HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strengthening Your Soft Skills (with bonus article "You Don't Need Just One Leadership Voice--You Need Many" by Amy Jen Su)

The C-Suite Skills That Matter Most

by Raffaella Sadun, Joseph Fuller, Stephen Hansen, and PJ Neal

FOR A LONG TIME, whenever companies wanted to hire a CEO or another key executive, they knew what to look for: somebody with technical expertise, superior administrative skills, and a track record of successfully managing financial resources. When courting outside candidates to fill those roles, they often favored executives from companies such as GE, IBM, and P&G and from professional-services giants such as McKinsey and Deloitte, which had a reputation for cultivating those skills in their managers.

That practice now feels like ancient history. So much has changed during the past two decades that companies can no longer assume that leaders with ...