Image by John Ritter

The path to a job in the C-suite isn’t what it used to be. For many years, companies could lean on financial expertise and industry connections when recruiting candidates, but HBS professors Raffaella Sadun and Joseph Fuller say that so much has changed in the last two decades—between globalized workforces and the rise of technology—that the traditional pedigree is out of date. They studied almost 5,000 executive job descriptions compiled by the executive recruiting firm Russell Reynolds Associates in the last 20 years. From that research a new picture of leadership emerged, and it’s one that hinges on social skills. Sadun leads the Digital Reskilling Lab at HBS; Fuller co-leads the School’s Managing the Future of Work project. Here, they talk about the rise of soft skills in the C-suite.

Your research identified a real shift in the last two decades, as companies moved away from operational expertise as they look to hire CEOs. Do organizations know how to recruit for these softer skills?

Raffaella Sadun: As a basic starting point, organizations often lack the process to make these decisions optimally, for a few reasons. Now on top of that, you put a desire to get people who have these intangible social skills. We define them as empathy and persuasion; those are objectively very di⁄cult to measure. That combination, of looking for something that is hard to measure, plus a process that is already inadequate to capture objective skills, is an explosive combination.

If you’re looking for social skills, you need to be ready to take the subjectivity out of the process. To use a very personal analogy here, don’t hire someone just because they support AS Roma. That is my soccer team, and I tend to believe that Roma supporters are great; but they’re not necessarily great from the perspective of the skills that are needed to manage complex organizations. I would be very, very cautious of making sure that you have a way of de-biasing your decision-making if you’re going after social skills.

Joe Fuller: I support Juventus FC, which is an archrival of AS Roma, although the more successful of the two sides, and it’s only through superior social skills that I am able to have a productive relationship with Raffaella.

In all seriousness, beyond the evaluation process it’s also the hiring processes. Instead of scanning for social skills, most industries rely on inferential variables. A different piece of research that I did in the Managing the Future of Work project found that when technology companies removed a university degree as a job requirement, new language showed up in the job description that was all about social skills. The inference we’re drawing, of course, is that as those companies thought about rewriting the job descriptions, they said, “Well, we thought that a college graduate would be a good communicator and pay attention to detail. We’d better say that’s what we’re looking for now.”

We also don’t do professional development or assignment of rotations in a career path to heighten social skills. In fact, as big companies have become leaner, they’re more focused on getting someone who’s highly expert in that job and leaving them there. If you assign an executive to a foreign market which they’re unfamiliar with, they’re likely to flounder a bit. They’re certainly not going to be hypere⁄cient. Companies have to change their hiring practices to focus on social skills; they’re harder to find in the marketplace than specific hard skills. And they should consciously create opportunities for employees to develop social skills as they advance.

Sadun: Social skills allow for better teamwork, but if you use an evaluation approach that pays attention to the individual contributions instead of the team, you may be missing the value added by a person with great social skills. If somebody has this ability to make teams work well, the best way to capture it would be to observe the same person managing different teams and evaluate whether the team improves as this person arrives. It’s not science fiction; this kind of analysis can be done with the data that companies typically have. But they’re not the approaches that are currently used by HR.

Fuller: There’s an awful lot that has to get arbitrated here in terms of the way work is thought about, and how people get evaluated and developed. Over the 120 years or so of significant organized capital, most people were owner-operators. They had a farm or a store or a workshop that they operated. The whole logic was centered on hard skills, and they became the basis of evaluation. It was easy to say, “Joe forgot to show up for the exec ed class for the 15th time, so we’re just going to fire him.” But companies are scared to say, “Well, we’re not going to promote Joe because he doesn’t really have social skills,” because that’s much harder to evaluate—and then, boom, you’re going to court.

What response are you hearing from the business community about the new research?

Sadun: It has had a lot of resonance with the broad community of people who are involved in training, including social-skills training. Another audience that, anecdotally, has really engaged with it are people who do a lot of this teamwork and don’t necessarily see their skills being recognized, such as women, though I don’t have numbers from this demographic. And the third group is companies that are trying to implement social-skills training and are very eager to see the impacts of this training being evaluated.

Fuller: I was with about 20 utility CEOs recently, and one thing that resonated with them was the proliferation of constituencies and their ability to amplify their opinions using social media. To go back 50 years, after my father left being a professor at Harvard Business School, he became the chief human resources o⁄cer at General Motors. He had a wonderful boss named Tom Murphy, who was an exemplary executive. But if you looked at Tom Murphy’s calendar and compared it to Mary Barra’s, there might be 30 percent overlap. Murphy ran the business, but he wasn’t dealing with analysts or activists; he wasn’t dealing with employee groups much beyond the UAW. Every time he made an unpopular decision, it wasn’t on Glassdoor or whatever we’re calling Twitter now.

Sadun: In data from a different project, I found that on average, 70 percent of CEO time is spent interacting with others. My hunch is that team interactions are even more important now because the type of expertise that you need to deliver results is more heterogeneous: You need to have the tech person and the marketing expert, and your job is to combine all this expertise into something that’s coherent and delivers value.

What are the implications across the C-suite?

Fuller: Not every player’s got to be the fastest or the tallest, but you need a blend of skills across the team. And you need to think about the C-suite with four other positions, and the general inventory of social skills across that group. We’re getting a more nuanced and textured profile of how the senior management systems work and what kind of changes are needed to be responsive to context, which continues to change for big institutions.

Sadun: To have a functional team I expect that all executives will need social skills to work together. Even outside the realm of business: Think about teams of doctors and engineers. These technical professions will increasingly require specialized experts to work together effectively. Social and managerial skills will be increasingly relevant for these occupations too.

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