If you’re interested in leadership development, put Neil Irwin’s New York Times article, “How to Become a C.E.O.? The Quickest Path Is a Winding One,†on your must-read list. Here’s the first of two money quotes.
“To get a job as a top executive, new evidence shows, it helps greatly to have experience in as many of a business’s functional areas as possible. A person who burrows down for years in, say, the finance department stands less of a chance of reaching a top executive job than a corporate finance specialist who has also spent time in, say, marketing. Or engineering. Or both of those, plus others.”
This just makes sense. But let’s think for a moment about two kinds of inside experience.
Leadership development and two kinds of inside experience
When you look through a leadership development lens, the jobs in most companies fall into two groups. In one group there are the siloed jobs. Those are jobs that don’t require you to connect with or know much about many company functions besides your own.
There are also what I call “broad view†jobs. They provide exposure to the company as a whole. Top functional jobs provide this, but so can jobs in HR and IT and accounting.
To get meaningful experience, developing leaders need a mix of jobs that develop functional skill and give them a broad view of the organization. That’s one takeaway from Irwin’s article. There’s another one that’s just as important.
Leadership development assignments can be too diverse
Here’s the other money quote from Neil Irwin’s article.
“However, there is still such a thing as too much variety: Switching industries has a negative correlation with corporate success, which may speak to the importance of building relationships and experience within an industry. Switching between companies within an industry neither helps nor hurts in making it to a top job.”
This is an important caution and it echoes Boris Groysberg’s research on “Why CEOs Are Not Plug-and-Play.â€
