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The executive chair is a chair who is an active member of the management team rather than an outside director. Often the executive chair is a founder of the company and can often be the largest non-investor shareholder in the business. It can also be a founder who was previously the CEO but has handed that role to another founder or hired someone to be the CEO. An executive chair can be a full-time or part-time employee of the company, but in either case, has a significant role in some aspect of the company.

Few people have been as successful as Reid Hoffman as executive chair. Reid co-founded LinkedIn and is also a partner at the VC firm Greylock, a significant investor in LinkedIn before Microsoft acquired it. Here, Reid explains how he approaches the role of executive chair (which officially was “Executive Chairman” while he was at LinkedIn).

A few years after I co-founded LinkedIn in 2003, I decided to shift my role from CEO to executive chairman. While there are a relatively clear-cut set of roles and responsibilities attached to the CEO's job, an executive chairman at company X may play a much different role than the executive chair at company Y. It's a nebulous job title and depends on the company in question and the person filling the role.

I made the shift because LinkedIn was in a state of transition, shifting from a startup to a growth-stage company. I love articulating a product vision and other facets of early-stage entrepreneurship, but I'm less interested in organization building, international expansion, and developing scalable business processes. Becoming executive chairman allowed me to continue playing a highly active role at LinkedIn regarding strategy and several key projects while handing off the operations to the CEO.

Jeff Weiner became CEO in 2009, and, while I remained extremely involved at LinkedIn, the division of responsibilities between us was extremely clear. The buck stopped with Jeff. If Jeff made a decision, that decision was made. Period. While I tried to offer Jeff honest and candid advice and even challenged him, he had operational control over the company. Jeff worked for the company, not for the executive chairman or the board, although the board could choose to replace him.

Trust is the critical factor in an executive chairman and CEO relationship. Neither works explicitly for the other, and no one reported to me. I was careful never to override the organizational chain of command.

My most important job as executive chairman was helping Jeff do the best job possible. Sometimes this meant helping recruit and retain great people. Sometimes this meant helping launch an international expansion or a new product. It always meant being a great partner to Jeff and the entire executive team so that we could advance our vision of bringing economic opportunity to every professional in the global workforce with our thousands of LinkedIn colleagues around the world.

Reid Hoffman, Greylock Partner, LinkedIn Founder, and Executive Chairman until the sale to Microsoft