Why the C-suite needs a rethink – and how to do it

In a world of constant disruption, with fundamental business practices reshaped by AI and geopolitical shifts, the C-suite needs a fundamental overhaul.

Executive leaders in every function face new challenges. Members of the C-suite have more choices to make and bets to place, even as their sphere of influence shrinks and external pressures knock at the door. The future C-suite’s primary job is no longer optimization within functions, but enterprise-level sense-making under uncertainty.

But while CMOs used to huddle with other CMOs and CTOs would meet with other CTOs for advice and insight, that closed-off, singular functional thinking no longer works. The external issues that leaders face aren’t bound by roles; they span functions. Executive leaders from across the C-suite need to work together to share intelligence and solve broad, cross-functional challenges with cross-functional solutions.

CFOs need to understand the customer in ways they’ve never had to in the past. CTOs need input from across the organization to build broader solutions that will make a firm-wide impact. CROs know that finding new markets and opportunities for growth is increasingly difficult.

The boundaries that once defined leadership roles are dissolving. Leadership is no longer about operating within a function, but about operating beyond it. This shift is not cyclical but driven by permanent conditions: faster capital cycles, tighter coupling between functions and decisions that must be made before certainty is available.

As external volatility intensifies, the internal architecture of leadership must evolve too. But the C-suite reset isn’t just about adding new titles such as Chief AI Officer; it’s about restructuring the C-suite to maximize leaders’ collective intelligence. Those who can break down old boundaries, build new skill sets and think more broadly will lead the most resilient, future-ready organizations.

Functional expertise is no longer the primary source of power in the C-suite. Integration, collective judgement and the ability to navigate enterprise-wide trade-offs now matter more. Our new era of leadership, however, requires the C-suite to break down walls between their functions and take a new approach: working together, trusting each other and building collective confidence.

When a C-suite knows and trusts each other and melds their areas of expertise to create a new, stronger collective intelligence, they can weather storms together. For example, sometimes knowing when not to react is as important as knowing when to react. In 2025, as tariff threats sent many C-suites into a tailspin, the most stable C-suite leaders resisted the pressure to make knee-jerk reactions. They acted calmly and carefully, avoiding panic and wasted energy. Those leaders understand that sometimes true leadership is having the confidence to look around the room at the other members of the C-suite and use their collective intelligence to not react (yet).

In future-ready C-suites, discussions are organised around enterprise decisions and trade-offs not function-by-function performance updates. Leaders debate shared priorities, capital allocation and risk exposure together, rather than sequentially reporting from silos.

The skills that got people into today’s C-suite are not the same skills that will get leaders into the C-suite of the future. While leaders once relied on specialized, function-focused knowledge, they now require broader knowledge that spans the organization. Similarly, the path to the role of CEO is shifting, with leaders from a wider range of professional backgrounds taking the highest leadership positions in many companies. No matter their title, every leader in the modern C-suite requires two skills: curiosity and a nuanced understanding of performance.

First, curiosity. We’re experiencing unprecedented levels of organizational anxiety (behavioural experts’ term for that constant feeling of “we’re not doing enough”). Research suggests that “anxious executives may, in their overriding desire to avoid threats, miss out on high-upside strategic opportunities and thus limit growth.” In other words, as anxiety ticks up, the ability to make decisions goes down.

In an era of abundant data but fragile forecasts, curiosity becomes a competitive advantage. It enables better capital allocation, sharper risk judgment and fewer knee-jerk reactions to noise. For leaders under pressure, curiosity is not a mindset shift; it is a strategic asset.

The solution may be simple: curiosity. When leaders turn their anxiety about a topic into curiosity about that topic, they reframe their thinking. As an executive team, flipping from anxiety to curiosity can create more constructive conversations. When the team is feeling doom-and-gloom, get curious about what could happen instead. When C-suite leaders model curiosity, they show their functional teams how to ask more questions, consider what they can control and build new skills.

The second skill that modern C-suite leaders need is a nuanced understanding of business and market performance. In the past, CMOs would report on past campaign performance – they were reporting the news, not making the news, in a typically very function-specific style. If a CMO needed help understanding how to measure marketing success, they’d talk to other CMOs and go deeper into an echo chamber using a language often wholly separate from the vocabularies of CFOs and other leaders.

The new model for all executives is a more nuanced, dynamic approach to measuring and discussing performance. When leaders across the C-suite have open conversations about what success means and what they should be measuring, those old reports become less relevant. The next generation of C-suite leaders will think bigger than one quarter or metric and start broader discussions about the future of the organization.

As the organizations we lead become even more complex, leaders around the world must prepare for nuanced conversations about what’s coming next. Stay curious about questions like:

The organizations of the future are being built now. The C-suite leaders of the future need to think bigger, longer-term, and more broadly about what those organizations will look like. Leaders can’t do that if they’re just focused on their own function; it's time to work collaboratively, lead with curiosity and rethink the boundaries that hold leaders back.