There was a time when many senior leadership roles were predominantly about running a function well. You inherited a team, an operating model and a set of objectives, and your job was to improve performance, deliver the plan and keep things moving in the right direction.
Those days are disappearing.
When we look at the senior leadership roles we’ve been asked to hire at Gallop Executive over the past 12-24 months, there seems to be a common theme. Regardless of the job title or function, organisations aren’t simply looking for leaders to manage what already exists. They’re looking for people who can fundamentally change it – and increasingly, deliver a significant commercial outcome at the same time.
The Chief of Staff role has become more and more popular, and has changed in its profile by and large, Customer Excellence Director roles are more prevalent with a focus on process improvement and operational efficiency, and the Chief Customer Officer and Customer Experience Director roles are ever changing. Chief Technology and Chief Information Officer role titles have become interchangeable with every single one having some sort of focus around AI. On paper, these are quite different appointments, but the underlying requirements have had far more in common than the job titles might suggest.
The Chief of Staff roles required leaders capable of working across organisations, connecting strategy with execution and driving change across traditional functional boundaries. The Customer Excellence Director mandate extended well beyond improving customer satisfaction and into operations, technology, efficiency and commercial performance. Perhaps the clearest example was an operational Customer Experience Director role where one of the key objectives was to reduce the operating cost base by 50%.
That’s a pretty significant transformation agenda sitting behind a Customer Experience Director job title, together with operating model redesign, including the integration of AI.
This tells us something important about what is happening to senior leadership more broadly.
The Job Title Is Becoming Less Important Than the Problem That Needs Solving
One of the questions we ask clients at the beginning of a search is what they actually need this person to achieve. It sounds obvious, but it can lead to a very different conversation from simply working through a job description.
Increasingly, a Customer Director might need to redesign an operating model. A COO might need to lead significant digital or AI-enabled transformation. A Chief of Staff might be responsible for turning a CEO’s strategy into tangible change across an entire organisation – or even rescuing a failing transformation programme. A Marketing Director may have a much greater direct responsibility for revenue and growth than someone holding the same title five or ten years ago, with some of these roles being presented as Chief Revenue or Growth Officers.
The traditional lines between functional leadership, transformation and commercial leadership are becoming increasingly blurred.
Part of that is simply a consequence of the environment businesses are operating in. Customer expectations continue to change, technology is developing at extraordinary speed, AI is creating both opportunities and challenges, costs remain under pressure and businesses still need to find growth.
Against that backdrop, how many genuinely BAU senior leadership roles are left?
Even when an organisation isn’t going through a formally labelled “transformation”, its leaders are almost certainly being asked to change something significant. They might be reducing cost-to-serve, increasing productivity, redesigning customer journeys, introducing new technology, changing organisational structures, finding new revenue streams or fundamentally reconsidering how work gets done.
Transformation is becoming less of a programme and more of an ongoing permanent leadership requirement.
Every Leader Now Needs Transformation Capability
Historically, transformation could be treated as something relatively separate from the day-to-day organisation. A transformation programme was established, somebody was appointed to lead it, a roadmap was created and eventually the business moved back into BAU.
There isn’t much of a steady-state BAU to return to anymore. The new normal is constant, rapid change.
By the time one major change has been implemented, another technology, customer expectation, competitor or commercial pressure has emerged. All against the backdrop of ongoing volatility in global and geo-politics. Businesses are having to adapt continually, which means transformation capability can’t sit exclusively with a Transformation Director or programme team.
It needs to exist across the leadership population.
That doesn’t mean every senior executive needs to be a transformation programme specialist. What they do need is the ability to look critically at the business they’ve inherited, identify what needs to change and then actually deliver that change while continuing to run and optimise the operation around them.
This combination is critical in modern day leadership.
Transformation Alone Isn’t Enough
There is another dimension to this which I think is just as significant: the growing expectation that leaders understand the broader commercial impact of what they’re doing.
Reducing costs by 50% is obviously a very clear example, but commercial leadership doesn’t simply mean cost reduction. It might mean revenue growth, margin improvement, customer retention, productivity, increasing market share, customer lifetime value increase or creating an advantage that competitors can’t easily replicate.
This means leaders need to understand how their function fundamentally contributes to and impacts the commercial performance of the wider organisation.
Customer experience can’t be considered independently of cost-to-serve and retention. Operations can’t be separated from customer outcomes and margin. Technology investment needs to connect with productivity, growth or competitive advantage. Marketing increasingly needs to demonstrate its contribution to overall revenue.
The strongest leaders tend to understand those connections instinctively. They don’t just think about their own functional remit; they have a bigger picture mentality and understand how the different parts of the organisation interact and how the decisions they make ultimately affect business performance.
This Has Changed the Way We Need to Hire Leaders
This is where executive hiring needs to catch up – and is the reason that Gallop Executive exists. Cookie cutter does not work anymore – in fact, it’s a lazy approach to senior leadership recruitment.
If leadership roles are becoming broader, more transformational and more commercially accountable, hiring somebody primarily because they’ve previously held the same job title will not work. The right hire may not, and in many instances does not, have the same job title at all. This is where hidden talent comes in to play.
The question isn’t simply, “Who has done this job before?”
It’s “What does this business need this person to achieve?”
If you start there, the search almost always looks very different.
Someone may never have held the exact title you’re recruiting for but have repeatedly delivered the transformation your organisation now needs. Another candidate may have spent ten years in precisely the right role and sector but have predominantly operated within established structures rather than changing them.
That distinction matters much more today than it did when leadership roles were primarily about functional expertise and BAU delivery.
For me, the direction of travel is becoming increasingly clear. Businesses still need leaders who can run excellent functions – that hasn’t disappeared. But functional expertise on its own is no longer enough.
The modern executive increasingly needs to be capable of doing three things simultaneously:
Run the business. Transform the business. Grow the business.
And that is why executive search is no longer what it once was.
