June 2025 Newsletter
Burning Questions from the C-Suite
From a Right Hand: So many ideas come out of my CEO’s brain. How do I keep it all straight without drowning?
To stay above water when listening to a CEO, you need three things: role clarity, a resilient mindset, and the right tool set.
Role Clarity. When CEOs talk fast and flow from topic to topic, that’s not dysfunction. It’s what executive thinking looks like, and it’s a superpower you want to leverage. But you can’t treat everything your CEO says as an immediate assignment, or you’ll drown. You’ll burn out and pull the team too many directions. Plus, your role as Right Hand isn’t to do everything the CEO says; it’s to catch and sort everything the CEO says. Capture the ideas and put them in the right mental buckets, then let the buckets drive the follow-up action. Assignments get assigned. Strategic pivots get clarified or calendared for future discussion. Venting gets emotional support. Problems get put on your list for further investigation. Catch and sort.
Mindset. At this point, you may be thinking: “Yeah, but how do I stay calm when what I’m catching feels overwhelming, disruptive, or personal?” Because CEOs don’t just share ideas, they share stress. Frustrations with performance. Pivots that obsolete an entire month of your work. Offhand remarks that land like judgment. CEOs constantly broadcast high-stakes information, and it’s normal to react emotionally. However, that reactivity doesn’t make you more effective. You can’t afford to get hijacked every time the CEO says something unsettling. You need a mechanism to move from reaction to reflection—and fast. The simplest, most reliable tool is curiosity. When your chest tightens or your inner monologue flares (“Why is he blaming me?” “How am I supposed to do all this?” “Does she even know we already launched that campaign?”) that’s your cue to pause. Shift from interpreting to inquiring. Ask: Why am I reacting this way? What might the CEO be seeing that I’m not? Curiosity opens your brain and provides cognitive space to keep listening. It turns defensive energy into diagnostic thinking. It lets you catch and sort, rather than spiral and stew. It preserves your ability to be a true brain partner. When CEOs sense your curiosity, your willingness to stay in a conversation even when it’s messy, they’ll give you more access, more information, more trust. Train yourself to notice your emotions, name and acknowledge them, and then use curiosity to steer toward action. Sometimes the biggest barrier to moving forward isn’t the CEO’s ideas. It’s your own reactions.
Toolset. But how do you actually keep up? That CEO moves fast. The Right Hand role requires more than a sharp mind; it requires a system. You need a quick, repeatable way to capture what the CEO says, hold onto it, and make sense of it later. You can’t sort what you didn’t hear or don’t remember, so use technology to help. Use voice memos on your phone to record “word dumps” when the CEO starts processing out loud. Push record on the Zoom call when the instructions come fast and furious. Use AI tools (suggestions below) to transcribe in seconds and get a skimmable summary. Asking to record shows you’re listening and intend to act with precision. It can build trust and provide an archive to revisit when memory fails or deeper thought is needed.
High-leverage Right Hands don’t chase tasks. They build systems that quickly collect and implement the right ideas.
Famous Right Hands
In The Devil Wears Prada Oscar-winning movie, Miranda Priestly is the legendarily tyrannical CEO. Andy Sachs is the long-suffering Right Hand. Miranda never says a kind word, insists that Andy reads her mind, makes unreasonable demands, undermines Andy’s personal life, and comes in hot when anything goes wrong. Even more annoying: Miranda is tremendously good at the actual deliverables and vision of her job, which means her instructions are often right even though the way she gives those instructions is completely insufferable.
Lessons to be learned? Here’s four:
Some bosses really are too much, and the job isn’t worth it.
Doing a complex Right Hand job well can be so very satisfying.
To be good as a Right Hand, you actually have to care about the things your boss cares about. You can’t fake it.
There are few real limits on Right Hand time commitment and workload. No one else will stop you from working, even when continuing to work is not good for you or the company. Your boss probably isn’t crazy like Miranda, but the Right Hand job is big. How much you take on, what hours you work, what you delegate, what you leave undone—so many of those decisions need to be made by you. Involve the CEO when needed, but realize that keeping the work from overrunning the life originates with the Right Hand, not the CEO.
News
Last month, Heather taught her 100th Vistage/TEC workshop! Big thanks to all the execs who were willing to challenge their paradigms about Right Hand relationships. The 100th session was hosted by Master Chairs Chris and Ana Quinn and the fine folks of CE5685 in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Recommendation
If you are trying to sort through AI noise, we found the AI Foundational Boot camp offered by Kiingo to be a trustworthy and comprehensive overview. Kiingo is owned by Vistage Master Chair Jess Hartmann and his genius son and Vistage speaker Ross Hartmann. Heather paid about $900 for this 6-week virtual course taught by real humans, and it was worth every penny.
And here’s what we use at Practical PhD for AI note-taking tools:
Fathom for meeting summaries, transcriptions, and an AI chatbot to analyze the meeting. Only for conference calls because it can’t transcribe standalone audio files.
Fireflies for quick transcription of “brain dumps.” We use it to catch and sort CEO conversation and transcribe raw content and strategy ideas. Versatile, works on many platforms. Processes standalone audio files. User interface is a bit dense.
Granola for taking notes by hand. Works as a supplement: you jot quick notes, and Granola fills in the gaps.
They all start at a few dollars a month, with free trials and multiple price tiers.
“You're not going to lose your job to AI. . . you’re going to lose your job to someone who uses AI.” -Jensen Huang, NVIDIA CEO
What can we do for you?
At Practical PhD, we help companies Get the Right Hand Right so they're ready for top leadership transition in 1-3 years:
Find and hire a Right Hand
Onboard a new Right Hand
Teach an aspiring Right Hand the job
Performance-manage a struggling Right Hand
Create phased leadership succession plan
Ask about the Right Hand Advantage program we offer with One Eighty Collective. It's a full-service hiring, onboarding, and coaching solution for CEO, President, and COO level Right Hands.