The Suite Spot: a career to the C-suite and beyond

MBA graduate John Jeffcock explains the reasoning behind his writing a social mobility book, to enable all people however diverse to have successful careers and to reach the pinnacle of corporate roles across the globe

The great resignation taking place as a result of Covid-19 all over the world means that many people have taken a step back to reflect on their careers and how they want to spend their life, a life that is getting longer. We now know that in developed nations the average office worker born after the year 2000 will live to over 100 years.

When you start the IMD MBA I am told that they ask you to think about what happens on your 70^th birthday, a year by which most people expect to be retiring. The brutal truth is, it is about 10 years too early because economically pensions seldom last for more than 20 years. So your 80^th birthday is probably a more accurate retirement date.

C-Suite age

The average age of the CEO and C-suite in the US, Europe and Asia remains constant and is the peak of most business peoples earning potential. So if people want a comfortable retirement they need to understand how much time they have to get there.  The below table summarises the average age of C-suite roles across thousands of companies.

You can draw many conclusions from the above and there are numerous variances such as finance sector CEOs tend to be older and technology CEOs younger, but the overriding message is 50. We need to be in the C-suite when we are 50. UK plc research shows the number of people who get into the plc C-Suite post 60, who have not already been in one, is almost non-existent.

My book The Suite Spot: Reaching, Leading and Delivering the C-Suite, published by Bloomsbury in January 2022, builds on this and provides a timeframe with things you need to do. The book is a social mobility book, was written to enable all people however diverse to have successful careers and to reach the pinnacle of corporate roles across the globe. It is the first book to be focused on a career to the C-suite and beyond and this article is a snapshot of part of its content and the golden thread that runs through it is the CXO method.

The CXO method

The CXO method breaks down the role name into its three constituent parts and looks at how these evolve throughout your career. So what is the CXO method that runs through the book.

C – is for chief, running the department or business unit.

X – is for your area of expertise, legal, tech, people, finance, marketing etc

O – is about being a good company officer and adding value across the organisation.

People’s careers run X C O. They should learn their area expertise (X) in their 20s, start running teams (C) in their 30s, create O in their 40s and be in the C-Suite in their 50s. But when Boards and CEOs are looking for new members of the C-Suite the order in terms of importance reverses to O C X. They look for O first, then C and lastly X. So although technical skill might enable people to earn more when they start their careers it may limit them towards the end of their careers.

The T shaped manager has a glass ceiling

The average FTSE 100 has a C-Suite of nine people. The CEO, five staff officers and three line officers, business unit leads, typically divisional CEOs. The staff officers are usually the CFO, CHRO, CLO, CTO/CIO/COO and CMO. The digital giants, such as Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, HP and IBM, have a similar size C-Suite of nine people but tend to have a COO and two, not three, divisional CEOs.

Sitting under the five staff officers are around 40 other C-named roles. Take D for example, a CDO may be a chief diversity, digital, design or data officer. This means that on average each staff officer including the CHRO has around 8 functional areas reporting into them and as a result they need to be a generalist. If you just do Legal you will not get into the top team.

In the T-shaped manager model the top horizontal bar of the T is about them sharing knowledge and communicating and the vertical bar is their area of technical expertise. The problem is that this approach will get you to the layer beneath the C-suite but no higher.

In C-suite management breadth trumps technical depth. All CXOs are in fact chief multidisciplinary officers. Chief marketing officers in the C-suite for example do not practice marketing alone, instead they may manage a cluster of parts of the business and may for example cover marketing, communications, public relations, brand, external affairs, employee communications, data, digital and government relations officer, so are better called the CMCPRBEAECDDGRO.

Why is no-one telling me this?

Because they don’t know and the problem starts with appraisals. Appraisal systems rarely address the O, so people who are good team leaders and technically sound, score high on C and X in their appraisals, are disappointed that they are not selected into the C-suite. The reason for this is often because they have no or little O. You need to build O as part of your career and you do this by sitting on boards and advisory panels internally and externally. These do not have to be commercial enterprises and many start this journey as School Governors, Charity Trustees or small company directors.

But there is something else that a lot of people overlook, and that is the importance of line experience. 90% of CEOs in the S&P 500 came from line not staff roles. Why? Each business unit is probably in size equivalent to all the staff functions put together. The CEOs of these divisions run much bigger teams and are much more personally exposed. It’s very easy to judge how well the business unit is doing compared for example to the finance function. This front line business experience is key in all professions, whether a doctor, soldier or business executive. So ambitions MBA graduates must try and get line experience in their careers and if they have line experience they can add to this through gaining staff experience. A combination of line and staff experience is key to smart career planning.

An exemplary career

In The Suite Spot there are many illustrative stories about careers and one particularly comes to mind. Although the individual was not aware of the CXO method he followed a similar path and made the right decisions at key points.

He started his career off in the retail banking arm of a global bank. He was able, rising through the ranks quickly but realised he had no central banking experience. In his early thirties, he was offered a pay rise with a substantial promotion but decided not to take it after a slightly difficult conversation with his partner. Instead he applied for an internal role in the strategy department, where he learnt how the broader bank worked, got to know a few C-suite executives and gained staff experience. The bank was global, having operations in most continents and he realised that the other area he was missing, was international experience. So he got to know the global lead and when the opportunity arose he was appointed CEO of a relative small country that had significant corruption issues. After a challenging few years he returned home, promotion ready for the C-suite. Since then he has been a successful CEO of two other banks and he has no doubt that his earlier life decisions to gain staff experience and commercial breadth of experience were the key to his success.

To summarise

The Suite Spot builds on the CXO method looking at how your knowledge and skills need to evolve, how to position yourself and manage your career. This is put in the present day context, the maturity of the organisation, the type of area you may manage and what the future may look like. Particular attention is paid to the most powerful role, the CEO, and then what your options are in your twilight years.