The skills chief executives really want
RECENT research covering the opinions of 280 chief executives from over 21 countries launched by CIMA (Chartered Institute of Management Accountants) and the AICPA (American Institute of Certified Public Accountants) highlights how in this time of flux, when business is being disrupted by globalisation, innovation and the fallout from the global financial crisis, employers are crying out for very specific skills, both at the C-suite level and below. At an executive level, the CEOs agreed that the competencies required to drive future success were: marketing expertise (41 per cent), performance management (34 per cent), technological expertise (33 per cent) and the ability to transform data into knowledge (28 per cent).
Our research – which has been produced to launch our new global management accounting designation, the CGMA – was supplemented by interviews with seventeen chief executives, chairmen and corporate leaders whose organisations collectively employ 2.1m and have a market capitalisation of $1 trillion (£637.5bn). They were adamant that they want people who can connect the dots, supplementing their core strengths with a multidisciplinary approach. Soft skills – including communication, influence, decision-making and leadership – were also cited as critical.
If global corporate leaders are to navigate their way through the current tangle of challenges, they need to understand where value lies in their company and direct resources to the right goals. The quality of decisions taken is paramount: in the current economic climate, there is much less room for error. Three quarters of chief executives state that they need to put more emphasis on measuring and demonstrating the non-financial value of their business, so people are also needed who can transform qualitative and predictive data into knowledge to feed into decisions and risk management.
The overriding theme to emerge from our research is that chief executives agree it is people – customers, employees, partners and many others – who are crucial to a business’s success. Understanding and unlocking the human dimension means the difference between companies that prosper and companies that collapse.
Gillian Lees is the author of Rebooting Business: Valuing the Human Dimension. www.cgma.org