Shaping the C-Suite’s Relationship with AI

In the words of our Director, Richard Chiumento, “You probably will not lose your job to AI, but you will lose it to a human who is using AI effectively.” An organisation is extremely unlikely to replace its leadership team with artificial intelligence (AI), but rather must enable its C-Suite to form a strategic relationship with technology to drive impact. Doing so will require a baseline understanding of how AI can benefit the business, and how to derive maximum value from it.

While many existing roles will be replaced by technology over time, businesses are unlikely to eliminate their entire workforce in favour of technology, despite the bleak predictions we often see making headlines. Rather, what lies ahead is a massive reshaping of the working world and ‘modern’ workplace as we have traditionally known it through the optimisation of everything we do, every process, and every production. The C-Suite will hold the responsibility of guiding the organisation through this transformation, which will require effective management and fostering a closer relationship with technology by all.

In this article, we provide key factors for organisations and senior leaders to consider to effectively leverage the current AI wave.

Differentiating Between Tactical and Strategic Uses of AI

Business use of AI can be split into two categories: tactical and strategic. What this looks like in practice will vary by business, but here are some general use cases to be aware of based on the solutions available in the marketplace:

• Tactical: Drafting text copy and imagery for marketing materials, sending outreach messages, communicating with prospects, automating parts of the manufacturing process, taking notes across sales interactions, answering customer queries through chatbots, screening job candidates, delivering tailored training, generating reports, etc.

• Strategic: Gauging customer sentiment through social listening, analysing historic data to identify opportunities, assessing performance, reducing production costs, streamlining operations, monitoring employee performance and engagement, lead prediction and scoring, competitor research, etc.

Understanding the Tactical Side of AI

The C-suite will likely have very little to do with the tactical uses of AI as part of their everyday role but should still be concerned with these practices. Team leaders should decide which systems to adopt, which vendors to work with, and where to invest. For this to be successful, each member of the C-suite will need to work collaboratively with their teams to identify where opportunities and efficiencies sit.

It is therefore critical for the leadership team to understand how specific areas of the business can benefit from the adoption of technology and how that might feed into the bigger picture. For example, the marketing, customer service, and sales functions are the most outward-facing functions of the business and stand to benefit greatly from the introduction of AI systems. It is likely that these functions will use generative AI to automate their communications with customers, create more compelling materials, become more targeted, and deliver the right offer in the right place at the right time. The CMO and CRO will need to work with these teams to find out which tasks could benefit most from AI’s helping hand and crafting a case for investment.

On the Operations and Supply Chain side, ongoing disruption has made an already challenging role even more difficult. The expectations placed on the COO will be to improve decision making, keep things running smoothly, and ensure cost efficiencies. They will need to think about how AI can facilitate innovation and identify how investing in new tools might improve long-term revenue and contribute to overall productivity and efficiency.

The urgent business need for digital transformation has fundamentally changed the CIO role from IT operator to business strategist. The CTO and CIO will be concerned with the technicalities of AI adoption and will most likely lead any conversations about vendors and tools. The ability to communicate the value of complex technology to the business is critical, as is the skill to drive and manage long-term change. Tactically, they will oversee the actual implementation of AI systems and need to ensure that the business possesses the necessary infrastructure, hardware, and software.

The CFO will most obviously be concerned about the cost of any AI investment and the returns it will generate. In addition, adopting the right AI will play a huge role in supporting the expectations of shareholders, regulators, and audit committees specifically in providing information in the areas of financial and nonfinancial reporting, transparency, and governance. The CFO will need to work closely with the other leaders to provide structures for governance of AI models to help ensure end-to-end AI governance. This will span from defining the AI strategy through training, testing, deploying and monitoring AI and the data used to train it.

Meanwhile, the CEO will have to keep a finger on the pulse of all this activity. They will be assimilating the massive amounts of data from AI initiatives taken forward by their peers to form answers to complex strategic questions at a massively accelerated rate. The CEO will also likely be the public face of the business’s transformation and will need to communicate with key stakeholder audiences both internally and externally.

In summary, despite not having a hands-on role in the tactical use of AI day-to-day, the C-Suite will need to stop going it alone and start thinking with a machine, using increasingly sophisticated analytic tools to help them rally the organisation. Selecting the right AI solutions, deciding what processes are automated, where money is spent, and how the business can benefit through business model transformation will be critical. This will require a need to ask questions that weren’t previously economical to answer as well as questions they didn’t even know to ask.

Leveraging the Strategic Side of AI

Most businesses possess more data than they know what to do with and in today’s increasingly digital age, even more is accumulated each day. This data is a goldmine of untapped potential that can offer a genuine snapshot of the business, its customers, stakeholders, and performance. However, to try to manually assess this data is a fool’s errand. It would take far too long and by the time any real progress is achieved, so much more new information will have been generated that the old data is obsolete.

Making sense of a business’s data in a tangible and useful way is the most valuable strategic benefit AI offers. In such a competitive landscape where customer habits change regularly and disruption is always on the horizon, having real-time insight into the business can help in staying ahead of the curve and gaining a competitive edge.

Measurement of KPIs is often focused on hard figures such as revenue, number of sales, and other tangible metrics. But every C-Suite executive knows that cost and value is often not that simple to nail down. There are often soft KPIs that are harder to measure but impact the business nonetheless. This includes reputational gains, employee or customer satisfaction, perceived CX, and loyalty. Because these indicators are not tied to an organisations figure, they are often harder to quantify.

AI can help with this, too. Again, the C-Suite will not need to have much direct interaction with tactical AI platforms on a regular basis, but these solutions and their activity can generate insights that can make the C-Suite more effective at what they do. For example, your marketing team’s social listening tool can provide insight into who your customers are, what matters to them, and how they feel about your business. Your sales team’s CRM platform will offer plenty of intelligence into what it takes to attract new prospects and what it takes to retain them. All of this information can be fed back to the C-Suite to help inform their wider strategy and measure success in a much more nuanced way.

The C-Suite will need to redefine the KPIs of the business for the AI age. This is where that grasp on the tactical side of AI comes into play. By understanding how each function of the business uses technology, it becomes possible to determine what can and should be measured. For example, if you know your sales team is using AI to manage relationships with existing customers, you can ask them to measure retention and loyalty. AI tools offer advanced reporting capabilities which help the C-Suite gain a deeper knowledge of the business as a whole. With this information in their arsenal, the leadership team can be much more targeted in their strategic objectives, agile in a crisis, and smarter with their budgeting.

Developing a future focussed workforce

But of course, with any significant change comes resistance, hesitation, and discomfort. It is likely that integrating AI into normal business practices will be met with all of these. Businesses are likely to encounter negative mindsets from their teams and this can include those in the C-Suite. Here are some common negative mindsets our team have come across and advice on how to overcome them

• Replacement: With so much hysteria surrounding AI and several bleak predictions pertaining to massive job losses, it is understandable that your people will be concerned about job security. How the leadership team communicates with the rest of the organisation will be critical here. Instead of shying away from these fears, address them head on. Acknowledge that this is a big change for everyone but provide reassurance that your people will be active participants on this new journey. Set expectations, and assign actions and owners. That way, employees will be reassured of their value and feel more secure in their place with the company. If there are redundancies to be made, be honest about that, too. However, do not leave those you let go of to fend for themselves. Invest in Executive Outplacement services such as those offered by The Rialto Consultancy to support these employees through the transition and help them to land on their feet.
• Obsolescence: Witnessing how impressive and effective AI can be at tasks people have been contending with for years may stir up feelings of intimidation. Individuals may begin to question both their value and their abilities. The truth of the matter is that AI is an assistant, not a boss. When AI takes over those more routinised tasks, it will create more time for individuals to focus on value-add activities that technology cannot yet replicate. This includes creative thinking, strategy, and providing a human touch to the customer journey. The leadership team will need to reshape the roles of their team to assign new purpose behind them. While experiencing changes in one’s role may be uncomfortable at first, it can also reinvigorate individuals and breathe new life into their careers and levels of motivation. The C-Suite will need to consider how to best reshape responsibilities in their organisation to provide adequate support for AI while deriving the most impact from their human workforce.
• Complacency: On the other side of the coin, after witnessing how effective AI can be, individuals may begin to incorrectly assume they can hand off their entire workload to technology. While generative AI is impressive in its current state and growing smarter rapidly, we have not yet reached a point wherein technology can replicate certain human capabilities. When reshaping your people’s roles, it is important to emphasise that their new responsibility is to fill the gaps that technology cannot currently replicate. AI should always be presented as a partner rather than a substitute. By setting expectations early and clearly defining the roles of both technology and humans, the leadership team will be sending a clear message that there is still very much a job to be done by their employees.
• Inadequacy: However, some of your people may be more tech savvy than others and will pick up new tools quickly. Those outside of this camp may struggle and feel ill-equipped to cope with new technology, especially if they have become accustomed to doing things a certain way. You will need all your people on the same page and performing at the right level and may need to invest time and money to get there. It is important to not let these employees struggle in silence. You therefore need to develop a culture of open communication wherein everyone feels encouraged to speak and feels reassured that they are heard. Conducting check-ins with both managers and their direct reports can help the leadership team—especially the HRD or Chief People Officer (CPO)—to gauge where issues lie and where intervention is needed. It will also be crucial to provide necessary training for new tools, whether that be conducted in-house or externally.

Securing Necessary Skillsets

The C-Suite must be strategic about how they develop the necessary skills for successfully deploying AI and using it in practice. A lot of this will fall on the HRD and CPO, but each member of the C-Suite should be just as concerned and involved. Again, training will be necessary as AI skills will not just manifest on their own. The leadership team will need to decide the best approach for themselves, their people and budgets. In some cases, it may make sense to conduct in-house training led in collaboration with the Technology function and HR. It may also be of value to bring in outside experts such as vendors or consultants. You may need to conduct not only technical training, but also offer coaching to help create new mindsets conducive to supporting cultures of change. In other cases, it may make more sense to fund and encourage individuals  to pursue their own upskilling and continuous learning development outside of the organisation. While this lifts the burden of having to organise training in-house, it offers less control. You may not be able to ensure that all of your people are developing the essential skills and covering the necessary bases. The C-Suite will need to seriously consider which option best suits their needs and shape their upskilling programmes accordingly.

You may also consider introducing necessary skills through recruitment. This is a strong option for securing more specialised skillsets that might be costly or time consuming to cultivate with existing team members. Depending on your needs, you may want to secure a full-time employee for this, or may find that a temporary contractor will suffice. However, given the ongoing skills shortage and fierce competition for qualified candidates, businesses should be prepared to face difficulties in securing the talent they need. The leadership team will need to consider their value proposition for new hires. Gaining an understanding of what today’s professionals expect from their employers can help to both attract and retain valuable talent. The C-Suite may need to reshape their hybrid work policies, employee benefits packages, and overall corporate culture.

While the AI landscape is fast-developing and ever-changing, adopting it successfully does not need to be difficult. If the C-Suite is willing to invest time and effort into their own learning whilst building the right physical and emotional infrastructures, the organisation is more likely to reap technology’s business value with minimal disruption.

To get started, explore our upcoming AI-focused webinars.

If you are looking to build cultures of change within your organisation or further your own Leadership Development, we can help. Get in touch with us to discuss our Business Transformation services.

With the new financial year about to begin, businesses will be confirming their budgets and determining where to spend and where to save. As we predicted at the start of the calendar year, talent is a top priority for businesses as they aim to ensure they have the right skills in the right roles and the right leaders at the helm. However, ongoing disruption in the market will continue to make this a challenging feat.

CEO turnover is at its highest levels in 20 years, with an average tenure of around 5 years. Coupled with the mass exodus of over 50s from the workforce, businesses are having to fill gaps more frequently and reassess what qualities they need at the senior level. Succession planning is a smart move for preventing productivity losses, negative impacts on the bottom line, and a never-ending cycle of turnover. Yet, only 35% of organisations have a formalised succession planning process for critical roles and the majority of leaders will fail shortly after ascending to a new position.

