Chief (change) officer

Is there a better way to signal importance to a business than appointing a C-Suite head of something? Maybe not.

Recent ideas about appointing chief ESG officers gave me flashbacks to conversations ten years ago about the need for chief digital officers — and reminded me of recent appointments to chief remote officers.

I get the instinct to appoint to the C-Suite when something is important. Change initiatives need leadership, and just as importantly, appointing a person to the C-Suite signals to employees and shareholders that a business is taking something seriously.

The problem with this direction, of course, is that things are always changing, and ideally the C-Suite would be a stable leadership institution that doesn’t change that often. Creating new C-level roles every time an organization needs to adapt is at least as likely to create chaos as it is to instill confidence.

Complexity thinkers have theorized that part of the difficulty of navigating the modern world is that we’ve created knowledge silos: in academia (what’s your major?), in government (which agency acronym do you work for?), and definitely in business (what’s your specialization?). And when faced with cross-functional problems (like, say, a global pandemic) specialized expertise can be a hindrance to creative problem solving because it limits our ability to forecast unintended consequences.

If successful, all of these CXO roles would work themselves out of a job—and maybe that should be our barometer for whether or not a C-Suite role should exist. Eventually, an organization should be capable of remote work, should be digitally-savvy, should be ESG-competent, at least in theory. I’d much rather see an organization put leadership oomph behind adaptive capability for the long haul than any one technical change initiative, even when that initiative is important.

Give me a chief transformation officer (chief change officer?) before a chief of wishful-thinking.