The best advice Marissa Mayer received from Google CEO Eric Schmidt on being an executive

One of the things that Eric had said as you'd gotten closer and closer to the executive level is he said, good executives confuse themselves when they convince themselves that they actually get to do things. You don't get to design web pages, you don't get to design apps, you don't get to code. What you get to do is set a direction, and then your job is defense. Get things out of the way, get the stuff that's going to slow the team down, distract the team, get in the way of the team out of the way. And so he's like, you know, your job really becomes listening to them about what's going to get in the way and how to get that cleared out of the path so they can move as fast as they can move. Because you've got to acknowledge yourself that you're not going to do the designs, you're not going to do the implementation, you're not going to do the coding. So your job is to help make them as effective as you can make them.