If you want to be seen as a successor or are appointed as the successor to a key role, what must you consider and how can you succeed? From a business perspective, what should you factor in when considering which individuals to appoint to ensure a smooth transition? Our Rialto Executive Career Coaches have compiled their top areas for consideration to help deliver an effective succession plan.

Effective Succession Planning: Business Considerations

Succession planning looks at the business through a long-term lens with the understanding that certain senior executives in business-critical positions may leave or retire at any point. You may know when that will be, or you may not. However, recognising the potential of individual talent who might take on the challenges of these roles, investing in their development in advance, and having a plan for the role they subsequently leave behind can ensure a smoother transition of power and minimise business disruption.

Appointing a successor from within the organisation holds several advantages including demonstrating to your staff that the business values its employees. There is also a smaller learning curve and shorter onboarding time when a ‘candidate’ is already familiar with the business, and therefore these moves can be made much quicker without having to advertise, extensively interview, and screen for the position. In succession planning, you will likely already have an eye on specific candidates who will have already proven themselves, making it much easier to act with agility when the organisation needs to pivot. An internal candidate will also already have relationships with the team and the business’s partners, making it easier to generate support and buy-in.

It is therefore understandable why this is a common practice at the senior level. Many CEOs will have been appointed to the top chair from the CFO/FD or COO role. Other C-Suite executives may have previously held VP, Director, or other senior-level titles in their department or a specific geography the business operates in. Others will have worked their way to the top after climbing the level from the junior level. There is no one clear path to any specific senior role, and a business would limit itself by only considering specific positions as ‘feeders’ for other higher-level roles. What is more valuable for ensuring success is that whoever you appoint will have the proper support from the business throughout the transition.

For those looking to grow and identify a succession pipeline, we would advise you to not only have a view of the long-term vision of the organisation but also an understanding of your wider market and competitors. Openness to diversity and links to any wider talent management practices in the organisation will also provide an advantage. Our experts advise you to consider the following:

• What Worked Previously May Not Work Now: It is an easy trap to fall into when succession planning to appoint the most similar person to the executive who previously held the role. While keeping the status quo may be comfortable for the team during a transition of power, it may not be the most beneficial for the business. Succeeding a leader is an opportunity to bring in fresh perspectives, ways of working, or leadership styles. When considering who the right internal candidate for a leadership role might be, do not overlook those who do not resemble others who held the position historically. Instead, assess the current and future needs of the business, the challenges it faces, and priorities moving forward before assessing who may be well placed to navigate these factors.
• Expect Push Back: As any HRD can attest, it is impossible to please every employee all the time and every decision will have its naysayers. When you promote an internal candidate to a key role, there will always be others who felt they deserved it more and who are vocal about that opinion. Others will be apprehensive about change or may doubt the appointed executive’s suitability, and these individuals may resist or challenge the authority of the new leader as a result. It would be unwise to expect that every transition will be smooth, and everyone will be excited and onboard. By anticipating these biases within the organisational politics, you will be much better placed for overcoming them. Ensure you are clearly and effectively communicating why a specific individual was chosen for the role, what characteristics they possess, and how this appointment serves the bigger picture for the business. Shut down any negative talk with clear points on why the decision was made and stand firm in your choice.
• Communicate Carefully: Of course, how you communicate the succession of a senior role matters to more than just the naysayers. You need to consider how you position this appointment both internally and externally. How you communicate your points will change by audience. Internally, you will need to consider framing the announcement in a way that generates buy in and trust within the team and makes resistance of authority less likely. You will also need to consider that you are not just speaking directly to that new leader’s team, department, or direct reports. When communicating internally, consider how your message will be perceived by the rest of the leadership team and those in other teams or departments that will have to interact with or collaborate with this new leader. What would they want to know? What would get them excited to have this person in this role even though it has no direct impact on their own role? Externally, your mission is less about generating buy in than it is about inspiring confidence that the organisation is being led in the right direction. How you communicate this and what you might choose to focus on will vary. Your shareholders or other various stakeholders will be primarily focused on the safety of their investments or partnerships, while your customers will want to know what this means for your products or services. Ensure you are framing all messages in third party media, social media, the company website, emails, and beyond to hit the points your external audiences will be most concerned about.
• Factor in Skills: Succession planning is about so much more than filling open seats or promoting your talent. It’s about ensuring you have the right skills in the right positions to pilot the business into the future. When succession planning, be sure to factor in what capabilities you will need on hand. Is there someone you can appoint who already has those skills? Should you consider ‘training up’ an otherwise ideal candidate to make sure they have a well-rounded skillset when they ascend to the role? These are all important considerations for ensuring agility and viability in the future of work.

Succession Planning- Preparing for your next step up

While companies look to build their talent pipeline of candidates who could step into the shoes of key roles, individual senior executives need to consider what this might mean for their own career trajectory and adequately prepare. In fact, this preparation can make or break one’s success in their new position. Research estimates that 50% to 70% of executives fail within 18 months of taking on a role, with about 3% of those executives “failing spectacularly” while nearly 50% “quietly struggle.”

Preparing for the next role you’d like to have while still in your current position can help you succeed once you ascend. In an ideal scenario, you would be notified well in advance that you are next in line to take over, train under the sitting executive, and have all the necessary support you need to move into the role. In the current business climate of ongoing disruption, the ideal scenario may not be the reality. You may not have the necessary onboarding you desire, and therefore need to take the reins of your career into your own hands.

Our Rialto Executive Career Coaches advise senior executives preparing to ascend to the next level to consider the following:

• Know Yourself: Many of the executives who fail shortly after taking on a role do so because they are not adequately prepared for leadership. We can at times become so busy that we neglect to think about who we are, what type of leader we want to be, what legacy we want to leave. This can lead to misalignment in a role, imposter syndrome, and mistrust from key stakeholders among other issues. Who are you professionally? What do you stand for? What will you do, and what will you not do? What approach do you prefer to take? What do you want out of your career, and what is the best way of achieving that? Knowing who you are as a leader and carrying yourself appropriately will help position you as a potential candidate for succession and help others visualise what you would bring to the role.
• Know Your Stakeholders: When considering how you want others to perceive you, you must also consider who it is you need to influence. Who are the key stakeholders both above you and below you that you need to gain the support of? Who are the key decision makers for all succession-related activity? What is your relationship to the individual you aspire to replace someday? Forging strong relationships now can prove beneficial later as you will ascend to the new role with an existing network of support and trust among your peers. Knowing how these various stakeholder groups are influenced will enable you to build that support by meeting people where they are. Learn all you can from these individuals and bring it into your new role to maximise the impact you are able to deliver.
• Comparison Kills Confidence: Just as HRDs and the business need to avoid appointing carbon copies of past leaders, you need to be your own person in your new role. It can at times be easy to compare yourself to the executive before you or to your peers who might have also been considered for the role. Sometimes, it may not even be your internal voice making the comparison. If you are replacing someone who was much beloved, others may be very vocal about how you measure up. If you are replacing someone others were not as fond of, the bar for comparison may be set so low that it becomes easy to get away with giving less. At the end of the day, there was a reason why you were the person chosen for the job and you need to trust in that decision regardless of what your thoughts or your peers have to say about it. The only person you should be benchmarking against is yourself. Are you delivering on your promises? Are you living out your values? Are you making as big of an impact as you could be? No two leaders are the same. Focus on carving your own path and creating your own legacy instead of stepping into the shoes of your predecessor.
• Be Prepared to Navigate Organisational Politics: The challenges of organisational politics will not just impact HRDs or the other decision makers involved with succession choices. Navigating hurt feelings, dissent, and doubt is an unspoken responsibility of taking on a senior role. There will likely be someone who thinks they could do the job better than you, and they may choose to be vocal about that belief. You may also have others who lack respect for your new authority, let your existing relationship impact what they believe they can get away with, or doubt your ability to deliver on objectives. These may seem like such small incidents, but they can make it difficult to adjust to the new role or cause unnecessary distraction. Do your best to keep your head above the noise and focus on the work at hand. Proving yourself in the role is the best way to shut down any naysayers and demonstrate that you were the right person for the job.
• It’s More Than a Promotion: Succession is not simply a promotion and will require a fair amount of career development activity on your part. Most succession planning is focussed at a senior level where executives will be succeeding into C-suite or Board-level positions, which come with other various reputational and strategic considerations. Appointing new members of top leadership enables the organisation to pilot itself into the future with the right people at the helm. What might that future look like, and what role do you intend to play in it? Do you have the right skills? It may be that taking over a role through succession requires reskilling or upskilling on your part to satisfy the organisation’s needs. Are you prepared for the internal and external pressures of the role? Your new role may require you to be more visible in your industry or the wider market. Is your personal brand reflective of who you are professionally and how you would like to be perceived? Understanding that this is more than just taking the next step in your career and preparing adequately will help position you as a stronger candidate for a desirable role and help you succeed once you get there.

If you are a senior executive seeking to grow your career, reach the next level and make a game changing career move, our Executive Career Coaches can help. Get in touch with our team to discuss our bespoke executive transition and career coaching services.

The theme for International Women’s Day 2023 was to ‘Embrace Equity,’ which calls for discussions about why equal opportunities are not enough to reach true gender parity. Rialto Executive Career Coaches have been reviewing the changes that have taken place since our previous blog exploring the idea of a ‘glass ceiling’ that hinders female leaders from progressing beyond a certain point.

What was once criticised as a ‘tick box exercise’ has continued to evolve as a critical business priority. Beyond simply being ‘the right thing to do,’ businesses have come to appreciate that championing equality in leadership can only make an organisation stronger and more resilient. Introducing voices and perspectives that differ from one another contributes to more agile and informed decision making. It’s no wonder why so many businesses are appointing female senior executives to key leadership positions.

Despite this progress, accomplished female executive continue to seek support from our Executive Career Coaches to navigate the challenges and limitations that persists in the form of the glass ceiling effect. With barriers continuing to exist as they progress into senior leadership positions, how can individuals break through? How can businesses aim to remove these invisible barriers? Where do we stand, and where do we go from here?

Progress, But Not Yet Perfect

The past several years have seen major progress in terms of gender equity, especially at the senior level. In fact, the annual FTSE Women Leaders Review found that 40.2% of directors at the UK’s largest listed companies were women in 2022, surpassing the voluntary threshold set for 2025 three years ahead of schedule. This figure is just over four times higher than it was in 2011 when it stood at a mere 9.5%

In the FTSE 100, female representation on boards stands at 40.5%, a marginal increase on 39.1% in 2021. This equates to 431 of 1063 directorships being held by women. Only seven of the UK’s top 100 companies fall short of the previous 33% target.

64 companies have at least one woman in the key roles of Chair, SID, CEO or FD, while a further four companies have women holding three out of those four positions. In 2022, 48% of board appointments for FTSE 100 companies went to women and 23% of FD roles in these companies are held by women. But only nine CEO roles are held by women at this level.

What we have viewed is that representation of female executives overall at the FTSE 100 level continues to improve, with 23 companies already meeting the 40% women Executives target and a further 31 companies meeting the previous 33% target. In terms of female executives’ functional roles in the FTSE 100, their lowest representation is as CIO (21%) and their highest is as Human Resources Director (69%).

Today, women occupy two out of five board seats in the FTSE 350, with almost a fifth of FTSE 350 boards having a woman chair despite there being only 21 female chief executives across the main listed markets. Across the FTSE 350, 1,202 of the 3,000 board seats and 6,660 of the 20,000 leadership roles were held by women in 2022. The Review also found that the number of all-male executive committees in the FTSE 350 fell to 10 in 2022 from 54 in 2017, but female representation in these committees stands at just 27% and could still be further improved.

The 2022 Review included data on the UK’s top 50 private companies for the first time. This data revealed that in these companies, the proportion of women on boards averages at about 31%. A third of these companies reported that more than 40% of directors were women, while more than half reported female representation that is well below the average. Of the top 50 private UK companies, 19 had boards that were either all male or included just one female director. In the top 50 private companies, the figure for women’s representation on executive committees and direct reports stood at 34.3%.

