CEO Recruiters Increasingly Prize Soft Skills
- by Emily Peck
Axios Markets — Turns out some of us might have what it takes to run a giant public company: social skills. CEOs with such skills are increasingly in demand, finds a new analysis just published in the Harvard Business Review.
Why it matters:
People skills have grown in importance as CEOs are increasingly expected to respond to not just shareholders and board members, but employees, customers, the public at large, regulators, activists, and more. The upheaval of the pandemic has made it even more crucial that leaders are good, empathetic communicators.
- The most wanted soft skills include a high level of self-awareness, the ability to listen and communicate and "the capacity to infer how others are thinking and feeling," write the authors.
Details: The researchers began this project three years ago, analyzing nearly 5,000 job descriptions between 200o and 2017 provided by executive recruitment firm Russell Reynolds. The help wanteds were for CEOs, as well as the other big C's — the chiefs of finance, information, human resources and marketing.
- There was a 27% increase in C-suite job listings emphasizing social skills in the time period the authors examined; while listings that emphasized hard skills declined 38%.