The Amrop Partners argue that the core domains should serve most organizations and that the traditional ‘role species’ need preserving. The Amrop global assignment data confirms that Finance and Operations have remained stable over ten years. So, too, has IT/Digital. What of other roles? “Other CXO roles are a question of the smartest design for the next five years in terms of reaching your strategic goals,” a Amrop Managing Partner emphasizes. “It has to be geared and tailored to the situation.”

Change in the air for C-suite team composition.

As one Amrop Partner reports. “We now commonly have hiring organizations where the top level consists of two people: the CFO and CEO. At the same time, very much emerging are clients where the leadership team consists of 19 people.” He sees operational roles moving ever closer to the C-suite orbit to the point of becoming a C-suite role. Ultimately, he says, a CFO and COO should almost always be present, and few modern companies will fail to include HR: “in some shape or form. The companies where HR remains a box-ticking, or a legal, contractual, payroll exercise — those days are gone.”

What of digital know-how? This must be wired into the C-suite, even if it is embodied by a C-level role holder in only around ten per cent of organizations served by Amrop, according to Amrop’s own data. Whatever the case, all senior digital executives require board support. But as Amrop’s research demonstrates⁵, this is often failing them.

Now more than ever, the C-suite needs deep roots

If C-suites need integrating with an organization’s strategy and higher purpose, the same goes for its human fabric: CXO’s must resist empire/silo building, internal politics and reporting matrices. An Amrop Partner: “I advise my candidates: if you want to be truly successful and happy, don’t waste time building silos and fighting internal politics and matrices. Ultimately you serve the consumer by helping your sales team, your finance team, HR, supporting others and enabling them.”

Engineering team dynamics: the C-suite must balance fluidity and structure

Our interviewees generally support clear areas of responsibility and seamless interfaces at CXO level. But the C-suite risks extremes: role ambiguity & blurred boundaries, versus silo thinking & rigid walls.

Given today’s need for agility, are relationships between C-suite members becoming more fluid, signaling the death of the silo? Not so fast, says one Amrop Partner. “The good thing about silos and compartmentalizing is that you know ‘this is your responsibility’ and that you shouldn’t meddle with ‘this person’s responsibility over here’.”

“We’re a long way away from silos, thank goodness,” says an Amrop Board Member. “It’s definitely becoming more fluid. And there are times where one could say roles are getting a bit blurred, because people may overstep their boundaries. And so, they just need to be reined in.”

Role ambiguity signals shaky architecture, one Amrop Managing Partner insists. Without clear roles and responsibilities underscored by a sense of meaning, “it’s not a good organizational structure.”

But balance is not self-evident

With structure and fluidity comes cross-fertilization as domain owners translate their specific knowledge into an over-arching business strategy. But there is a problem: mental shortcuts. As one Amrop Partner puts it. “Even though we’re a smart bunch, we tend to compartmentalize things in order to understand them. Not out of bad intentions or a lack of values in terms of understanding the need for fluidity, but simply because in understanding every possible type of risk that could hit this company you couldn’t do anything else. And it would burn your mental capacity just thinking about it.”

Nonetheless, some binomes should be cultivated, according to this Amrop Board Member: “Some of the most successful companies have a strong relationship between the CEO and the CHRO, the CEO and the CFO, and the CEO and the COO. Those three are absolutely critical to the success of the leadership team and CEO.

Apart from content expertise, what are the Amrop interviewees looking for in candidates? Seven core characteristics emerge:

• Purpose
• Credibility
• Gravitas
• Resilience
• Risk tolerance
• Relationship building
• Transformational leadership

View all appointments through the risk lens, with CEO succession in sight

As an Amrop Board Member puts it: “Firstly, what is the risk in appointing this over that person? Secondly, what is their risk tolerance in dealing with the situation they would be stepping into?” Succession planning also means looking beyond the role domain in play during a hire. “Often on a C-suite search our clients want us to look at people who could be successors to the CEO, for instance. So, in any senior role, think of this person also in terms of what development they would need over the next five years to be a contender for the CEO role.”

Exercise lateral thinking in C-suite hiring

“I think we in the search community have a role to play whereby we can challenge the thinking of our clients too,” says the Amrop Board Member. “My objective in any senior role is to have at least one person who is not on spec — who is different, who can truly challenge his or her thinking. Because companies don’t know what they don’t know until they explore what someone could bring to the table differently than where they’ve historically gone.”

Look out for further articles in this series: the evolution of the CEO, CFO, COO, CHRO and CIO

Sources:

¹ ‘Defining the ‘G’ in ESG; Governance Factors at the Heart of Sustainable Business’ (June 2022).

^2,5 ‘Digitization on Boards 4th Edition (2021)’. The Amrop Global Digital Practice.

³ ‘The Amrop Talent Observatory (2021).’ A survey of 443 senior executives from all world regions.

⁴Fernández-Aráoz, Claudio, et al, ‘The High Cost of Poor Succession Planning: A better way to find your next CEO’. The Harvard Business Review, May-June 2021.