The primary loyalty of the chief executive officer is to the board of education, a group of lay people elected to represent the school's clients. Because accountability is to laymen rather than to senior professionals, chief executive officers must play a heavy role in educating them about education and in generating policy recommendations for their consideration. The essential competencies for the position fall into three domains: the conceptual and substantive, the human and political, and the technical and managerial. These competencies can be developed by professionalization, which can be pursued by formal preparation, inservice education, and applied research and development. Also professional organizations can develop mechanisms for mutual support and to monitor the performance of fellow professionals; establish a code of ethics on which there is consensus among the members; and establish an agency through which chief executive officers can have input to the development of policy at the provincial level. Professionalization also requires that executives commit themselves personally to professional development by managing time to allow for reading, studying, and thinking. (MLF)