Because the way top level management is structured in private companies sometimes differs from the leadership structure of publicly listed organisations, it is difficult to truly compare progress. Looking at the data, it is clearly apparent that the UK has made excellent strides in both private and public company leadership, but there is still some way to go before true gender equity is reached.

Parity is yet to be reached in terms of payment as well. According to Government data, 2022 UK gender pay gap had an average 5.45% and a median of 9.71%. In monetary terms, the average hourly difference in ordinary pay is £1.44 compared to £1.48 in 2021 and the median hourly difference is £2.41 (£2.68 the previous year). Again, small improvements are occurring year on year, but we are still shy of true equality.

Executive Transition Top Challenges

Despite this progress, something still stands in the way of true gender equality at the senior level. From speaking with our female clients looking for their next executive career transition, our Executive Career Coaches have shared some of the top barriers they continue to identify today:

• Unconscious Bias: We all have biases. The ones we are not consciously aware of can often be more detrimental than the ones we know we have. These biases are developed throughout life as we are shaped by our family, environment, peers, culture, education, society, and more. These beliefs may not reflect truth, but influence how we view the world and our place in it. Sometimes, that can bleed into our professional lives with detrimental effects.

For example, what we feel may be anecdotal office humour can actually be the reflection and perpetuation of harmful, long-held ideas that hinder true progress. One such ‘stereotype’ is the idea of female bosses as cold, calculated, or downright mean. This characterisation is rooted in deep-seated biases held by both genders to feel that success is tied to ‘male’ qualities. Because the top has been male dominated for so long, many female executives unconsciously believe they must take on more masculine traits and behaviours to be accepted and to succeed. Their male counterparts expect this of them, but this expectation is also in conflict with their perception of femininity and what a woman ‘should’ act like. Whether realised or not, these biases held by both parties have a detrimental effect on the decisions involved with appointing senior executives to key leadership positions. These biases may lead women to adapt their management style in an ineffective way or create doubt among the men involved in the hiring process about appointing a woman to a key role.

• Imposter Syndrome: Of course, these biases and a lack of representation in general can lead to other adverse outcomes such as imposter syndrome. These nagging, deep-rooted beliefs may hinder female executives’ progress by making them question themselves unnecessarily. Our Executive Career Coaches regularly tackle this issue with both male and female senior executives, but the latter group are more likely to experience imposter syndrome related setbacks. A lack of representation and unconscious ideas about success and leadership may prevent well-equipped women from aiming for roles they are qualified and suited for or may shake their confidence once they ascend to these roles.
• Misunderstanding of ‘Equality’: Gender parity does not necessarily mean treating women and men the exact same at work. As discussed, our societally shaped beliefs of masculinity and femininity and what success has historically looked like can potentially have negative effects on who we put in leadership positions and what sorts of traits and behaviours we accept from them. Gender equality does not mean expecting women to mimic the behaviours and actions of their male counterparts when appointed to senior leadership. True gender equality will involve reshaping culture to support and celebrate everyone’s unique contributions and attributes whilst also introducing structures and practices that support both sexes equally. This will likely involve having to overcome some of the barriers still present in wider society. For example, women continue to bear a heavier burden when it comes to balancing work and family, despite progress in recent decades to bring about gender equality in the workplace. We also found that younger female leaders who have become mothers are still among the most likely to say that being a working parent makes it harder for them to get ahead in their career. For true equality to exist, this can no longer be the case.
• The Tech Barrier: Recently, an increasing number of organisations have been implementing artificial intelligence (AI) tools to their recruitment processes. While these technologies are not inherently biased, they are trained by humans who inherently possess bias and are trained on datasets that may perpetuate negative outcomes. With these tools, what you put in is what you get out. In some cases, recruiting talent this way can help to remove human bias from the equation by blindly evaluating candidates on their suitability for the role alone. In other cases, these algorithms and tools can exacerbate existing problems in the organisation. For example, if a company trains their AI to identify suitable candidates based on their existing and historical workforce, the AI will use those parameters to assess the CVs it is fed. If that company has been historically male dominated or has hired people from specific ethnicities, geographical areas, educational backgrounds, and so on, the AI has been trained to find more of the same. If not overseen properly, this can lead to excellent candidates being overlooked and a perpetuation of the organisation’s lack of diversity. It is critical to keep a human in the loop for this process and to keep this possibility for bias in mind if using AI for hiring purposes.

Advice from our Executive Coaches

Overcoming the barriers to break through the ‘glass ceiling’ phenomenon requires businesses and individuals to work jointly together. For both groups, our Executive Career Coaches advise the following:

• Challenge Yourself and Others: Most of our biases are unconscious, but that does not mean they do not manifest themselves in our everyday lives. If you find this happening to you, it is essential to nip it in the bud when you become conscious of it. Question if you truly believe it, and where that belief may stem from. Now that you have identified that you have this bias or belief, you can consciously work towards remedying it. At the same time, we need to hold our peers accountable, both male and female. If ever you pick up on something from someone else, discuss it with them in private. Have the hard conversations. That is the only way we are going to improve. From an organisational standpoint, intentional action and education are the paths forward. Revisit your D&I initiatives. Are they meeting expectations and generating real impact, or has the business been simply treating these as tick box exercises? Is there anything you could be doing better to bolster different groups? It is also wise to revisit your training efforts to ensure they reflect the right ideals. Offer training on unconscious biases to help your people identify and address them.
• Create Cultures of Equity: Training individuals to reflect, improve, and become more inclusive can help to create an overall culture of awareness and equality. Organisations and their people should aim to create an environment that recognises and celebrates the differences among its members, and the reassurance that all are empowered to succeed. When all employees are encouraged to be their best selves and reach their full potential, it’s not just good for women or people of colour. It’s good for business. Encourage communication and collaboration, but most of all, ensure everyone feels heard.

Those operating in the C-suite or at senior level often have cultures of their own, where informal networks are critical for gaining influence and forging bonds. Camaraderie can sometimes be formed through hobbies or activities outside of work which can lead to those who have other responsibilities or interests being excluded.  These networks are important for communication and decision making, but at times can ostracise those on the outside. As these networks are embedded deeply into business life, eliminating them altogether is unrealistic. Instead, the aim should be to evolve the culture of the leadership team. These networks can continue to exist so long as they do not create communication silos between those on the inside and those outside. Ensure all parties are kept informed and encouraged to speak openly and honestly with one another. It is important that these discussions flow across all forms of communication. You do not need to be friends with your colleagues outside of work, but it is important not to let those friendships get in the way of how you collaborate with one another. A successful leadership team is one where everyone feels comfortable and equally empowered to speak their mind honestly and transparently without fear of retribution, regardless of their gender or any other factor.

• Embrace Flexibility: Hybrid working models have become the norm for many companies and embracing more flexibility can help promote better parity amongst men and women in the organisation. Increased flexibility can help improve work life balance, and ease some of the additional pressures placed on female employees. For example, allowing hybrid or flexible working schedules to suit the needs of both male and female staff with children can help keep women in the workforce instead of forcing one parent out to bear the responsibilities of childcare and parenthood on their own. In addition to maternity leave, consider offering comparable paternity leave to male employees, affording them the same opportunity to bond with their new family members and support their partners. But also understand that staff with children are not the only ones entitled to flexibility. True equality in your organisation will involve enabling access to privileges for all your staff regardless of their situation. Just as you offer flexibility to your staff to be with their children, encourage your childfree staff to take time out for their hobbies, relationships, and wellbeing to prevent burnout. Greater work life balance has become a major priority for younger staff of both genders, and your ability to deliver on this now will help shape and strengthen your future workforce.

Despite some great progress over the past year, the glass ceiling continues to be a reality for many female executives. But equally, each person has the power to break through. With the right mindset, support, and a little creativity, there are ways to feel empowered, identify solutions, and pave a path to success.

If you would like to arrange a confidential discussion to explore how our Executive Coaching, Executive Transition or Executive Outplacement support could help you to maintain your career trajectory, speak to our team on +44 (0)20 3746 2960 or contact us via email at info@rialtoconsultancy.com

The C-suite has always faced the challenge of having to simultaneously run tomorrow’s race while also competing in today’s marathon, but that challenge has become even more difficult in recent years. Ongoing uncertainty and disruption has called for bolder, more assertive, and purposeful transformational leadership guided by well-executed strategy.

As part of our ongoing Executive Transition research, we have found that organisations are appointing a Chief Operating Officer to drive growth, boost organisational resilience, and generate value. As of 2022, 40% of leading companies had this role as part of their leadership team. The remit of this position has never been easy to nail down, and the role of the COO can be the most variable of the C-suite. As the world of work has evolved, so has the expectations of those in these positions to become catalysts for business impact.

While their title implies a strong foundation in operations, areas such as supply chain and customer satisfaction are equally of importance as the role of the modern and future COO will require much more diverse and well-rounded enterprise capabilities. Often considered to be the right hand of the CEO, the COO must pair their strategic and day-to-day operational capabilities with high-level relationship management, customer and stakeholder engagement. Rather than being a specialist in a specific capability, success in the role requires the executive to instead become a specialist of the business itself to become a driver and facilitator of its growth.

Here are some of the top skills required to be successful in the role for the foreseeable future, challenges faced, and factors to keep in mind if a COO role is your objective when undergoing an executive transition.

COO Snapshot

When working with our Executive Outplacement clients, we often encourage them to use LinkedIn to benchmark themselves against other candidates and to get a feel for the marketplace. A LinkedIn search for profiles in the UK with a current title of “Chief Operating Officer” yields approximately 15,000 results. While there is not much data available on the demographics of these executives, data from the US can help to paint the picture. In the US, COOs are predominantly male (76.6%) with an average age of 51 years old. The majority (89%) of these COOs are older than 40 years old, while the further 11% are between 30 and 40 years old. The COO role is found in businesses of all sizes, with most COOs representing mid-sized organisations with 50-500 employees (43%) or large organisations with more than 10,000 employees (21%).

As for tenure, the data shows that approximately one third (33%) of COOs will hold the role for just 1-2 years. 18% will have a tenure of 3-4 years, and a further 18% will have the title for 5-7 years. It is not entirely uncommon to hold the role for longer stretches of time, as 11% of COOs have a tenure of 11+ years.

According to Glassdoor, the average UK base pay for a Chief Operating Officer is approximately £111,000 per year. However, pay scales for the role range from £59,000 and £211,000. The average additional cash compensation for COOs in the UK is £40,000. Of course, the financial reward for the role will vary by region, industry, and size of the business. Those currently in the role might find that moving company is their best option for increasing their earning potential.

Top COO Skills

The role of the Chief Operating Officer has become increasingly important in recent years, but rarely do these positions have a clear job description. Because their remit is so varied, a COO’s skillset is arguably the most versatile of anyone else the C-suite apart from the Chief Executive. Some of the most valuable characteristics of successful COOs include:

• Broad enterprise capabilities: Unlike the CFO, CTO, or CMO who represent specific functions and must be experts in their respective areas, the COO needs to be a generalist. While many will rise to this role from a more specialised background in finance or supply chain, a COO’s day-to-day means that they need to have an understanding of all areas of the business. An organisation is the sum of its parts, and it falls on the COO to ensure all those parts are moving seamlessly together to reach targets and deliver on strategic objectives. The COO needs to have enough understanding of how those different parts function to spot inefficiencies and remedy them. Having to oversee the organisation’s complexity provides a broad viewpoint and deep enterprise insight that can be beneficial for success as a COO, and especially beneficial to those ascending to CEO later. The most effective COOs are those with strong, well-rounded strategic, CX, operational, people, and commercial capabilities rather than narrower expertise in one or two of these areas.
• Adaptability: Due to having to wear many different hats on any given day, adaptability is critical for success in this role. Because the modern COO role comes with so many different mandates and responsibilities, it is rarely defined. This lack of a structured remit requires those in these positions to encourage their teams to pivot quickly and often, and encouraging the right culture and effective operations to do so is a crucial attribute. If this capability is not inherent, this would be an ideal area of focus for personal development. COOs need to keep their finger on the pulse of the business, their industry, and the marketplace at large. While it won’t be possible to predict every bump in the road, becoming more adaptable will help COOs become better at anticipating changes as they crop up.
• Execution and Delivery: Because so much of the organisation’s strategic mandate flows through the COO, it is crucial for these executives to be inclined towards action. Being able to identify organisational inefficiencies, develop strategies to remedy them, and enacting those plans with desirable outcomes is the true measure of success in this role. Are you able to see the business from multiple stakeholder views, and do what needs to be done to innovate and create improvements? Do you have what it takes to both create the vision and lead others to bring it to fruition?
• Relationship Management: A COO’s ability to deliver goes a long way for instilling trust and credibility among stakeholder audiences, which is a critical task for any executive in this role to accomplish. Among the C-suite, the COO’s visibility in the organisation is one of the highest. With their hands in so many different areas of the business, COOs are constantly having to navigate different audiences and perspectives. The COO needs to juggle their relationships with the rest of the C-Suite and Board, other senior-level leadership, staff further down in the business, customers, investors, and suppliers. Each of these audiences will have different needs, priorities, and insights. Therefore, having a high emotional quotient makes it much easier to forge and maintain strong support among all the groups you vacillate between on a regular basis. Being willing to listen to these differing perspectives will help you inform your own strategy, and your abilities as a communicator will be crucial for expressing your plans and objectives to your various audiences and getting them on board.

