Getty Images; Andrius Banelis for BI
The rapid acceleration of change in the workplace — from the boom of generative AI to shifting work models — means leaving behind old ideas of what C-suite leadership looks like.
For Business Insider’s third Workforce Innovation virtual roundtable, we asked board members how C-suite leaders might have previously led their businesses and how old approaches are giving way to a distinctly new way of executive leadership.
Several board members said change needed to happen at every level of an organization, not just on a single team. Now it’s up to leaders to harness the potential of their workforce and prepare employees for how they can play an active role in transformations across the business.
“The reset message here is that no function is exempt,” Maggie Hulce, the chief revenue officer at Indeed, said. “Every function can change and should be changing and needs to take accountability and ownership for driving that, versus waiting for a central team to figure everything out.”
With evolving workplace priorities, the Workforce Innovation board also predicted which new roles might emerge in the C-suite, including “chief transformation officer” and “chief experience officer.”
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Julia Hood: What’s the old way of C-suite leadership, and what’s the new way? What is changing for those leading the workforce during this time of transformation?
Alicia Pittman, chair of global people team, Boston Consulting Group
One of the biggest differences we’re seeing and we’ll continue to see is that the concept of apprenticeship is becoming truly a two-way street. An old version of apprenticeship is learning the craft step-by-step — like the “Karate Kid” and Mr. Miyagi, based on wisdom and time.
Now leaders are also seeing from younger generations how to embrace technology and AI, specifically, how to lead inclusive teams that maybe don’t look so much like you, and how to support employees through mental-health challenges and general wellness.
I’m seeing that happening in very powerful ways, truly two ways, and up and down. Organizations that embrace that — which are flatter, less formal, and allow for more of that cross-connectivity — are going to benefit as that becomes more the norm in how we craft leadership.
Neil Murray, CEO, Work Dynamics at JLL
I like the idea that’s been coined about leading from behind. The notion is that the old way was about leading leaders top-down, personally owning strategy, P&L, innovation, and culture.
Leading from behind has been likened to a shepherd coordinating from behind and creating an environment where people who are willing and able can take initiative and lead innovation. That company culture becomes owned collectively rather than the singular responsibility of the CEO.
I don’t think that’s about a CEO stepping back and allowing mob rule, but rather, it’s about harnessing collective genius in the organization.
I think the reason for this is that the psychological contract between companies and employees has changed quite dramatically and continues to change. We know that people are looking for more meaning and purpose in their working lives. They expect to be seen. They expect to be valued for who they are and, ultimately, want to be part of and coauthor a company purpose and culture.
It also applies to innovation. It’s no longer about incremental innovation from a centralized chief product officer. Breakthrough innovation will be key, with consistent breakthrough innovation to sustain competitiveness. From a leadership perspective, that’s about creating an environment where those closest to issues and most nimble can lean in and innovate, rather than trying to centralize it.
Kenon Chen, executive vice president of strategy and growth, Clear Capital
When I first saw the GitHub Copilot demo before it was launched, I was struck by the idea of someone with a business use case and business knowledge being able to execute and create a technical solution without going through our typical translation layers, which are business analysts and scrum masters and technical project managers.
We now have this huge layer of translators between the business, especially from the C-suite to the people who are creating the innovations or products.
What gen AI is leading us to is a world in which we don’t need so many translators because there are fewer hops from the idea to the value that we want to create to the execution. When you have all these translators, it’s like the telephone game.
As a leader, you need to be able to communicate much more precisely and clearly the outcome that you’re trying to create in terms of value. You have to be your own translator, in a way, so that every stakeholder involved can take action on what’s being communicated.
Anant Adya, executive vice president, service-offering head, and head of Americas delivery, Infosys
At Infosys, one of the things we are focusing on is employee well-being. We want to be a hybrid work environment where we give flexibility to our employees to choose the way they want to work.
There is obviously great value in coming to the office, collaborating with team members, and working to do innovative stuff. But this also ties back to DEI initiatives in the company. As we improve our gender diversity, especially as we go to the top, we want to make sure we give flexibility to our employees.
Also very important is how we embrace innovation. We continuously upskill, retrain, and reskill our employees. How do we make sure that we embrace the culture of learning in the company? It’s very critical that we have to constantly learn and upskill ourselves with all the new technologies that are coming and with all the new lingo that is being spoken. We don’t want to get stuck in the old world of still talking old technology.
Finally, we balance risk and focus from a long-term standpoint. Of course, everybody’s focused on the quarter results and numbers, but we want to have a very long-term focus and plan at the same time.
Justina Nixon-Saintil, vice president and chief impact officer, IBM
There is such a focus on employee voice across everything that we do. When you think about AI, we’re asking employees, no matter where they are across the business, to come up with use cases and ways that AI can make a difference in their function.
In the past, this would be the limit of just one entity, one function to come up with the right use cases. Maybe it was the software team, CIO team, or CTO.
Now we’re looking across the entire business and saying, “Come up with the right use cases that can help your function, your programs, your organization.”
Even in the area that I lead around corporate responsibility and ESG, we’re deploying AI technology to create better learning pathways for our users or to look at ESG and data analytics. So this is an area we’re leading within the organization and not necessarily waiting for another function to help us lead.
Maggie Hulce, chief revenue officer, Indeed
We are moving towards AI-enabled transformation being a companywide expectation, as opposed to just a few teams working on it and incubating it. That requires, as others have said, cross-team learning and development, and we are acknowledging we need both centrally driven, top-down things and a lot of bottom-up things.
