There is a real boundary between senior management and the executive team, and it is not scale. It is accountability for outcomes you cannot personally produce.
Below it, you are accountable for a function performing. Above it, you are accountable for the company's result, of which your function is one input among several. Executives who never make that shift stay excellent functional leaders with a seat at the table, and everyone in the room can tell — because they argue for their function when the question was about the business.
Bring your function's facts, argue the company's case. The person who does this consistently is trusted with more than their function.
Decisions arrive earlier and with worse data. Waiting for certainty reads as hesitancy at this level, where it read as rigour one level down.
The board, the founder, the investors, the peers. A large share of executive effectiveness is relationships outside the reporting line.
Below the line you are asked whether your function is working. Above it you are asked whether the company is, and your function is one of the answers.
Continuing to run the function personally while attending the executive team as a guest. It shows up as a diary full of functional meetings and an inability to answer questions about anything else — and it is usually the reason a first executive role does not become a second one.
It does not require having done the role before. Most first-time executives were hired on evidence of judgement rather than a matching title, which is worth remembering when a specification asks for experience you do not yet have.
Chief roles are not senior versions of the jobs below them. They are a different contract — with the board, with peers, and with uncertainty.
Read → Stepping up a levelThe step from managing work to leading a function is not a promotion in scale. It is a change in what you are paid to produce, and it catches good managers out.
Read → Stepping up a levelThe early period is not for proving yourself. It is for buying the right to make the decisions you were actually hired to make.
Read →A short call, your target list, and an honest answer about whether this fits how you are running your search.