Executives have always been—and always will be—expected to produce results. But today they’re expected to produce them in a fundamentally different way. Gone are the days of the heroic individual leading from the front. Instead, in most corporations decision-making has become decentralized, and leaders are now supposed to empower and enable their people. Because of that they’ve had to give up considerable control. As Raffaella Sadun and her colleagues reported in this magazine (see “The C-Suite Skills That Matter Most,” July–August 2022), people skills—often described as “soft skills”—are now especially critical for leaders.

We’ve observed ample evidence of this new reality in our work as researchers, coaches, and leadership advisers. And we’ve also observed that executives are having a hard time adapting to it. For starters, the terms “soft skills” and “people skills” are used to refer to a wide range of competencies and capabilities, leaving many executives confused about what exactly they entail. (For more on this, see the sidebar “What Kind of People Skills Do You Need?”) In addition, few aspiring CEOs entering the succession process have mastered the complete array of these skills, and few newly appointed CEOs have them fully ready to deploy. That shouldn’t be surprising. No leader who has built a career on making expert contributions and exercising hands-on control can be expected to make the leap overnight to a people-centric style.

Yet reliable information about how to acquire people skills is scant. To find out more—about what skills executives struggle to learn and what learning strategies pay off—we analyzed assessment, development, and interview data gathered by Spencer Stuart, one of the world’s top leadership advisory firms. Most Fortune 500 companies partner with advisers like Spencer Stuart to discover and develop succession candidates, so this data can be considered strong evidence of today’s leadership requirements.

In our analysis we studied 75 CEO successions, involving 235 candidates, that took place at large-cap companies in the United States and Europe from 2009 to 2019. Forty-seven of those companies were public. We examined the correlation between CEO skills and firm performance, as measured by shareholder return, revenue growth, and operating margins. We also interviewed a subset of leaders about their development experiences to understand the variety of styles they used to deliver results. In doing so we looked for evidence of strengths and developmental opportunities along the spectrum between directive and empowering styles. We also studied the executives’ ability to work through networks and to enhance organizational performance by instilling and leveraging people skills.

In this article we’ll outline our findings. First, showcasing the stories of several of the candidates in our study, we’ll describe the extended journey that most aspiring CEOs must go through to properly develop the people skills necessary for leadership today. Then we’ll lay out a few guidelines for anyone embarking on such a journey. (We’ve disguised the identities of the people whose stories we share, at times combining them to protect their privacy and capture the full range of experiences we observed.)