Top Market Challenges Impacting COOs

The skills above will be critically important as COOs attempt to navigate the challenges of the current business landscape. Some of the top factors that these executives should be aware of are:

• Short-term Firefighting: When was the last time your organisation could rely on a five- or ten-year strategic plan? Surely it has been a while. In recent years, COOs and the rest of the C-suite have been faced with having to deliver on strategic objectives while battling near constant interruptions. The unexpected pandemic and its resulting aftershock of difficulties added more challenges to the C-suite’s already full plate, so understandably, dedicating energy to putting out urgent fires has taken the focus away from longer term planning or adhering to big picture goals. The COO role is highly strategic in nature, and executives in this position need to keep one foot in the present and the other stepping forward towards the future. Getting wrapped up in delivering impact in the short-term creates the risk of this becoming a cycle. While this might be good for in the moment agility, the business’s future competitive edge is at stake.
• People and Resources: It is no secret that this is a tough time for the jobs market and for the global economy. These challenges have trickled into many businesses, leading to tough staffing decisions, cutbacks, organisational restructuring, and reprioritisation. Even those businesses who are looking to grow are facing hardships with attracting and retaining talent with the right skills and capabilities. Lack of people and fiscal resources presents major operational difficulties that many COOs will be tasked with finding solutions to. For the foreseeable future, COOs should anticipate being tasked with having to do more with less and be very strategic about their resource allocation.
• ESG and CSR: But internal resources are not the only resources COOs and their stakeholder audiences are worried about. Sustainability has become a major area of focus for both businesses and their customers, with many organisations introducing carbon reduction initiatives and committing to net zero targets. Therefore, incorporating ESG into company strategy has become an essential expectation for the COO and the rest of the C-suite. However, it is not enough to simply set targets. The organisation needs to be able to ‘walk the talk.’ The business’s efforts must be perceived as genuine and be supported by real action. It will fall on the COO to help determine what targets are most achievable for the business, and to help generate the necessary internal support.
• Digital Transformation and Cyber Threats: The current wave of digital transformation presents an opportunity for businesses to become more agile, efficient, and competitive through the adoption of advanced technologies. But with increased reliance on technology comes increased cybersecurity risks, which of course threatens a business’s operations. COOs are having to keep these threats in mind as they help shape the organisation’s digital transformation plans and wider strategy.

Top Priorities

Given these challenges, current and aspiring Chief Operating Officers should focus their attention on these key areas:

• Supporting the CEO: We have spoken at length about the difficulties and pressures facing CEOs, and oftentimes, COOs are appointed to help support or drive CEO performance. This may take one of two forms. The first option is for the COO to take on a complimentary role to the CEO, possessing opposing traits and characteristics that offer different perspectives, insights, and ways of working that lead to better outcomes. Alternatively, they may take on a partner role and be viewed as another version of the CEO, lending support to their ideas and sharing in their vision. Regardless of which form is taken, it is an unspoken understanding that the COO is there to drive performance at the top. This may involve challenging the CEO to think differently or taking on some of the burden to alleviate their pressures. The relationship between these two senior roles is one of the most crucial in the business and has the potential to make or break the organisation’s effectiveness.

Others will enter the COO role as the heir apparent to the CEO, appointed with the expectation and understanding that they will one day be at the helm. Historically, the COO role was the primary steppingstone to the top job, with 76% of new CEOs in the early 2000s having started as a COO. Today, COO is still the most common starting point for CEOs but to a lesser extent, with nearly 27% of CEOs in Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies promoted from the COO role in 2021. Comparatively, only 8% of CEO promotions in 2022 were from the CFO position. It would be naïve to enter the COO position without potential succession in mind, and therefore executives in these roles or aspiring to them should make the most of the time they spend in this position. Learn all you can about the business and its people. Increase your visibility and support so that when the time comes for you to ascend to the CEO spot, you can dedicate less time to generating buy-in and building your credibility. Of course, you need to ensure you are not so wrapped up in your next role that you neglect your responsibilities as COO. The COOs who tend to overperform in the Chief Executive role later are those who draw on the experience and knowledge they gained through shaping and delivering operational excellence.

• Strengthening Strategic Relationships: However, it is not just their relationship with the CEO that Chief Operating Officers need to be mindful and protective of. As mentioned, COOs operate throughout the business and therefore must navigate a wide range of internal and external audiences. The COO needs to be able to cooperate with the rest of the C-suite and the Board, work effectively with senior leadership, instil confidence in investors, generate buy-in from the rest of the organisation’s staff, and demonstrate value to customers and partners. One of the most important strategic relationships the COO is tasked with nurturing, however, is that with the organisation’s suppliers. The past few years have been incredibly disruptive at the operations and supply chain level, and new and reliable suppliers can be hard to come by. In PwC’s latest COO Pulse Survey, 57% of responding COOs reported building closer relationships with suppliers is very important to transforming their business operations. As a result, executives at this level need to be thinking more strategically about how their relationships can be leveraged to improve stability, increase quality, and optimise pricing. Fostering fruitful partnerships will be critical, but today’s COO’s need to be willing and able to cut ties as needed to better serve the business. An ability to effectively judge your relationships will serve you well in the role.
• Strategic Workforce Management: Of course, the Chief Operating Officer’s strategic vision is null without the right people in place to enact it. Hiring has been a challenge for businesses across industries since the onset of the pandemic, but COO’s personnel interests are less about getting bodies through the door and more about getting the right talent in the right positions. Having highly skilled talent can make the business leaner without sacrificing on efficiency. The right talent is worth more than having a broad workforce that does not necessarily deliver at the desired level. As businesses restructure and rethink their personnel priorities, COOs should champion quality over quantity to make the most of the organisation’s resources.
• Doubling Down on Digital: Investing in new technology will help with this as well. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a major area of interest for COOs in recent years due to the productivity benefits it can produce without increasing workloads. Automation is nearly always a wise investment from an operations standpoint by helping to streamline, predict, and execute. After much resistance, businesses and their C-suites have begun embracing new technologies rapidly. COOs have no choice but to get on board with digital transformation and champion it in their strategy. Coming to grips with this technology makes it possible to plan for it more effectively. Current and aspiring COOs should dedicate the time to researching macro trends and sharpening their own digital capabilities to deliver long term value.

If you are a current Chief Operating Officer looking for your next executive role, or an executive looking to transition into a COO role, we can help. The Rialto Consultancy offers a range of career strategy services including Executive Outplacement, Executive Career Coaching, and Personal Branding. Get in touch with our team to discuss your options to make a game changing transformational career move.

When was the last time you actively sought out a new contact at a conference, or sent a LinkedIn request to someone beyond your second degree of connection? If you are like many senior executives, it has likely been a while. Data from McKinsey shows that only 14% of professionals have grown their networks since 2020, while less than 50% reported making any effort to do so.

The vast majority of executives spend their career lifecycle in closed networks. This shouldn’t come as a surprise when you consider that many professionals remain in the same sectors and industries for their entire career. Those who have reached the senior level will have spent many years occupying the same spaces, attending the same events, and engaging in the same conversations with the same groups. The higher you climb to the top, the thinner the population gets and the more likely it becomes that senior executives already know each other.

For senior leaders, the C-suite, and members of the board, being closed off and not actively growing the scope of their network can lead to a major reduction in their career value and lost opportunities. It also does not align with the more agile demands of modern leadership. Today’s executives must be adaptable, curious, and keen to evolve in the wake of ongoing disruption. These behaviours can be stimulated and enhanced by exposure to more open and vibrant networks.

In this first instalment of our networking series, we are exploring the ways in which executives in senior, C-suite, or Board level roles can extend and leverage their networks both during an executive job search and for success in their existing position.

Why Network?

In business, there exists a popular adage that states, “It’s all about who you know.” This idea provides the entire basis for networking as a practice. The people you meet, attend school with, and work with through the years play a part in your professional past, and those relationships may prove beneficial in the future even after your paths have diverged. Fostering these relationships over time can help generate referrals, retain valuable partnerships, and build your reputation in your industry and beyond. You can tap into the wisdom, experience, and insight of your trusted peers for your own personal growth. You can also leverage your relationships when venturing into a new geographic or business area for your organisation, or if you plan to make a career change.

While who you know matters, it is equally important who knows you. When you are sharing your thought leadership on LinkedIn, who is seeing that content? When you attend conferences or industry events, who is walking away with your card or contact details? When your business is on the verge of securing a new partnership or revenue stream, or is facing a crisis of public opinion, is your reputation as a leader enough to instil confidence?

The further your reach extends among the right audiences, the more value your name holds. This increases your credibility in the marketplace and your notoriety. By getting out there and getting in front of the right people, your name is on people’s minds when relevant opportunities arise or in conversations related to your areas of thought leadership. The people who know you can carry you even further to the people they know, potentially leading to partnerships or beneficial new contacts. And if you have really strengthened your name recognition and reputation amongst your stakeholder audiences, then your sheer presence on the board alone can reflect positively for your organisation in others’ minds.

There is so much value to this practice for both businesses and individuals to reap, but how should senior executives think about their networking activity to drive their own impact?

Using Networking to Your Advantage

For senior leaders, the C-suite, and members of the Board, networking will have different objectives than it might for someone looking to climb the ladder. Executives at this level will be looking to take that final step up to the top, build their professional reputation, establish thought leadership, take on higher impact Executive or NED roles and other similar opportunities, or make a lateral move to a different organisation. Therefore, the way they navigate their networking activities will differ. Even so, networking at the senior or board level can be narrowed down to four core activities:

• Benchmarking: One of the most valuable yet most overlooked aspects of networking is its power as a research tool. Interacting with other senior executives both in your industry and beyond it is a great way to get a feel for how your skills, experience, and capabilities compare to others at your level. Are there any capabilities that you lack that you should work on developing? Is there something unique that you bring to the table that sets you apart from your peers? Are there trends in the market you might have overlooked or gave too little consideration? Conversations with others in your industry can help gain insight into where things stand and where they are heading, which can help you to adequately prepare for what lies ahead for your role, job function, business, or industry.

The best way to do this is to reach beyond your immediate circle. If you limit yourself to those you are closest to, you may not gain a comprehensive view of what the senior market really looks like. Recent research from MIT, Harvard and Stanford found that weaker social connections have a greater effect on job mobility than stronger connections. Reaching out to your lesser known or secondary contacts on LinkedIn is more likely to yield opportunities than mining your close personal relationships would be. When looking to benchmark yourself in the marketplace, be sure to look beyond your immediate sphere to help paint a clearer picture of what is happening at the senior level.

