We’ve recently published our H1 Leadership Index reports covering senior leadership movement across Housing, Utilities, Banking, Financial Services and Insurance, alongside functional leadership areas such as COO, Transformation, Customer, Data, Insight and AI.

You may also have seen a few recent articles and posts from me exploring what I called The Double Hat. They all point to the signal that senior leadership roles seem to be getting broader.

Customer leaders taking on digital, AI, transformation.

Operations leaders taking on technology, cyber, Information and data.

Technology leaders becoming accountable for customer outcomes, transformation and organisational change.

The theme kept appearing, across different industries, different job titles, increasingly expanding in length, but a surprisingly similar pattern.

Responsibilities that previously sat in separate functions are increasingly showing up in the same job function and potentially are now being brought together under a single executive, as opposed to have two or three roles on the ExCo.

It’s something I have been speaking about in our conversations with C-suite and senior executives as well and these sorts of comments have stood out:

“Decisions are slow, a bottleneck is starting to appear as the Executive is too busy, with too many demands”

In our enthusiasm to break down silos, create a more agile, leaner leadership team, are we potentially confusing broader accountability with better organisational design.

On the surface, much of the changes makes sense. Most of the problems organisations are trying to solve today do not respect functional boundaries anyway, however some of the conversations we are having including that of the recent one is worth a think:

“The wider remit has diluted the focus and lacks the expertise the organisation needs.”

Across Housing, Utilities and Financial Services and beyond, responsibilities that previously sat within separate functions are increasingly being brought together; technology, AI, transformation, customer, insight, risk, cyber, governance, they are all increasingly showing up in each mandate, regardless of the actual title of the role and perhaps that’s exactly what organisations need.

But there is another side to it and that is when the responsibility moves, the authority doesn’t always move with it. A Chief Customer Officer can be accountable for the customer outcome while many of the things determining that outcome sit in operations, technology, product or elsewhere.

A COO can own transformation but not necessarily control technology investment, the CIO can be expected to transform the organisation while commercial priorities and operating decisions remain outside their remit.

The job gets bigger but the organisation doesn’t necessarily become more aligned.

Sometimes one person owns the outcome while several others control the levers. Everyone attends the steering group, yet the person supposedly accountable still can’t make the decision.

There is another version of this too, sometimes I wonder whether executive roles get bigger simply because someone is good, or more importantly I think today, they are trusted, they understand the job, the company, and the CEO, investor, or Board. They are someone who proves they can solve difficult problems and gradually more of the organisation gravitates towards them, which actually may and can work brilliantly…Until they leave, or, the layers beneath them do not have the capacity or capability to pick up and deliver what is needed and that’s perhaps quite a useful test for Boards:

If this person left tomorrow, would we design the role this way again?

If the answer is no, perhaps you’ve designed the organisation around an exceptional individual rather than designed the role around what the organisation needs. It also changes the hiring question.

“Have they done this role before?” becomes increasingly difficult to answer when the role itself keeps changing.

But I don’t think the answer is simply to search for increasingly impressive executives capable of carrying increasingly enormous jobs, at some point the organisation has to do some of the work too.

Before adding another responsibility to an executive remit, I’d want to understand what outcome they genuinely own, which decisions they can actually make, which important levers sit somewhere else, and where they will be dependent on influence rather than authority.

Are these responsibilities together because they genuinely belong together, or because we’ve found somebody capable enough to carry them?

I still don’t think broader leadership roles inherently dilute expertise. In many organisations, bringing these responsibilities together is exactly the right thing to do, but adding responsibility is the easy bit. Changing authority, decision-making and the organisation around it is considerably harder, so before we write the next bigger executive job, perhaps the question isn’t whether we can find someone capable of doing it.

It’s whether we’ve designed a job in which they can actually succeed.