The traditional C-suite has been relatively predictable for decades. CEO, CFO, COO, and a handful of business unit or functional leaders made up the senior leadership team at most large organizations.
Those titles aren’t disappearing, but the responsibilities sitting at the top of organizations are changing.
New research from The Conference Board, highlighted by the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, examined how the composition and compensation of named executive officers (NEOs) at U.S. public companies changed between 2021 and 2025. Because NEOs generally include the CEO, CFO, and other highest-paid executive officers, the data provides an interesting view into which leadership roles companies are giving greater prominence.
The overall trend is fairly clear. Legal, technology, human resources, and commercial executives are becoming more prominent, while traditional business unit leadership is becoming somewhat less so. At the same time, many of the newer C-suite titles that have emerged around data, cybersecurity, sustainability, and other priorities still haven’t become fixtures among companies’ most senior executives.
For companies hiring executives, the takeaway isn’t necessarily that they need different titles. It’s that the scope of executive roles is changing, and the way organizations define those roles needs to change with it.
The C-Suite Is Becoming More Enterprise-Wide
One of the clearest shifts is happening outside the CEO and CFO roles.
Business unit heads remain the most common NEO category beyond those two positions, but their representation declined 15% between 2021 and 2025. Meanwhile, several functional leaders whose responsibilities tend to span the enterprise became more prevalent.
Legal roles, including chief legal officers, general counsel, corporate secretaries, and chief compliance officers, recorded the largest absolute increase. Technology leadership also gained ground, with CTO disclosures rising from 155 to 249 and CIO disclosures increasing from 92 to 115. CHRO disclosures increased from 148 to 230, while chief commercial officer disclosures rose from 161 to 227.
These roles have something important in common: the problems they are being asked to solve rarely stay within one department.
Technology now touches almost every part of an organization. Legal leaders increasingly operate at the intersection of regulation, risk, governance, and business strategy. CHROs are responsible for workforce productivity, organizational design, succession, leadership development, and increasingly the workforce implications of AI. Commercial executives may oversee everything from revenue strategy and pricing to customer experience and market expansion.
As businesses become more complex, the executives closest to the center of the organization increasingly need to operate across traditional functional boundaries.
The Role May Be Changing Faster Than the Title
That creates an important challenge in executive hiring.
When an executive leaves, organizations naturally tend to begin by replacing the role that existed. The title stays the same, the previous job description becomes the starting point, and the search is built around candidates who have held similar positions elsewhere.
But that approach assumes the organization needs the same leadership from that seat that it needed three or five years ago.
Increasingly, that isn’t the case.
The Conference Board data offers an interesting example. Responsibilities related to data, cybersecurity, sustainability, and other emerging priorities have become increasingly important, yet titles such as chief data officer, chief information security officer, and chief sustainability officer remain relatively uncommon among NEOs.
Those responsibilities haven’t disappeared. In many organizations, they are being incorporated into broader executive mandates instead of becoming standalone C-suite positions.
That makes the title a less useful starting point for defining an executive search. Two companies looking for a CTO, CHRO, COO, or CMO may use exactly the same title while asking those executives to solve very different problems.
The Changing CMO Role Is a Good Example
Marketing illustrates this particularly well.
Between 2021 and 2025, the number of CMOs qualifying as NEOs declined, while chief commercial officer representation increased. The research suggests that companies may be placing greater emphasis on commercialization, pricing, and revenue leadership when determining which executives occupy their most senior positions.
That doesn’t necessarily mean marketing has become less important. It may say more about how organizations are defining the role.
At some companies, the CMO remains primarily responsible for brand and marketing. At others, the position has expanded into demand generation, customer experience, digital, analytics, growth, or even broader commercial responsibilities.
Compensation data adds another dimension. Median CMO compensation among S&P 500 companies increased 26.9% in 2025, while it declined 3.1% across the Russell 3000. The researchers caution that the relatively small number of CMOs included as NEOs makes those figures more sensitive to individual compensation changes, particularly within the S&P 500.
Still, the broader point for executive hiring is useful. A company shouldn’t assume that another organization’s CMO is comparable to its own simply because the titles match. The actual mandate matters much more.
CHROs Are Moving Closer to Business Strategy
The rise of the CHRO tells another part of the story.
CHRO representation increased substantially during the period studied, and compensation rose with it. In 2025, median CHRO compensation increased 30.4% among S&P 500 companies and 14.7% across the Russell 3000.
The scope of the role has also become broader. Workforce strategy, productivity, organizational design, leadership succession, culture, talent development, change management, and the impact of new technology on work can all sit within today’s CHRO mandate.
That changes the profile of the leader an organization needs. A company hiring a CHRO based primarily on what the position required five years ago may be recruiting against a version of the job that no longer reflects its biggest challenges.
The same principle applies across the C-suite.
Define the Role Before You Define the Candidate
One of the easiest mistakes to make in executive search is defining the candidate before fully defining the job.
A company has a title, an existing job description, and a general picture of the type of executive it wants. Those inputs quickly become a list of requirements: previous titles, years of experience, industry background, company size, functional expertise, and other familiar credentials.
Those things can matter, but they shouldn’t be the starting point.
At Y Scouts, our executive search process begins with Role Visioning and Success Outcome Design. Before building the candidate profile, we work to understand what the organization actually needs this executive to accomplish, how the role fits into the leadership team, and what success should look like in the first 12 to 18 months.
That distinction becomes even more important as traditional executive roles continue to expand.
Instead of beginning with “What should our next CHRO look like?” the better starting point is understanding what the organization needs its next CHRO to accomplish. The same is true whether the search is for a CFO, COO, CMO, CTO, general counsel, or another senior leader.
Once the outcomes and mandate are clear, the candidate profile becomes much easier to define.
Compensation Needs to Reflect the Mandate, Too
The changing nature of executive roles also complicates compensation benchmarking.
Across all NEOs, median compensation increased 8.1% in the Russell 3000 and 4.7% in the S&P 500 in 2025, but compensation growth varied significantly by function. CHROs and chief legal officers were among the roles experiencing particularly strong increases.
Titles alone don’t tell you enough to understand those differences.
One company’s CTO might primarily oversee technology infrastructure. Another company’s CTO might own technology, AI strategy, cybersecurity, data, product engineering, and digital transformation. Both executives can have the same title while carrying very different levels of responsibility.
The same is increasingly true across much of the C-suite. When organizations benchmark executive compensation or build an offer, the scope and complexity of the mandate need to be part of the comparison.
Rethinking the Seat Before Starting the Search
The larger story in the data isn’t that one executive title is replacing another. It’s that organizations are adjusting their leadership structures around where value is created, where risk exists, and what the business needs next.
That makes an executive transition a useful moment to reconsider the role itself.
Before launching a search, organizations can look beyond the existing job description and consider what the business will need from that seat over the next several years, which outcomes the executive needs to deliver, which responsibilities have grown or shifted, and where accountability may currently be unclear across the leadership team.
Sometimes that process confirms that the existing role is exactly right. Other times, it changes the scope, the candidate profile, or even the title.
Either way, the search begins with a clearer definition of success.
The C-suite is evolving because the work of leading a company is evolving. The organizations that recognize that before beginning their next executive search will be better positioned to hire for where the business is going, rather than simply replacing where it has been.
