NEW YORK–What’s the best way to make it all the way to the CEO job? What path should be taken by a young person who wants to someday wants to be boss?
There is no one path. Indeed, one recent analysis suggests that while hard work, brains, leadership ability and luck are all critical, “another, less understood attribute seems to be particularly important,” according to several new analyses. That attribute? “It helps greatly to have experience in as many of a business’s functional areas as possible,” The New York Times reported in summarizing several recent research reports.
“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,” the Times noted.
These are some of the big findings in a new study of 459,000 onetime management consultants by the social network LinkedIn. Experience in one additional functional area improved a person’s odds of becoming a senior executive as much as three years of extra experience. And working in four different functions had nearly the same impact as getting an M.B.A. from a top-five program, the Times noted in its reporting of the study.
The LinkedIn analysis is not an isolated piece of research.
Burning Glass, a firm that scours millions of job listings to detect labor market trends, has found a surge in demand for what it calls hybrid jobs, incorporating expertise in, for example, both technology and finance, according to the New York Times. And researchers have found that M.B.A. holders with a variety of experiences get more offers and higher bonuses from investment banks than those with narrower experience.
“There is a lot of work to be done to get to that point. But this early evidence suggests that success in the business world isn’t just about brainpower or climbing a linear path to the top, but about accumulating diverse skills and showing an ability to learn about fields outside one’s comfort zone,” the Times said.
The Times quoted Gary Pinkus, a managing partner for North America with McKinsey & Co. as saying, “Work used to be much more hierarchical, and in many instances rote. You could build a nice career within any particular function by taking on more responsibility within that specialty. But if you look at most companies now, work has become incredibly cross-functional.”
The Times also noted:
- In a 2014 survey of 2,100 chief financial officers by Robert Half Management Resources, 85 percent said their role had expanded beyond traditional accounting and finance-related work over the preceding three years, most commonly into human resources and information technology.
- And two business school professors, Jennifer Merluzzi of Tulane and Damon J. Phillips of Columbia, studied hundreds of graduates of an elite M.B.A. program who went into investment banking. The people who were specialists — who had focused only on banking in the past — received fewer offers and lower starting bonuses than those who had worked across various specialties.
The full Times report can be found here.