change, without alienating all those one still must rely on, seemed to be there. The symbol chosen was compensation--not necessarily the amount of compensation, but the form.

   A new stock-related compensation program was installed, and the new CEO was designated as the only current participant. It got the attention needed to serve a communication purpose because it was a proxy statement item. It did not need to be communicated by me in what would appear to be a self-serving way. Also, standing procedures for additional compensation items such as stock options were changed. This wasn't done in a capricious way; I thought it needed to be done. But it also served to communicate the reality and necessity of distance because it involved redistribution of awards.

   The element of distance does not mean the end of friendly and cordial relations or becoming unapproachable. It simply means communicating that things have changed. As time goes on, the kind of relationships built with subordinates will serve to define the limits of the appropriate distance, which must surely vary with personalities, the size and complexity of the business, and the kind of working relationships with which the CEO feels comfortable.

2. Legitimacy

   It strikes me that in today's corporate world there are few corporate hierarchies--even small ones--that respond lock-step simply because an individual is anointed the CEO by a board of directors. There is a need to establish one's legitimacy in the CEO role in order to be able to spend time getting the job done, rather...