It's Harder than Ever to Be a Senior Executive

The job of the senior executive is much more complicated today than it was a decade or two ago — and that trend will continue, especially if you hope to play on a global stage (which is a nearly universal condition these days for many companies). Why? Here are five reasons.

1. Soft skills are more important than ever. Most people come out of business schools fairly well armed with technical skills, but the softer side of management — communication, collaboration, cross-cultural intelligence, for instance — has dramatically grown in importance, and will continue to do so.
And for many people they're harder to learn. To some extent, they come only from experience. I've written about the rising significance of soft skills, including in the March 2011 issue of HBR (coauthored with Kevin L. Kelly and Bryan MacDonald), on how C-level jobs are evolving, and in my upcoming book on communication with Michael Slind[link]. In a knowledge economy, the shift is inevitable; you need to keep up with it.

2. So are technical skills. Though the balance of management skills has been shifting, hard skills are also more important than ever. Regardless of how it's divided, the entire pie of necessary managerial skills has grown. In other words, you need to be better at everything. Technical and functional knowledge are vital to making good judgment calls, being legitimate in the eyes of your people, and making resource allocation decisions. Running a company has become dramatically more complicated, and your skill set has to keep pace.

3. C-level jobs have become less circumscribed. Senior executive roles are increasingly interdependent, so it's less and less viable to remain a focused specialist. The CIO has to know what's going on in finance and marketing, for instance, and P&L experience is important even for support functions like human resources. That's one reason that job rotation is more common than ever as a development tool. A well-rounded executive will rise to the top much more quickly than one with singular expertise.

4. Companies are increasingly global. A handful of industries are still local — waste management, for instance — but most companies are competing on a global scale at some level. And if they aren't, they will be. So executives need a global mindset and a global IQ — and meaningful global experience (a short stint in Sweden won't do).

They need to be open to different experiences, attuned to cultural differences, and comfortable working with a highly diverse and globally dispersed employee and customer base. And the competition for good jobs is fiercer than ever. So, for instance, if you want a top finance job it's not enough to be the best CFO in the U.S.; you have to be the best CFO in the world. Many executive searches are done on a global basis now.

5. You have to be constantly learning. Industries have become much more dynamic — the rules are always changing, new competitors come out of the woodwork, the talent pool has expanded exponentially. To be employable you need to demonstrate a learning orientation, learning agility — defined as an executive's ability to acquire new skills quickly by seeking and learning from new experiences, which allows them to be more adaptable in this uncertain global environment.

Many executives also set up procedures and relationships to have access to constantly changing information and best practices. Reverse mentoring has become popular today for precisely this reason. Younger employees may lack the experience of their senior colleagues, but they've grown up in a different world and are more accustomed to the new rules of business. And industries are crossing boundaries in completely unexpected ways — there was talk recently of Apple looking to buy the distribution rights to U.K. soccer, for example. You never know where the next challenge is going to hit, but it's your job to be prepared.

That's a pretty hefty set of requirements. And to make matters more complicated, companies no longer have the responsibility to help you update your skills. Many will offer various learning opportunities and they're certainly happy if you're able to keep up, but in the end it's up to you. The emerging global executive has tremendous opportunity for an exciting and rewarding career, but it will take a lot of work. So how are you preparing for the future?

This post is part of the HBR Insight Center, The Next Generation of Global Leaders.

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Boris Groysberg
Boris Groysberg is a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. His work examines how a firm can be systematic in achieving a sustainable competitive advantage by leveraging its talent at all levels of the organization.