'C-suite' skills refer to the competencies that make people effective managers, leaders and high-ranking executives. Increasingly, this is less about people's technical skills and specialist subject knowledge and more about their communication, presentation and social skills.

Crucially, these are the very skills our courses develop in young people!

Raffaella Sadun, Joseph Fuller, Stephen Hansen, and PJ Neal from Harvard's Business Review have written a great article explaining exactly why our future leaders should be investing so much time into developing these key soft skills.

Here are our highlights...

"So much has changed during the past two decades that companies can no longer assume that leaders with traditional managerial pedigrees will succeed in the C-suite. Today firms need to hire executives who are able to motivate diverse, technologically savvy, and global workforces; who can play the role of corporate statesperson, dealing effectively with constituents ranging from sovereign governments to influential NGOs; and who can rapidly and effectively apply their skills in a new company, in what may be an unfamiliar industry, and often with colleagues in the C-suite whom they didn’t previously know.

These changes present a phenomenal challenge for executive recruitment, because the capabilities required of top leaders include new and often “softer” skills that are rarely explicitly recognized or fostered in the corporate world.

The traditional capabilities mentioned earlier—notably the management of financial and operational resources—remain highly relevant. But when companies today search for top leaders, especially new CEOs, they attribute less importance to those capabilities than they used to and instead prioritize one qualification above all others: strong social skills.

When we refer to “social skills,” we mean certain specific capabilities, including a high level of self-awareness, the ability to listen and communicate well, a facility for working with different types of people and groups, and what psychologists call “theory of mind”—the capacity to infer how others are thinking and feeling. The magnitude of the shift in recent years toward these capabilities is most significant for CEOs but also pronounced for the four other C-suite roles we studied.

Companies that rely significantly on information-processing technologies today also tend to be those that need leaders with especially strong social skills.

Here’s why. Increasingly, in every part of the organization, when companies automate routine tasks, their competitiveness hinges on capabilities that computer systems simply don’t have—things such as judgment, creativity, and perception.

When every major competitor in a market leverages the same suite of tools, leaders need to distinguish themselves through superior management of the people who use those tools. That requires them to be top-notch communicators in every regard, able both to devise the right messages and to deliver them with empathy.

Social skills are gaining in relative importance in the search criteria for all five of the executive positions we studied.

Companies today better appreciate the importance of social skills in executive performance."

If this article teaches us anything, it's the urgent need to equip our children for success in this evolving world of work.

To unlock their true potential, we need to bring up children "who are adept communicators, relationship builders, and people-oriented problem solvers."

Our courses are specially designed to develop these key future skills in young people, using debate-led methodology to teach communication, critical thinking, teamwork, leadership, empathy, resilience and crucially, core confidence!

🔗 Head to our website to check out the huge range of courses we currently have on offer!