• Development: That said, gaining insights from those around you can be incredibly valuable for driving your own personal development. Oftentimes, others close to us can see us more clearly than we see ourselves. Our personal biases and perceptions can cloud our judgement and prevent us from reaching our full potential. To combat this, try asking your colleagues, friends, and family to describe what they perceive as your strengths and weaknesses. Are these in line with the ideas you have about yourself, the impressions you would like to leave others with, or the professional image you would like to project? You might find areas in which others have noticed you can improve and grow, which in turn can guide where you devote time to skill building or other professional development activity.

Of course, personal growth is incredibly valuable for delivering long term value as a leader, but it can also help you solidify your value proposition for an executive job search. Many job opportunities—especially at the senior level—are secured by word of mouth and peer referrals. For many at the senior level, it will have been a while since they have been in the job market, and things will have changed pretty dramatically since then. Rather than simply fishing for leads on open positions, use networking as a means of putting feelers out in the marketplace, seeking out advice for navigating current conditions, and using feedback to drive your search efforts. If you aren’t engaging with your peer network and learning from them, you may be missing out on potential opportunities to expand your horizons and enrich your career.

• Innovation: Just as we cannot always rely on our own judgement to be an accurate barometer of our own personal strengths or of the conditions in the marketplace, sometimes it is better to branch out to find new ideas and ways of doing things. Senior leaders, the C-suite, and members of the Board are all in unique and high-pressure positions of having to deliver impact at scale and drive the business forward through every new challenge. Building a strong internal team is fundamental for delivering desired business outcomes, but sometimes leadership need to look beyond the business to gain a better understanding of the market and the needs of their customers. Getting out there and having valuable conversations with various different groups can give rise to new ideas and innovations, and can help leaders gather feedback about proposed plans and projects before committing to them.

• Sharing: You should not treat your network like a cash machine from which you only withdraw. Networking is a reciprocal practice in which you need to give as much as you take. Just as you glean insights from your network, you should be feeding back your own knowledge and advice. Being able to offer valuable contributions helps to strengthen those relationships and others’ perceptions of you as a thought leader. The more insight you can provide on particular subjects, the more you become associated with and are viewed as an expert in these areas. Then over time, it becomes more likely that others will think of you when opportunities and discussions related to these subjects arise. Not only that, but your insights and advice may benefit those you share them with and help them to progress on their own career path.

Your approach to networking and the motivation behind it will vary based on where you are in your career and where you aim to be, but it is important that you do it regardless. Treat networking as an integral part of your role as a senior executive rather than an added-on chore.  To truly reap the benefits of this useful peer-to-peer practice, treat networking as ongoing relationship building rather than a transactional exchange. You never know when you’ll need to draw on the power of your network, and it is crucial to build the necessary support and perceptions ahead of time.

For over a decade, The Rialto Consultancy has helped individuals access high-quality networks that can expose them to new thinking as well as new career and business opportunities. If you would like our help with strengthening your network and getting in front of the right audiences, explore our upcoming networking-focused Events and get in touch with our team about our Executive Coaching or Executive Transition programmes which also support to build your personal digital brand.

On average, an adult makes approximately 35,000 conscious decisions every day. Some of these choices are as simple as ‘tea or coffee,’ while others have much higher stakes. For business leaders, that number is likely much higher and many of those decisions hold much greater weight. Day-to-day, senior executives are tasked with making choices that impact their business, their people, their customers and – in certain cases – wider society.

Each individual leader will have their own approach to decision making, with some preferring to seek the advice of trusted peers while others rely on their own intuition. In fact, research has found that more than 40% of CEOs make decisions based on gut feelings. But in our increasingly digital age, businesses and their leadership have a powerful weapon in their arsenal that hold incredible value for making smarter, more effective decisions.

Understanding Data-Driven Decision Making

‘Data’ is not unique to the digital age. Before the somewhat recent wave of digitisation and the subsequent migrations to cloud storage, businesses kept physical records locked in filing cabinets or stored in boxes. These methods were not necessarily the most convenient or secure but served their purpose of telling the story of the business via facts and figures.

Data looks rather different in the digital age. With our shift towards smart devices, social media, and e-commerce, businesses today have access to more data than they realise or utilise. The volume of online activity makes it difficult to pinpoint exact figures, but estimates suggest that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created each day. Every interaction, every web search, every sale, and every activity between the organisations and its audiences creates a data trail that helps the business to gain a better grip on its standing in the marketplace and among its customers and competition.

The process of using this information to guide the business strategy and validate courses of action is commonly known as Data-Driven Decision Making (DDDM). Organisations may do this by analysing macro trends and research from credible third parties, conducting their own surveys and focus groups, or running tests to generate original insights on specific products or business challenges. These and other DDDM practices have been used for centuries. However, an innately modern phenomenon is occurring wherein an increasing number of companies have begun using advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse the wealth of digital data produced by the everyday digital activities of the business.

Combined, these methods provide deeper insights into the activities of the business, its people, and the markets in which it operates.

Why Use DDDM?

According to a PwC survey of more than 1,000 senior executives, highly data-driven organisations are three times more likely to report significant improvements in decision-making. It is easy to understand why.

In the wake of the pandemic and its aftereffects, it has become more important than ever for businesses to develop the right strategy and prioritise actions that drive impact. The challenges in the marketplace have made it imperative for leaders to make wise choices regarding their products, customer experiences, operations, personnel, suppliers, and more. However, the stresses of navigating the tumult amid pressures to deliver business impact can often cloud judgement and create space for irrationality.

Becoming data-driven can help to keep the business on track by creating a stable model for decision-making that can withstand both troubling times and ideal operating conditions. Much of its value can be attributed to the fact that data is inherently objective. At some point or other, all of us will have heard the phrase, “Numbers don’t lie.” Data offers a similar infallibility. While it is possible for biases to creep into data collection methods and taint the outcomes, overall, data lacks the subjectivity and ‘blind spot’ thinking that intuition-based and other decision-making methods possess. When collected properly, data paints a picture of the way things are rather than presenting individuals or the business through the lens of how you perceive or wish them to be. It may not always be what we want to hear, but data will tell us everything we need to know to grow and evolve.

Because of its ability to benchmark the current position of the business, data makes it possible to better understand the potential impacts of any subsequent decisions and track progress along the way. Data can lend credibility to gut instinct or help steer leaders away from paths that may not deliver the desired impact. This is crucial in times of turmoil when every decision carries extra pressure, and resources may be increasingly valuable. Data analytics and insight generation can often highlight issues that may require immediate attention, areas for improvement, develop risk metrics or potential cost savings. On their own, these insights may seem small, but can help inform a wider strategy that pilots the business towards a more favourable position.

Since data is both logical and objective, it is much easier for business leaders to become more confident in their decision making over time. This confidence will be key for generating buy-in for any strategic initiatives and earning trust for the leadership team. Staff, customers, and other stakeholders want the business to be led by leaders who have proven their competence and their ability to make good judgements. Prioritising data in decision making increases the likelihood of achieving the best possible outcomes much more often, thus increasing the credibility of the leadership team in the eyes of their audiences, as well as the leaders’ own sense of conviction.

Top DDDM Challenges

This is not always as easy as it may seem. In the most recent NewVantage Partners annual survey, which tracks the progress of corporate data initiatives, just 26.5% of organisations reported having become data driven. The biggest challenge seems to be a people issue. 91.9% of executives in the survey cited cultural obstacles as the greatest barrier to becoming data driven. Crafting a successful data culture requires shaping collective beliefs and behaviours to unite all levels and areas of the business over a shared mission to lead with insight.

As with any major organisational change, there needs to be effort invested into communicating objectives, creating alignment, and ensuring the right values and priorities are embedded into the organisation’s practices. Leaders may experience pushback or resistance and will have to work through these changes collaboratively with their people. Data is a fluid asset that flows throughout the business and transcends organisational boundaries. Therefore, it can at times become difficult to assign clear ownership to it, which increases the complexity of managing the business’s valuable information. Communication is critical for assigning responsibility and creating the necessary alignment across teams.

The nature and sheer volume of the data itself presents obstacles as well. The majority of this information is unorganised with experts predicting that by 2025, 80% of global data will be unstructured. This form of data is more difficult to analyse, quantify, and search through. Common examples include email communications, photos and videos, social media posts, websites, and open-ended survey questions. When you consider how many of these items are generated each day, the burden of data analysis becomes much heavier. That is why many businesses looking to become more data driven have begun rapidly adopting advanced technological tools that are capable of assigning meaning and gleaning insights from this mess of information.

How data is collected, managed, and shared creates a major challenge both internally and externally. Customers are not naïve to the fact that the organisations they do business with collect and use their data. Over time, consumers and businesses reached an unspoken social contract in which customers agree to surrender their data in exchange for better products, services, and experiences. But as part of this agreement, it is also expected that the business will use and store this data in a way that safeguards their customers. In recent years, we have seen companies including British Airways, Yahoo, Marriott Hotels, and various social media platforms experience major backlash when this trust is breached. We have also seen the introduction of specific laws, such as GDPR, designed to provide additional protections to consumers in the data age. Navigating the ethical and regulatory considerations of fair data use is a challenge every business needs to take very seriously.

Becoming Data-Driven

But how can leaders overcome these obstacles and put DDDM into practice successfully? At Rialto, we consult with C-suite executives, Non-Executive Directors, HR Directors, Board members, and other senior leaders on strategies to enhance their capabilities and keep pace with the evolving marketplace. Our experts are advising senior leaders to develop a greater focus on the following:

• Maintain an Open Mind: The first step to becoming more data-driven is to be willing to take it on board. Data will not always tell you what you want to hear or confirm the beliefs you may have, which can be uncomfortable. This discomfort may be especially strong for leaders who have historically relied on gut instinct in their decision making. To reap the benefits of data, you need to think of it as an ally. Leaning into your organisation’s data can make you and your business more efficient, more effective, more strategic, and more targeted than ever before.
• Take a Proactive Approach: DDDM is most often reactive in nature. An insight is presented by the data which in turns triggers a decision to either remedy it or follow in the direction it leads. While this is often fine, sometimes the insight is gleaned too late for the subsequent action to make a real impact. Therefore, leaders should aim to use data proactively to become more strategic. Data does a great job of presenting what is, but it is also very useful for assessing what could It is possible to leverage insights in a way that enable the business to test potential courses of action, predict trends, or identify budding problems before they worsen. Learning to use your data in this way will help you navigate the present while setting your organisation up for the future.
• Keep Data at Your Core: Of course, for DDDM to be effective, it needs to be consistent. Your organisation’s data needs to be at the core of all decisions, not just the larger or more strategic ones. When deciding anything, leaders should reflect on the data rather than reverting to gut instinct or previous behaviours. Make it standard practice to tie all decisions back to the data to support your thinking. Use all any data sources available whether it is your digital data, research your organisation conducts itself, or simply the latest macro trends and stats. Over time, referring to the data and applying relevance to your decision making will become a habit that can support more analytical ways of thinking.
• Understand Where DDDM is Headed: While AI and other technologies are not the only way to assess or collect data, these tools are unrivalled for the depth and efficiency they can produce. Therefore, DDDM is relying more heavily on the insights created and presented by advanced technologies. AI is capable of analysing all the organisation’s digital data constantly in real time, a feat no human worker could replicate. This technology can also process and make sense of millions of data points in a matter of seconds. It would take a human worker months of nonstop work to get through this volume of information, and by the time they finish, it is likely that the trends and market conditions will have changed. To keep abreast of ever-changing consumer habits and economic fluxes, businesses will increasingly rely on digital DDDM tactics moving forward. Understanding this now will help to prepare for this inevitable shift.
• Upskill as Needed: That said, it is critical for leaders to have the right digital capabilities for navigating the future of DDDM. Given where DDDM practices are headed, a baseline understanding of AI will be of value to any leader possessing decision-making responsibilities. To support data-driven mindsets, leaders should also look to increase their analytical thinking capabilities. Being able to make sense of patterns, spot anomalies, and derive meaning from charts and figures is a crucial aspect of becoming data forward. The ability to translate raw figures into business relevance and commercial thinking will also serve you well. Additionally, honing softer skills like communication and collaboration are crucial for creating data driven cultures. The most effective data-driven leaders are those who empower their teams to become active contributors the business’s growth. Focus on improving these areas to get the most of your DDDM activity.

