What Companies Want Most in a CEO


      For a better shot at landing the top job at today’s companies, aspiring CEOs should set aside their slide presentations and work on their listening skills instead, new research suggests.

      Companies are increasingly seeking socially adept leaders—not charismatic smooth-talkers, but executives who listen empathetically, welcome input, and rally the workforce around a common goal, according to a recent study by a team of researchers including Harvard Business School Professors Raffaella Sadun and Joseph Fuller, who analyzed thousands of executive job search descriptions created over a 17-year period.

      “The demand for social skills is increasing in every category of the economy,” says Sadun, the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration in the Strategy Unit at HBS. “[But] it’s not about schmoozing.”

      Instead, headhunters and corporate recruiters want candidates with soft skills who can:

      Actively listen to others;
empathize genuinely with others’ experiences;
persuade people to work toward a common goal;
and communicate clearly—or, as Sadun puts it, “touch the chords of listeners.”
Top executives who demonstrate this kind of interpersonal prowess are more likely to be in high demand, particularly at large, multinational, and information-intensive organisations, the research suggests. Those companies see social skills in the C-suite as more important than more traditional operational and administrative abilities, such as monitoring the allocation of financial resources.

      That’s because today’s senior executives face a more complex, technology-driven work world in which they must coordinate diverse teams across the globe to achieve goals and solve problems, the researchers note in their recent working paper, The Demand for Executive Skills.

      “The demand for social skills in executive searches reflects specific firm needs, in particular the need to coordinate more—and more complex—activities within firms”.