Every career is unique. We all have different strengths (our talent stack — skills, knowledge, accomplishments, and behavioral traits), and weaknesses. Unexpected opportunities and obstacles arise — at work and at home — that affect how your talent stack and career evolves. Across our differences, there are general types of knowledge and experiences that all executives need to succeed in the C-suite.
In my recent insight How to Unlock Leadership Potential In Your Organization, I discuss a top to bottom leadership development approach based on our Leadership Ladder. In this article, I focus on help you get to the C-Suite, achieving success and staying there.
C-Suite executives need to be the starters, the innovators, the drivers of the organization. They define and set ambitious objectives, identify opportunities and launch initiatives to turn them into a reality. They are the external outward-facing representative of the interests of the organization and must manage the complex interests of different stakeholders within the organization.
Here are the dominate competencies required in the C-Suite.
People management
Related C-Suite Competencies:
- Leads Decisively
- Inspires Others
- Demonstrates Energetic Enthusiasm
Organizations are made up of groups of people. That means that, first and foremost, senior executives manage and then lead people. Early in your career, this means mastering the basics of managing yourself, including building strong working relationships with your bosses and peers. It is about:
- learning how to be a dependable co-worker
- doing what you say you will when you say you will
- being engage in the business
- producing high-quality results, with no surprises
As you move to managing subordinates, you are building and coaching teams and selecting and developing the talent to make those teams useful. You learn how to hire, motivate, counsel, and fire people — ensure you do so with the required clarity and compassion. For the competencies needed at this first level of leadership, see our Leadership Ladder.
Next is managing a substantive piece of an organization and overseeing a team of people who lead their groups of people; over time, those teams get more prominent. Again, this stage requires some new competencies. As the people whom you lead get more senior, how you coach them changes. It moves from the basics of doing a job well to how they build their teams, create business strategies and become good developers of talent.
We need Learning Leaders who can stay flexible, grow from mistakes, and handle a magnitude and diverse range of challenges.”
Business knowledge
Related C-Suite Competencies:
- Drives Achievement
- Sustains Profitability
- Focus on Results
All organizations exist to create shareholder value. There are two necessary conditions — satisfied customers and an engaged workforce.
Successful business leaders build profitable firms. Aspiring to the C-suite requires you to gain exposure and learn about all the other functions (e.g., sales, marketing, operations, finance, human resources). Eventually, you will master these core business functions.
Next, you need to learn how to align the functions to maximize profits for a specific product or group of products and maintain and grow market share. As a functional leader, you bring the various disciplines within your function together in ways that support critical business goals. Remember it is always about the business, many organizations with a few optimized business functions have failed. Always take the enterprise-level view – assessing enterprise-wide growth and profitability, across multiple product lines and businesses. You will be seen as a big picture thinker and rewarded in the long-term. At the most senior levels, executives determine investment and people risks, improve margins by thoughtfully controlling costs, and allocate capital to grow the most promising products and business lines over time.
Strategic
Related C-Suite Competencies:
- Seeks Innovations
- Sustains Profitability
- Initiates Independently
Successful executives are well-served early on by fostering a curiosity for how organizations and markets develop over time – learning to see what they do at work each day in a broader context. Strategic thinking is all about translating details into more significant picture implications and decisions that move teams and organizations forward, rather than merely maintaining the status quo. The core of strategic thinking in the C-suite centers around competitive strategy; that is, how a firm or business unit positions itself relative to its competitors, what differentiates it and allows it to attract customers and thrive.
Strategy is not planning. Our preferred approach is to treat strategy-making as developing a set of answers to five interlinked questions. The questions cascade logically from the first to the last.
- What are our broad aspirations for our organization & the concrete goals against which we can measure our progress?
- Across the potential field available to us, where will we choose to play and not play?
- In our chosen place to play, how will we choose to win against the competitors there?
- What capabilities are necessary to build and maintain to win in our chosen manner?
- What are management systems necessary to build, operate and maintain the key capabilities?
Reduced options for differentiation usually mean decreasing opportunities for profit. To create profits and long-term value, a company’s senior executives shape and reshape their organizations over time through mergers, acquisitions, start-ups, and spin-offs. In this shaping work, organizational structure is a crucial lever, combined with incentives, that executives have for implementing new strategies and the change required to support them. This means that gaining perspective and experience in how to (re)design jobs, then teams, and later business units and seeing how those decisions influence culture, politics and performance lies at the heart of developing the strategic thinking needed in the C-suite.
Our Goal Alignment Program GAP™ provides insights regarding how to think at the enterprise level and allocate resources to the strategic priorities.
