The boardroom can be a mysterious place, the hub of key decision-making, somewhat out of sight and touch from the rest of the organisation. It would be easy to assume that the economic forces which have changed the face of work for so many of us, might have somehow, skipped the infallible C-Suite. As it happens, no team or function – not even the C-Suite – is immune to change. The rapid pace of digitisation and the ever-shifting economic landscape is quickly forcing organisations to reconsider who has a seat at the boardroom table. No longer the preserve of CEOs, CFOs and CMOs, the millennial C-Suite has had a makeover. When you consider that data is the new gold, it’s hardly surprising that most organisations now have a chief privacy officer. But with climate change, AI and reskilling now very much on the board agenda, it’s becoming just as common to see a chief sustainability officer, chief artificial intelligence officer or even a chief learning officer make the C-Suite roll call.

While the transformation of the C-suite is a positive reaction to the challenges that organisations now face, it does beg the question: how do we support the next generation of leaders to move into these roles?

The obvious answer to this is ‘learning and development’ but traditionally that development has been concentrated on key performers in the finance and customer-facing functions of an organisation. Assuming that these areas of the business are the most fertile for talent is a narrow view and one that is unsustainable in an economy demanding agility, creativity and digital thinking. Previously, it was ‘old school’ hard skills like customer success or soft skills like demand planning that organisations sought to cultivate in future leaders, but research by Gartner would suggest this has changed dramatically in the last five years. Gartner found that the top three emerging hard skills for C-Suite leaders were now artificial intelligence, data science and machine learning techniques. When it comes to soft skills, design thinking, strategic management and adaptability topped the list. If these findings tell us anything about developing future C-Suite leaders, it’s that L&D thinking needs to focus not just on identifying future talent but on identifying future, in-demand skills.

While those hard skills can be acquired through practical learning, the soft skills are often learned through more personal approaches like coaching and mentoring. And according to a survey by Deloitte, this is exactly what tomorrow’s leaders want if they are to progress with an organisation. Its research found that millennials would increase the time they spent being mentored by 50 per cent, given the choice. Providing the support structure that millennial leaders are asking for is key to ensuring that leadership transitions are successful when the time is right. A failed transition to the C-Suite doesn’t just have consequences for the executive, but for the business too. McKinsey found that where a leadership transition fails, the cost to the organisation is a 15 per cent reduction in performance with 20 per cent less engagement. However, get that transition right and it can pay off – increasing the chances of an organisation reaching its three-year goals, by a huge 90 per cent.

Ensuring new leaders have the support they need is even more important given that we now expect employees to make bigger leadership leaps and quicker, in order to keep up with the rapid pace of economic change. In fact, such is the pace of change in the C-Suite that even CEOs are having trouble adapting. According to recent research, just 33 per cent of CEOs could tell you what their chief design officer does, while a mere 10 per cent of top bosses felt that their CDO played a meaningful role in strategy development.

If this new wave of C-Suiters is to have credibility among its peers, then clarity about their remit will be crucial, particularly if all functions of the organisation are to align in a common strategy. Supporting the next generation of future leaders is, of course, vital, but just as important is ensuring that the rest of the board understand why these new executives are at the table and what they bring with them.