If you would like support with strengthening your capabilities through Leadership Development executive coaching or creating a data-driven culture within your organisation via our Business Transformation services, please get in touch with our team.

There is no question that 2022 was yet another challenging year for businesses. Interest rates reached record-breaking levels, war broke out on European soil for the first time in decades, inflation hit a near 40 year high, and the disruptions that began in 2020 continued their ripple effects.

With a New Year ahead, the blank slate of the next 12 months presents fresh opportunity, but also holds unknown challenges. The challenges of last year did not cease to exist once the clock struck midnight, but what will they mean for us this year?

To help you prepare, we have compiled an overview of some of the latest key executive outplacement market statistics and issues to be aware of when navigating the market in Q1 2023.

Market Snapshot

Before making predictions about what lies ahead, it is important to get a sense of where the executive outplacement market currently stands. There are both positives and negatives to be found, as indicated by the latest ONS Labour Market Overview report. The estimate of employees on payroll for November 2022 showed a monthly increase of 107,000 on the previous month’s figures to a record 29.9 million, meaning employers continue to seek out full time employees with the right skills. This coincides with a decrease in the economic inactivity rate, which decreased by 0.2 to 21.5% in the latest report. The decrease was driven by those aged 50 to 64, mostly due to them leaving retirement and returning to the workforce amid economic turmoil.

At the same time, both vacancy and pay figures remain stagnant. In the latest ONS report, the estimated number of vacancies fell by 65,000 on the quarter to 1,187,000. Growth in average total pay (including bonuses) and regular pay (excluding bonuses) among employees for August to October 2022 held steady at 6.1%. Zooming in by sector, average regular pay growth for the private sector was 6.9% and 2.7% for the public sector. The ONS states that this is the largest growth rate seen for the private sector and is among the largest differences between the private sector and public sector growth rates we have seen outside of the pandemic period.

After adjusting for inflation, total and regular pay both fell by 2.7%. While this is slightly smaller than the record fall in real regular pay (3.0%) which we saw earlier in 2022, this end-of-year figure is among the largest decreases in growth since comparable records began.

2023 Predictions

It is not just pay that will be affected by the economic difficulties we continue to face. The fall in vacancies reflects a general caution across industries about the market and financial conditions, and the challenges will not stop there. Here are our predictions for what lies ahead between January and March 2023:

• Recession fears to become a reality: For months now, the possibility of a recession and making preparations for one have been a key topic of discussion, however this has yet to be officially declared in the UK or across most of Europe. The UK experienced unexpected growth in November 2022 bolstered by the World Cup, leading some experts to question if the situation is really as dire as it seems. The German economy, Europe’s largest, stagnated in Q4 2022 but grew by 1.9% across the year, indicating the country may narrowly escape a recession.

Despite this optimistic blip, we are not quite out of the woods yet and recession is still a very real possibility. The latest forecast from World Bank forecasts that recession is a seemingly likely outcome for us, with their latest Global Economic Prospects report predicting that the global economy will grow by only 1.7% this year. This is a sharp fall from the 3% growth they predicted in their previous report published in mid-2022. The world’s three most prosperous economic regions—the US, the Eurozone, and China—are expected to experience a ‘period of pronounced weakness,’ with their downturns more significant than those experienced by poorer nations. After surging by 5.3% in 2021, growth in the world’s richest economies is likely to slow to just 0.5% in 2023. Therefore, despite the optimistic outlooks possessed by some, it is likely not a matter of if we will declare a recession, but a question of when.

As the conflict in Ukraine surges on, the impact of the coronavirus pandemic continues to create ripples, and inflation rests at record heights.  We seem to get closer to an official declaration of recession every day. Therefore, it is certainly not out of the question that this announcement could be made in Q1. Should this happen, this would be the first time in over 80 years that two global recessions have occurred within the same decade. With the 2008-09 recession a recent memory, many businesses and executives will be proceeding with caution. Everything that happens now will be a result of recession wariness.

• Hiring will slow and freezes will continue: Higher interest rates and inflation have hit businesses hard, while higher costs of living have reduced customer spend. This has led many businesses to restructure and tighten up their budgets to preserve their financial health as much as possible. Typically, staff is the first area impacted.

We have already seen cautionary shrinkage in the jobs market reflected in the previously mentioned ONS data, and that contraction will most likely continue throughout Q1. In fact—within the first two weeks of 2023 alone—Amazon, Salesforce, Goldman Sachs, Barratt Developments, JLL, and Liberty Steel have all announced redundancies and hiring freezes that will impact their UK workforces. Others have announced that they are considering making cuts in the near future. That said, expect a pause rather than mass redundancies. Data from Iwoca found that nearly four in five companies plan to keep staffing levels unchanged in 2023.

While this is certainly concerning, opportunities remain available, especially at the senior level as the need for strong relevant leadership increases.

• Battling slowdown versus innovation: Businesses will face the uncertainty of the current slowdown whilst also having to navigate the challenge of needing to remain at the forefront of innovation disrupting every industry. Of course, the challenges in the market will impact each industry and sector in their own way. As one might expect, some will find balancing harder than others.

In the final quarter of last year, we saw a downturn in VC activity as investors opted to sit out the turbulence in the market. In the technology sector, which is central to the venture capital landscape, the last year has brought the steepest and widest drawdown for a generation. However, VC funds remain very well stocked to make rounds of new investments at much healthier valuations compared to one year ago. Predictions from London and Partners indicate the UK tech sector is showing resilience despite the challenges seen in many other major European cities, with sectors such as Fintech, Edtech and Gaming thriving.

In addition to this, for the first time, we saw every single subsector in Financial Services heading downward, with the biggest falls seen in Banking and Markets and Investment Management. Here at Rialto, our team also observed US employers made far more aggressive job cuts than their UK, European or Asian counterparts – almost without exception.  The focus on improving services for people remains high, as does the focus on aligning banking practices and technology to global/social problems. However, for the past decade—and maybe even longer than that—sustainability issues have remained as the key agenda item despite the cost-of-living crisis presently causing major threats to progress.

Retail is another sector we expect to have a particularly tough quarter ahead. Decreased customer spend, disrupted supply chains, and higher costs resulted in a December 2022 sales gain that was lower than the rate of inflation, meaning people likely bought less due to having to pay more. With no end to these challenges in sight, retail faces a tough Q1. We expect to see hiring freezes and redundancies here, but equally acquisitions and changes in leadership will be on radar to keep businesses afloat. Innovation will show itself in different ways, as retailers continue to go more ‘hybrid’ with their offerings beyond their normal inventory.

Manufacturing will also continue to struggle. The latest S&P Global/CIPS UK Composite PMI recorded falls in new manufacturing business for a fifth successive month, and as a result jobs were also lost for the third month running. In addition to this lack of new business and ongoing supply chain difficulties, the industry has been hit hard by the energy crisis. Costs have become a major concern. According to an industry survey conducted by Make UK and PwC, 70% of companies expect their energy costs to increase this year, with two-thirds saying they expect to cut production or jobs as a result. Rather than hiring new talent, manufacturing will likely turn to upskilling and retraining existing staff. 52% of respondents in the survey reported that they are engaging in this activity. Those looking to advance or enter manufacturing in Q1 or beyond will need to ensure that their skills are on par with those which firms will be instilling in their existing workforce.

Planning ahead

While we continue to teeter on the precipice of a recession, it is important to remain both optimistic and realistic. Yes, the coming months will be challenging, but will this really feel out of the ordinary given how much disruption has occurred in recent years? Just as we persevered through the pandemic and all of its ripple effects, we will adapt once again. We may escape recession, or we may not. Either way, opportunities in the executive outplacement market will remain, and executives should continue to be at the forefront of market changes to reposition themselves, upskill, and retain visibility as a leader of the future.

If you are considering undergoing an executive job search or career change during this period, you may face new barriers but not total roadblocks. It is important to keep visible online and active among your networks. Your personal digital brand remains one of the most valuable weapons in your arsenal for attracting and obtaining new opportunities. Instead of shying away from the challenges in your industry, use them to develop your thought leadership. Showcase your expertise and apply your insight to real issues impacting your business, industry, or job function.

Double down on skills and work on developing capabilities that will benefit your current or potential employer when navigating current and future market conditions. Upskilling will likely be the go-to strategy for businesses this year when it comes to their talent and recruitment, so it is essential that your abilities are on par with what your target organisations are expecting from their current staff. To gain a real competitive advantage, develop skills that exceed these expectations.

As always, if you would like personalised, one-to-one support with navigating your career transition or would like to explore our specialised capability of securing c-suite decision maker meetings for you in any industry globally, our team can help. Get in touch with us to discuss our bespoke programmes for personal digital branding and executive job searches.

Failure is not the true enemy of success; complacency is. As humans, it is in our nature to stick with what we know and gravitate towards tried-and-tested approaches that have previously yielded results. But as we have learned through ongoing disruption, sometimes what worked before no longer applies.

Many senior executives will have steered their businesses in new directions and made major organisational adjustments as a result of new challenges, but may have neglected to make necessary changes on a personal level. New ways of working require new ways of thinking, leading, communicating, and operating. If you as an individual are not growing and evolving alongside the business and the wider marketplace, you risk negatively impacting your organisational and personal effectiveness as a leader.

Change does not need to be radical to be effective. In fact, smaller sustained action is often more beneficial for generating long term impact than sudden drastic overhauls are. By committing yourself to a series of regular activities, you can help to ensure you are performing just as effectively and consistently at the start of the financial or calendar year as you are at the end.

Here are five pieces of executive career advice and our career coaches’ suggestions for manageable goals you can focus on to achieve long-term, sustainable value at the senior level.

1. Focus on Self-Improvement

In psychology, ‘self-actualisation’ is at the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and is the one step left to strive for after our basic need for sustenance, security, socialisation, and status are met. We are all predisposed to desire to reach our full potential. For many senior executives, there is not much further left to climb up the professional ladder in terms of title or role, and therefore this esteem comes from achieving one’s own internal purpose.

This ideal will look different for everyone, and in our executive career coaching work we advise our clients to gain a clear understanding of what this ideal means to them on both a personal and professional level. What fulfils you most in your daily life? What do you want to be remembered for someday? What values, goals, and priorities drive you at this level in your career? What type of life do you want to be living, and what is your optimal career at this stage?

The next question is focused on the present scenario, namely, how far away are you from reaching that version of yourself, and what are the key steps you can take towards getting there? For many, the easiest place to start is within. Set the intention of taking time out to assess and improve. Take stock of your strengths and weaknesses with full honesty. Assess whether those values and goals you have set for yourself are being served in your current state, and if not, what you could be doing instead to live out those values and reach your goals sooner. The things you valued earlier in your career may differ from what matters most to you now. Your circumstances may have also changed over time. Apply both big- and small-picture thinking here and be willing to shine light on even the most shadowy parts of yourself.

Our advice for executives is to not treat this as a one-off activity. You can set time out for a deep dive, but should check in with yourself at various points throughout the year to ensure you are keeping on the right path. While setting an agenda at the start of your self-improvement efforts can help you keep focus, it is important to remain curious. As we experience more life, our goals, circumstances, and priorities change. We are rarely the exact same people we were in January by the time December rolls back around. Therefore, it is important to stay curious about the world at large, your career, and yourself throughout the year and adapt and flex as needed. These are valuable skills, and this openness and agility will serve you well.

2. Acquire New Skills

Investing time in your own capabilities is always worthwhile for enhancing your value in the marketplace and furthering your own personal growth.

Over time, you may have picked up on a few of your own shortcomings. But one of the best ways to identify what skills will be most valuable for your career is to research macro and general industry trends, as well as those relating to your job function and sector. Gaining an understanding of what’s happening in the marketplace and the wider world can help you to identify opportunities and threats to your business, as well as to your personal growth and progression. We do this regularly with our career coaching clients, and it is majorly beneficial for helping them solidify their career objectives.