Relationship building
Related C-Suite Competencies:
- Thrives on Chaos
- Exercises Political Influence
- Drives Achievement
All business is enacted through human relationships, embedded within other links — referred to as networks. Building relationships start at the beginning of a career by staying in touch with college friends and connecting with new colleagues at work. Later it expands to include contacts made in different parts of a company and new colleagues or friends of colleagues who work at other companies in your industry or your city. Your network grows over time, across functions, geographies, and industries, as do the interpersonal skills required to manage all these relationships. Throughout, building your reputation as a trustworthy and value-add colleague or connection is vital. As you move toward the highest levels, interactions with the C-suite, board members, and even headhunters take on a unique character. Here interactions become as much about demeanor as they do about substance. People are watching to see if you can master the “smoothness” and low drama required in many C-suites. Body language, nuance, and question-asking take on a whole new character.
Leadership Style
Most recently, there has been a significant emphasis placed on examining the differences between Transactional and Transformational Leadership ideas. The newest trend is to Agile Leadership. This is a leadership style where the leader values the need to adapt to continually changing conditions, with the ability to embrace new effective behaviors based on new requirements and the challenges of a chaotic, even volatile marketplace driving a magnitude of change, with the potential to confound by its daunting complexity and uncertainty.
What is exciting and relevant to know about leadership is that paradigms continue to shift. As society changes — leadership changes. So the study and theories about leadership change as well. You will find numerous attempts of scholars and writers trying to capture the “essence” and “answers” to the intriguing field that has yet to be and probably never will be “nailed-down.”
Leadership styles research suggests that styles of leadership are more personality based at their core than directed toward performance as an effective leader. You will naturally tend to “lead” the way you do because it is your fundamental interpersonal nature. There is no correlation between one’s style of leadership and one’s leadership performance. However, it is essential that you understand your dominate traits — there can be too much of a good thing!
Also, the research on “leadership style” suggests most leaders do not have a single dominant style.
We also help you understand your leadership style and how to apply it in given situations. The seven primary leadership styles are:
- Agile Style
- Inspirational Style
- Entrepreneurial Style
- Utilitarian Style
- Directive Style
- Administrative Style
- Collegial Style
Multiple Leadership Style
The Multiple Leadership Style is where two or more styles falling within the high range. These leaders have a vast repertoire of techniques and are capable of adapting and demonstrating the leadership style believed to be the more effective given the scenario or the specific employee or situation being managed. Possessing more than one dominant leadership style will be more effective or even in preference to any other single “dominant” leadership style.
Undifferentiated Leadership Style
An undifferentiated leadership profile is found in individuals with no firm, clear self-identity. There is no well differentiated “Self” or “Ego” that they identify with, and their behavior is highly dependent on the circumstances they find themselves in. Generally, if you have no clear leadership style, you approach “leadership” roles with mixed feelings and consequently have difficulty knowing or choosing how to behave when required to perform this function. It also predicts the degree of stress or inner conflict you will experience when initially placed in a leadership role. With an undifferentiated style, you are likely demonstrating hesitancy when expected to lead others or when it is necessary to deal with a wide range of significant business circumstances.
In the C-Suite, you will manage a wide variety of different individuals, all who are making demands on you. Without a solid self-identity, you may be confused about how you should act or who you should be. The result is a leadership style that others reporting to you will describe you as “demonstrating too many inconsistencies” … telling one employee one thing and turning around and telling another employee something completely different.
Studying all the different leadership styles
It is crucial for you to spend more time reading and studying all the different leadership styles and evolve your unique leadership style rather than defining themselves in one style or the other. Likewise, by exploring and “consciously choosing” which style they would like to experiment with, master or learn until it eventually comes to “feel natural.”
If you fall into this group, it is equally important for you to question your motive for pursuing a managerial role. Often, we find individuals were encouraged to do so by outside influence. They leave a satisfying role and then they are constantly stressed. To me, career satisfaction equals career success.
Putting it all together
Understanding your leadership style and developing across all four areas during the early part of a career is challenging, but essential. Significant gaps in any area can lead to the uneven development and make succession into and success in the C-suite less likely. Getting it right requires some luck in landing the right array of experiences at the right times and in roughly the right order. It also needs strong coaching and feedback to correct mistakes early -- before they become problematic in ways that are hard to fix. (Nobody makes it to the C-suite without feedback!) Finally, as you progress toward and into upper middle management, you need someone, or a group of people, above you to be working proactively to fill in any of your gaps.
We help aspiring executives understand their talent stack, the full array of skills and experiences required to land a C-suite role and identify their gaps. This approach enables you to land the C-Suite job, succeed and stay there.
Still curious to learn more?
We are incredibly passionate about Behavioral DNA and the impact this scientific insight can have on you. We hope more promising men and women can achieve the learning and development they need on the road the C-suite by discovering their unique path to career success and satisfaction. This is possible if you learn about your behavioral DNA and leverage your unique strengths along your career journey. We offer our services worldwide.
Ladder of Leadership: New Research Unveiled
A behavioral competency model for driving top performance at three corporate leadership levels.
In the paper we share the competencies that are:
- Always On: Only two behaviors from manager to C-Suite
- Leap: “Bridging” behaviors for moving between each management level
- Lead: Unique behaviors for every stage of management
- Leave Behinds: The “once and done” list— good only for where you are, not where you’re going