That’s a parallel concept to DEI. We’ve gone through the transition of separate DEI organizations to having it be the expectation that equity is every leader’s responsibility.
Having a separate team that’s supposed to make everybody behave with equity just doesn’t work.
With well-being, we’ve been on this track that, of course, physical and mental health, employee engagement, and employee voice are really important. Right now, there’s more focus on training managers for the challenges of the multigenerational workforce and the mix of in person and remote.
The speed of change is getting more and more rapid. How do we equip the managers up and down to help navigate this? And that’s a big part of employee buy-in and navigating change. In the C-suite itself, you have more roles that have to think cross-functionally and be cross-functionally trained. Because as you think about how AI can change processes, it blurs and breaks old functional lines.
That will make people uncomfortable. But if you let the functional lines be blockers, it will definitely slow you down. So our expectation is that we’re going to see more and different types of roles that are enabling transformation.
Lucrecia Borgonovo, chief talent and organizational-effectiveness officer, Mastercard
One of the biggest shifts is around decision-making — the move from siloed decision-making, where each member of the C-suite has a defined set of decisions they’re accountable for, to a C-suite that acts more as a collective leadership body. It acts more cross-functionally, and there are more shared responsibilities and more joint decision-making that becomes part of the norm.
There’s much more fluidity and interdependency across different roles and functions. C-suite leaders are wearing multiple hats and creating roles that are much more versatile in nature.
Tim Paradis: We’ve seen new C-suite roles emerge in recent years, like chief AI officer and chief ethics officer. The C-suite itself is getting larger in some cases. What new C-suite offices might emerge next?
Nixon-Saintil: I’m seeing a lot of new roles, especially in corporate social responsibility and ESG. More “chief impact officers” are focused on social impact across the business. Those roles sometimes oversee environmental affairs and sustainability initiatives.
The “chief sustainability officer” role has increased significantly over the last two years. Many large companies had them, but now smaller or midsize companies are adding that role to the C-suite, especially as they prepare for regulation around sustainability and all of the mandatory disclosure that is occurring.
“Chief ESG officer” is a new role that we are seeing as well, with a focus on ESG, regulation, controls, and accountability.
Adya: The common thing that will happen across roles is the use of data and AI across every role.
There are two roles that we are seeing in some of our bigger customers. One is chief experience officer, who is focused on what we call “human experience.” It’s not just about the experience of users but also of the stakeholders, business users, and customers of the enterprise.
For example, if you go to a company and ask a finance person, “What does experience look like for you?” He or she will say that I would want to close my books on time. That’s the experience. They don’t care about whether they’re using X, Y, or Z vendor. For them, closing the books on time is their experience. So this is about looking at the experience of the stakeholders, the users, and their customers.
Then, while there is a “chief AI officer” role that’s picking up, there is also a lot of focus on automation. How do we use automation in a business process? So the “chief automation officer,” cutting across the enterprise, is looking at areas where we could potentially drive automation in a big way.
Borgonovo: One that is on my mind is what you might call a “chief optimization officer,” focused on how do you extract the most value across your products, your services, and all the different investments that you make, identifying items that aren’t necessarily scaling.
The other one that we have seen at Mastercard is the “chief risk officer,” a new role created in response to the environment getting incredibly complex and the importance of embedding risk management into the organization.
Roles like chief transformation officer will continue to be relevant. It all depends on the maturity of the different capabilities that you have in the organization.
Pittman: I think that a lot of these roles — whether it’s chief diversity officer, chief risk officer, chief digital officer — are really about building new competencies that are not widely spread. Where it’s working best, you see companies standing up leadership for these capabilities and then pushing it down the line. It’s got to be everybody’s accountability.
The number of companies naming chief transformation officers grew about 140% over the last couple of years. It’s one of those roles where the impact is most measurable. You can see with a chief transformation officer, from the time they’re appointed to the next two years, on average, that the company is going to improve its shareholder return performance versus its peers.
That’s pretty remarkable in terms of impact, so we’ll keep seeing that. With the pace of change, the half-life of market leadership keeps getting shorter and shorter. We’re going to see the role of the chief transformation officer being critical to enable C-suites to keep up with the pace of change and drive cross-functional initiatives.
Hulce: I was just pitching this idea of a transformation leader, not necessarily reporting to the CEO but one across internal functions to help drive the next 18 months given how fast we intend to stand up totally different ways of working.
When we think about transformation for external products versus transformation for internal processes, it is a bit different. So when we think about the work we’re trying to do for external products, making sure the scope is clear — those are long-standing, typical questions for how you stay competitive and innovate.
But rapid cross-functional, internal transformation is different. Can you make a successful role to drive a complete rethink of process and workflow across many functions with technology and AI being a critical enabler?
In the past, it wasn’t as important to do cross-functionally as it is now, with what gen AI can do. It’s a big opportunity to radically rethink how this work gets done.
Murray: Business-unit leaders now have an explicit responsibility to look at everything within their business line and think about on a 2-by-2 matrix the feasibility versus the impact of transforming end-to-end process.
Chen: I do like this idea of a chief transformation officer, but the risk there is if every leader isn’t equipped with thinking about how to proactively get value from tools that are around the organization and the data that is available. Everyone is going to have to be reskilled to learn how to do that, with AI as one of the new accelerator tools.