Picking up new skills, prioritising continuous learning, and leveraging your existing capabilities in a new role can help you to take advantage of the next growth curve. Our latest RALI insights illustrate that data literacy and digital/technology literacy continue to be key as many organisations ramp up their digital transformation plans. You do not have to learn to code, but you do need to have a general understanding of the role technology is beginning to play in your business, your industry sector, and your customers’ lives. Our insights also show that soft skills such as communications and collaboration continue to matter in the hybrid working world. Also, as previously mentioned, agility and flexibility are high up on the skills agenda in the continuously disrupted marketplace.

These soft skills will take internal work to develop and are learned in practice. As for the rest, you can develop those harder and more technical capabilities through your own research, seeking out training opportunities, enrolling in a course, or attending topical professional events such as those offered throughout the year by Rialto.

3. Reassess Your Leadership Style or Ways of Working

Soft and hard skills may not be the only areas that need adapting to move forward. As we have learned first-hand these past several years, it is often the case that many of the tactics that worked in the past may no longer be effective in the face of new challenges or business conditions.

You may find this is the case for your leadership style or ways of working. Perhaps you have introduced new practices in reaction to challenges or situations that arose in the past and remained on that same path even after the issues were resolved or no longer impacting your business. You may have even resisted change altogether, taking on an ‘if it isn’t broken’ mentality. Either way, you may be backing your team and the business into a corner and stifling their opportunities to flourish.

Many businesses conduct periodic reviews with their teams and leadership, which helps make it easy to glean feedback that can fuel this improvement agenda. These reviews should be approached not as an opportunity to critique your team, but as an opportunity to learn about the business from a different perspective and gain insight into how your leadership is either helping or hindering growth. If your organisation does not conduct these reviews as standard, you can have informal chats with your team or colleagues to discuss what is and is not working within the business and where your leadership could improve. Beyond that, seeking out career coaching can help you gain insight from an objective third party.

Our advice is that this too should not be treated as a one-off activity and should be revisited periodically. Every executive should be regularly collecting feedback day in and day out and adjusting their style accordingly. You may find that your team requires compassion and empathy in one period, and confidence and boldness in another. We never know what the day, month, week, or year will bring when we enter it, so it is imperative to constantly evolve.

4. Refresh Your Personal Digital Brand

How you present yourself within your organisation is important. But it’s also imperative to position yourself appropriately in the external market – i.e. in your industry and the job market. Senior leaders are often the most public-facing members of the organisation, which means that reputation and perception matter in many of these roles. Your reputation is crucial to gaining respect within your industry. For those planning a career change or undergoing the executive job search process, the focus should be on differentiation in a highly competitive senior marketplace. Are you being seen by the right people, and are you making the right impressions?

In all these scenarios, having a strong online presence is incredibly valuable. In our digitally driven age, this has become our frequent first impression of people. Ahead of a meeting, you may run a quick Google search, or before an interview the HR team will most likely review your LinkedIn. These activities enable us to create perceptions about one another before we even meet. It is an inevitable reality of our technology-driven daily lives. Therefore, you need to ensure that you are making the right impression.

Furthermore, your online presence can help attract opportunities for speaking engagements, conference attendance, or even new roles. LinkedIn is a powerful player in the executive jobs market. According to LinkedIn’s own data, 52 million people use the platform to search for jobs each week. Eight people are hired every minute, and 101 job applications are submitted through the site every second. It is an incredibly powerful tool, with benefits that you cannot afford to miss out on.

Our career coaches advise setting aside some time to dedicate to your personal digital brand. Assess which platforms you want to be found on professionally, and work to strengthen your profile. If you haven’t updated your About section, Experience, Education, or profile imagery in a while, make sure they are relevant to your current circumstances, and that they support your strategic objectives. Try to get into the habit of updating these sections whenever new developments happen.

If you aren’t a regular LinkedIn user, it is never too late to start. Many might find LinkedIn a bit daunting, overwhelming, or time consuming. Really, it is not as complicated as it may seem, and it is possible to reap the benefits of LinkedIn without spending all your time on it. Set a block of time aside to overhaul your profile at the start of your efforts, but also spend a little time on it each week to keep up your presence on an ongoing basis. The easiest way to do this is to build LinkedIn into your workday routine. Dedicate five to ten minutes each day checking your notifications and messages, interacting with others on your feed, sharing content, or engaging in Groups. It’s a short bit of time, but through the year it can really add up.

We have a blog series that can help you get started. Alternatively, if you would like individualised help tailored to your specific needs and objectives, we offer bespoke personal digital branding programmes.

5. Grow Your Network

There is more to LinkedIn than thought leadership. LinkedIn is a social networking platform, with the operative word here being ‘networking.’ The value of having a strong professional network cannot be overstated, but it tends to be something we let fall to the wayside over time. Data from McKinsey shows that only 14% of professionals have grown their networks since 2020, while less than 50% reported making any effort to do so. In neglecting your network, you may be missing out on opportunities to grow and enrich your career.

Our career advice in this vein is to make it a point to extend both your physical and virtual network. If you aren’t connected online to those you know physically, be sure to bridge that gap across touchpoints. Online, you should also consider reaching out to those you may not directly know but who may be beneficial contacts for you to have. In fact, research from MIT, Harvard and Stanford found that weaker social connections on LinkedIn have a greater effect on job mobility than stronger, more direct connections. Reaching out to your lesser known, secondary, or third-degree contacts on the platform is more likely to yield opportunities than mining your close personal relationships.

Make time to review your connections to ensure you haven’t missed any key ones, and make the task of growing your network into a regular LinkedIn habit. You could set KPIs for yourself to keep on track through the year, whether that be setting a goal to send a certain number of new connection requests per week, or growing your network by a specific number by a certain date.

We understand that this activity can take a greater time commitment to get right. Taking the time to research those potential connections and sending out requests can require time that busy senior executives do not possess. We do offer a service to alleviate this burden, enabling you to grow your network with minimal effort and focus on the more important task of developing relationships and sharing insights. Contact us to learn more.

In summary, if you have fallen into the trap of becoming complacent with your own personal development, it is time to remedy that. Regularly setting targets for yourself can be a great motivator to enhance and develop as an executive, and are much more likely to generate sustainable long term growth.

At this point, we are no longer strangers to disruption. It feels as though we have adapted, redirected, and flexed nonstop since early 2020 to the point where this has become our default mode of operation.

2022 was a continuation of this way of being rather than a deviation from it. While we saw the end of most of the remaining COVID-19 restrictions worldwide, the effects of the pandemic continue to ripple through our personal and professional lives. Rising inflation, geopolitical tensions, disrupted supply chains, greater adoption of emerging technologies, and shifts in the job market have created a new landscape for leaders to contend with as we wrap up this year and prepare to begin anew.

Naturally, many leaders are concerned about what lies ahead for the next 12 months, and what these hurdles might mean for their business’s growth, profitability, and shape. As many of our clients move their focus to 2023, we are highlighting five of the main challenges and priorities they foresee ahead.

1. Transforming Business Models and Culture

With accelerated and disruptive changes remaining a constant, business leaders need to continue to adapt existing business models, experiment with new approaches or change direction, informed by past lessons. If the last several years have taught us anything, it’s that we need to embrace flexibility and agility to overcome challenges. Many businesses and their leaders have adapted out of necessity rather than strategic or competitive motivations. That needs to change in 2023.

Business leaders can no longer ride the waves of disruptions in an attempt to keep their heads above water. The time is coming to think differently and boldly. Agility is a critical component of this adjustment, but rather than simply flexing with the times, leaders need to be tracking the disruption and looking a step ahead.

If supply chains are insecure, efficiency and costs need adjustment, and customer expectations are fluctuating now, what might that look like moving forward? What implications might current disruptions have in both the short and long terms? What changes to organisational goals, standards, and practices will need to be made as a result?

This is the time for leaders to shake the constraints of legacy thinking and models. What has historically worked may no longer fit the current and future needs of the business. In 2023, leaders will be tasked with determining which models and practices or team mindset are most effective and implementing them into the organisation’s ecosystem.

Expect to see continued shifts in the ways we work as a result. Hybrid working models have been with us long enough now to no longer be considered ‘exploratory,’ so expect to see businesses solidifying their stances on their staff’s office attendance in 2023. Hybrid calls for more fluid organisational hierarchies, with employees taking on more individual self-management responsibility and working more closely together. Rather than making decisions and edicts in a top-down management style, the role of the leader in 2023 will be more focused on encouraging and empowering the rest of their team’s decision making, autonomy, innovation, and collaboration.

2. Talent Shortages

Businesses will continue to face challenges in building teams in 2023. The effects of the pandemic’s ‘Great Recession’ are still with us all, with PwC’s Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey from earlier this year finding that one in five workers globally had plans to quit in 2022. Moving into 2023, we are also contending with trends such as ‘quiet quitting’ in which employees’ burnout impacts their motivation and productivity, as well as many major organisations enacting their own hiring pauses in reaction to economic difficulties.

All these factors combine to create a turbulent talent market in the new year. Many executives will enter the ‘job’ search either unwillingly as the result of redundancy or corporate restructures, or willingly in search of increased reward or deeper fulfilment. Rialto Associate Director Nicholas Storey expects that the latter motivation will be a key factor driving the talent market in 2023. He says:

“YouGov data has found that only 17% of people actually enjoy their jobs. That means that the other 83% are waking up to attend jobs that either don’t excite and fulfil them, don’t pay them enough, or don’t match their skillsets. After enough time, that will wear on a person to their breaking point at which time they will likely undergo a transition. On the business level, this is a big issue as you end up with staff that are dissatisfied, not invested in your organisation’s mission or objectives, and on their way out. I think 2022 was a wakeup call for many leaders in this regard, so I expect that in the new year these leaders will actively look for ways to help their employees feel more fulfilled and valued where they are while also enticing new talent to come on board.”

Employers need specific skills on hand to grow the business and deal with the challenges ahead, and therefore they need to be in the best position to develop their existing teams and attract any skills by they don’t have. Retaining and attracting employees will be a top priority for HR directors and other leaders in 2023 but will be difficult to accomplish with such fierce competition in the marketplace. While the Great Recession and corporate cutbacks have injected an influx of talent into the market, not all these professionals possess the in-demand skillsets that will help propel the business into the future. Therefore, competition for those individuals who do possess these capabilities will be fierce. Organisations need to consider what they can offer to new talent that sets them apart from other businesses, whether it be financial reward, aligned values, opportunities for progression, training, or beyond.

3. Upskilling for Teams and Leadership

If leaders cannot recruit the talent they need, then they will need to cultivate talent and skills required in-house.  Investing in skills and training for current staff can help ensure the business has the skillsets it needs for ongoing success without the difficulties of having to recruit it. Not only does this set the business up for success, but it also helps to deepen employee’s individual investment into the business and improves retention. Expect to see more businesses invest in in-house training or funding outside learning opportunities for employees in the new year.

Leaders will need to invest in their own skillsets as well to stay relevant. However, leadership is complex and varies by person and organisation. There is no singular recipe or combination of skills that ensure a leader will be successful in their role, but there are a few areas where senior executives can focus their efforts in response to the varying shifts in the marketplace to become more effective in highly disrupted environments.

While it will be imperative for those at the helm to have the necessary technical capabilities that their roles and industry might require, at the leadership level there is an even greater need to focus on the development of skills that help those in charge to better engage their stakeholder audiences.

‘Human-focused’ skills like communication, collaboration and empathy will be important focal points in 2023. The pandemic created a need for more compassionate leadership and continues to matter as we enter 2023 amid financial strains, geopolitical instability, and other challenges. Leaders need to be able to show resilience themselves whist also taking time to understand the circumstances of their staff, stakeholders, and customers so decisions can be made with those groups front of mind.

If future success is to be achieved through cross-department collaboration and empowered teams, then leaders need to be able to bridge the gaps between groups and create alignment. As mentioned, many organisations will be shifting away from top-down leadership styles in 2023. For this to be successful, communication will be key. It falls on leaders to engage their teams, customers, and other stakeholder audiences in conversation to gain insight and identify future opportunities and areas for improvement or diversification. Amid so much change, leaders will also need to ensure they are sharing the right messages with the right audiences at the right time. This requires tactful communication skills that take time to hone and develop therefore doing so would be a worthwhile investment for any senior executive in 2023.

4. Accelerated Digital Transformation

Of course, strong digital skills will also be imperative at every level as digital transformation disrupts at an accelerated pace. According to data from Vistage, despites 86% of decision-makers expecting a recession, the majority of leaders are poised to spend more on technology in 2023. In fact, 51% expect to increase spend by an average of 21%. This will involve a modernisation of both hardware and software in an attempt to streamline practices, make better use of data, and optimise organisational efficiency.

There are several major trends that business leaders should be focusing on in 2023. Cloud technologies and ‘bossware’ tools will remain popular as staff splits their time between home and the office and leaders aim to keep track of productivity. Augmented and Virtual Realty (AR and VR, respectively) tools are positively impacting the experiences that companies can deliver to their customers and are in the early stages of reshaping how we work via the Metaverse. However, one technology continues to reign supreme above all others.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will remain a top exploratory area for businesses in 2023 and will touch every industry and function in some capacity. Rialto consultant Katie King is well-versed in this shift, having published two books on the impacts of this technology on businesses. She predicts:

“We are seeing record AI adoption following the pandemic, and the population of businesses actively using and exploring this technology far outnumbers those who continue to resist it. AI makes it possible to overcome so many of the challenges that plague businesses today such as delivering results with limited teams and resources, managing a disrupted supply chain, and navigating ever-changing customer demands. There are so many tools and vendors already in the marketplace, which may make it feel a bit overwhelming to start but also lowers the barrier of entry for businesses looking to adopt. I expect that many of the holdouts will shed their AI inhibitions and get on board in the new year and that this technology will be an integral part of many business functions by the end of 2023.”

Expect to see AI take on a more active role in the new year. HR will enlist automated tools for their recruitment, training, and employee engagement activities. Manufacturing and operations will assign AI to resource optimisation, maintenance, and supply chain management. Sales and marketing will use technology to better understand customers, deliver more personalised experiences, and keep on top of trends while management will leverage AI to gain real-time insight into all areas of the business. There is not a single function that will not be impacted by technology, and businesses seem more open-minded than ever about embracing it.

Of course, as practices become more digitally driven, risks increase. Cybersecurity threats are at an all-time high with new threats emerging every day. As businesses invest in new tools, they must also be thinking of ways to safeguard their systems against any vulnerabilities. Therefore, it is essential when assigning 2023’s technology budget to allocate funding for security initiatives. All it takes is one breach for customers to lose confidence in your business entirely.

5. Sustainability

All that in mind, a threat bigger than cybersecurity, inflation, technology, and talent shortages looms above us all. Climate change continues to worsen year-on-year and cannot be ignored. As a result, customers are demanding greater transparency in organisations’ sustainability initiatives, climate-friendly products and services, and pledges from businesses to ‘do better.’ According to Harvard Business Review, over 700 of the 2,000 largest publicly traded companies—including 52 of the FTSE 100— have stated their intentions to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

If your organisation has not defined its sustainability values and begun altering its practices accordingly, then 2023 is the time to do so. Take the time to zoom out on the big picture of your day-to-day activities and to think critically about the impact your business is having on the world at large. From there, you can begin to identify actionable steps towards change. You will not be able to drastically reduce your impact overnight or eliminate your environmental footprint entirely, but small actions can compound and amount to major impacts over time. In 2023, businesses might consider switching to renewable energy sources, reducing waste, tightening up your supply chain, or allowing staff to work remotely more often.

Beyond demonstrating your organisation’s dedication to the global issues that impact your people, taking the time to examine your practices may highlight other inefficiencies and potential cost savings you may have otherwise overlooked. At the end of the day, an investment in sustainability should be part of all decision making, no matter the cost.

After three full years of disruption and change, there is still more ahead in 2023. Therefore, it is critically important to take the personal time to reflect and learn from what has come before so that we may continue to evolve and drive business forward and remain competitive across an ever-changing landscape.

Today’s C-suite executives certainly have their work cut out for them. These leaders are responsible for piloting the business through turbulent times, inflation and economic downturn, supply chain security, fluctuating demand, global disruptions, and shifts in customer expectations. It’s a tall order, and a major challenge for many businesses looking to recover from these setbacks and step into the future with the right foot forward.

As a result, we are seeing many businesses make major changes within the C-suite to build leadership teams that are better equipped to deliver the necessary impact to help the business succeed long term. This has involved reshaping roles, introducing new voices at the top table, and shifting focus towards more strategic objectives.

Here are the 3 major changes organisations are making:

1. Titles Aligned with Strategic Goals

Historically, C-suite titles have been limited to departmental designations such as Finance, Marketing, or Operations. It made sense that the key functions of the business had representation at the top of the organisation, with the Chief Executive at the helm overseeing everything. While those titles still hold valuable places in the C-suite, many organisations have begun to understand that stronger leadership and ownership is needed for their strategic priorities.

That’s why when you look at many of today’s boards, you see newer titles such as Chief Diversity Officer, Chief Sustainability Officer, Chief People Officer, Chief Data Officer, and so on. Research from LinkedIn found that a search for titles incorporating the word ‘Chief’ returned 51 different variations, most of which reflect the changing priorities of top-level leadership.

These titles may appear gimmicky, but their value is anything but. The creation of these roles indicates an understanding from organisations that both the business landscape and the world at large are changing, and that the business needs to adapt accordingly.

Can the appointment of these C-suite executives fix the shortcomings in these priority areas overnight? No. However, having leaders with remits dedicated specifically to these issues creates accountability for the organisation and helps ensure that these issues have an ever-present voice in all decision-making processes. The act of appointing a Chief Sustainability Officer itself will not reduce the organisation’s carbon footprint, but it will help to ensure that sustainability is represented in all leadership conversations and has the internal support required to make change happen over time.

In addition to these strategic titles, we are also seeing businesses adapt, expand, and adopt certain roles to improve the organisation’s ecosystem orchestration and cohesion. For example, the Chief Growth Officer, Chief Alliance and Partnership Officer, and Chief Customer Officer may be tasked with connecting traditionally siloed departmental roles like marketing and sales and infusing external customer-facing objectives into internal strategy. The Chief Data Officer will likely be tasked with bridging technology with other areas of the business, an increasingly important task as businesses accelerate their digital transformation projects.

We mentioned in a previous blog that having a niche related to one of these highly important business priorities is a major asset for any top executive to bring to the leadership team. As the C-suite is evolving, there is potential for executives to combine their leadership capabilities and subject matter expertise to create real impact in these newer board positions. The expansion of the C-suite allows for more voices in the conversation and can help to shape the leadership team into one that adequately reflects the evolving needs of the business and its people. You may be able to bring something unique to the table, and your insight may be exactly what the business needs moving forward.

2. Purpose-Driven Activity

Beyond strategic priorities, these titles and appointments are also driven by organisational purpose. ESG has become a major focus for businesses, with Harvard Law School’s ESG Global Study 2022 finding that the European market boasts the highest percentage of ESG users at 93%, which is more than both North America (79%) and Asia-Pacific (88%). Research from Deloitte backs this up, as 79% of respondents in their survey of 212 C-suite leaders across various industries reported that their company has a clear and defined purpose strategy that is integrated with core business strategy.

But it isn’t just the leadership team that cares about environmental, social, and governmental issues. According to a study by PwC, 76% of consumers say they will stop buying from companies that treat the environment, their employees, or the community in which they operate poorly, while 86% of employees prefer to support or work for companies that care about the same issues they do. As more Gen Z enter the workforce and become a bigger part of the customer population, it is expected that more attention will be paid to ESG-related issues in the years to come.

Issues like climate change and D&I are at the top of every board’s strategic wish list, and it falls on the C-suite to deliver the desired results. Appointments of C-suite executives with ESG-related remits is on the rise, but it is also becoming increasingly important for C-suite members in all areas to integrate these issues into their own agendas. The C-suite needs to work together to create an aligned strategy that creates accountability throughout the organisation and provides a basis for each individual member to draw from with their own teams and activity. Executives can no longer afford to overlook ESG, nor should they try.

3. Increased Scrutiny

The ways in which the C-suite delivers on ESG goals, enacts the organisation’s purpose, and behaves in times of turbulence will not go unnoticed. These roles carry a lot of responsibility and accountability both internally and externally. C-suite executives must answer to various stakeholder audiences including their fellow C-suite and board members, their teams and direct reports, the rest of the organisation’s staff, as well as investors and customers. These roles require a high level of relationship management skills to meet the varying needs of these different groups. It is a juggling act, and there are often trade-offs to be made.

Sometimes, the leadership team gets it wrong. Other times, serving the best interests of one group negatively impacts another. These situations are undesirable but an inevitable reality for C-suite executives. Unfortunately, our increasingly digital activities heighten this scrutiny. Thanks to social media and the ever-active digital news cycle, word travels fast. The C-suite are no longer mysterious, faceless entities that sit at the top of an organisation and are relatively unknown outside their specific industries. Social media has made it possible for many executives to position themselves as thought leaders and share content with a wide-reaching audience, while a 24-hour news cycle is able to pay more attention to things that might have otherwise been missed or selectively passed over. We are even seeing a rise in some C-suite executives becoming micro-celebrities outside of the business world—think Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sheryl Sandberg.

This increased attention can be both positive and negative. On one hand, a positive public perception of a leadership team can reap various benefits for customer loyalty, investments, and market performance. On the other hand, it puts additional pressure on C-suite executives to toe the line and deliver impact. In the wake of a scandal or organisational shortcomings, it is often the C-suite that bears the blame both internally and externally in the court of public opinion. C-suite executives need to be poised to perform under pressure and immense scrutiny despite challenging circumstances.

Our Advice

Navigating these changes may provide challenges for seasoned and long-serving members, or prove intimidating for new executives. Our executive career advice for overcoming these hurdles and driving impact is to:

• Be flexible. The only way for the C-suite to overcome change is to anticipate and adapt to it. Keep an open mind and remain agile. As the C-suite expands to give voice to more diverse perspectives, don’t write these new appointments off as a box ticking gimmick. Be open to these new perspectives and be willing to collaborate and learn. The C-suite is the sum of its parts but is at its best when those parts work in harmony. Be willing to take feedback on board, adopt new ideas and practices, and change direction as needed.
• Look ahead. Yes, we are seeing a rise in titles related to timely issues such as remote work experience, well-being, and AI, but what comes next? Executives should take time to study trends in the market to improve their understanding of what is to come and begin preparing for it. Make decisions using data, evidence, and intuition so you’re not surprised to see a rise in titles like Chief Metaverse Officer, Chief Automation Officer, or Chief Cohesion Officer.
• Create purpose and demonstrate responsibility. ESG is here to stay, and every member of the leadership team should have a solid grasp on the organsiation’s stance on various issues. Which causes matter most to your customers and stakeholders, and what is the C-suite doing about it? How do the organisation’s activities align with the values and visions it claims to represent? C-suite executives are in the spotlight and therefore need to walk the talk.
• Be self-aware. Of course, this scrutiny extends beyond just ESG issues. How you carry yourself day to day will impact how the rest of the C-suite perceive you, whether your team will be willing to buy into your vision, and the level of trust the board, shareholders, and investors are willing to put into you as a leader. There is a lot of value to be found in taking the time to reflect on your own individual impact in the grand scheme of things. Where are you delivering the most value, and which areas require work? No one is 100% perfect all of the time. Seek out feedback from your team and peers and be willing to reflect and adapt. Enlist the help of a career coach who can provide specialised executive career advice as needed. The organisation will improve when you perform at your best.

Rialto is at the forefront of providing insights on both individual and organisation transformational change. Our focus includes supporting senior executives to make game changing career moves. Over 6,000 professionals globally have successfully made senior level moves globally over the last 11 years.