Built For One Job. Expected To Do Three.

Executive roles have expanded as organizations respond to growing complexity, leaving many senior leaders responsible for functional performance, enterprise leadership and transformation simultaneously. RRA argues that organizations should move from mandate creep to intentional role design: defining roles around the outcomes the business needs, building leadership capacity beneath executives, and deliberately distributing accountability across the leadership team.

Ask almost any senior executive how their role has changed over the past decade and the answer is unlikely to be that it has become simpler.

A generation ago, C-suite leaders were appointed to lead a clearly defined area of the business, whether in finance, operations, marketing, or people. Today, remits are much broader. Executives are still accountable for delivering excellence in their own domain, but they are also expected to shape business strategy, lead transformation, and navigate issues that extend well beyond their traditional remit.

While new responsibilities have been added to mandates, few have been removed, resulting in executive roles that are now more complex, more interconnected and, in many cases, more difficult to sustain.

Deloitte research shows that the number of skills Fortune 500 CEOs were asked to bring to the job expanded by 19% between 2018 and 2023. For COOs, role creep increased by 19% over the same period. For CHROs, it increased by 25%.

Our longitudinal analysis of job specifications from 2016 to 2025 also shows a steady broadening of the CFO role, with tech and digital skill requirements increasing 286%. Critically, CFO skill requirements did not reduce in parallel; they increased 37% over the same period.

In effect, leaders are no longer doing one job. They are doing three: leading their function, leading the enterprise, and leading transformation—all within a single role.

Expanding leadership mandates has been an effective way for businesses to respond quickly to changing business priorities, but there are limits to what role expansion alone can achieve. Roles cannot continue to grow indefinitely, and organizations eventually reach a point where adding responsibilities creates more complexity than it resolves.

Many organizations are now reaching that point. In our research of more than a thousand CEOs and C-suite leaders, only 39% say roles and responsibilities are genuinely clear inside their organization.

Here, we outline why role expansion has become the default response to change, why that approach is becoming harder to sustain, and how organizations can take a more deliberate approach to designing leadership roles for the future.

 

The expectation for leaders to 'be in three places at once' is intensifying: deliver the base business today, while also positioning the business for long-term growth, and leading transformation. And they need to do all that while also cutting costs and doing more with less.

Leadership advisor, Industrial and Natural Resources Practice, RRA

 

Why leadership roles need a reset

Across our research, a consistent pattern is emerging: the demands on leadership are changing faster than many of the structures and practices designed to support it.

39% say roles and responsibilities are genuinely clear within their organization

33% say if things stayed the same, they can see themselves still doing the job in five years

51% say they would consider a career move beyond their current function today

24% say their leadership team consistently defines roles that align to organization goals

RETHINK YOUR LEADERSHIP ROLES

Why executive role creep became the default—and its costs

Executive role creep is an understandable reaction to a fast-changing business environment. AI, geopolitical shocks, cyberattacks, supply chain disruptions, and economic volatility compound organizational risk—and all are moving faster than most businesses can cope with.

Adding more responsibilities to trusted leaders is understandably an easier—and quicker—path than taking time to redesign the role properly or making structural changes to the organization.

We call this a reliability tax. A reliability tax is levied each time new scope and new expectations land on the most trusted leaders precisely because they're trusted. It’s scope creep by default.

Each time this happens, it looks like a sensible short-term fix. But new responsibilities that get piled on are hardly ever removed. Many years later, almost no leadership role in the enterprise still looks like the job its occupant was actually hired or prepared for.

 

Part of why scope keeps accreting is reputational. It gets absorbed by whoever is trusted enough to catch it. But many CFOs were developed for a much narrower version of the role than they’re asked to do today. Leaders who succeeded through technical finance expertise, controls, and functional execution may struggle.

 Leadership advisor, Financial Officers Practice, Russell Reynolds

 

The costs show up in two places.

For organizations, mandates that grew by accretion instead of intention create real accountability gaps. Responsibilities overlap, decision rights blur, and execution slows down right when speed matters most. Leaders end up trying to be in two places at once as they run the business while trying to reinvent the business for tomorrow. The day job crowds out the strategic work the business needs most.

For leaders, the cost is more personal: a mismatch between what they were prepared for and what the role now demands. And when the strain shows, it is more often seen as a personal failing than a systemic challenge to be addressed.

Our research indicates the scale of the personal challenge to leaders. C-suite turnover hit an all-time high in 2025 across the world's largest indices, with CEO departures reaching an eight-year peak. Similarly, COO and CFO appointments hit a seven-year high.

At the same time, some 69% of C-suite leaders would consider a move beyond their current employer today and only a third of senior leaders can picture themselves in the same job five years from now.

Some organizations may see these numbers as a retention problem or a resilience problem. We believe they can be read as a design signal: the roles themselves have become harder to hold than to fill. That’s the result of unchecked scope creep and rising expectations.

RETHINK YOUR LEADERSHIP ROLES

 

You can't fix one role at a time anymore. The moment you touch what the CFO owns, you've already changed what the CEO, the COO, and the CHRO are actually responsible for. Redesign in isolation, and you've just moved the mismatch down the hall.

Steve Morse, Global Capability Leader, RRA

 

Four questions to start The Great Leadership Reset

Intentional role design is a governance discipline. It belongs on the board and CEO agenda as a recurring exercise. From our vantage point, we have seen that the organizations furthest along in this area are asking a consistent set of questions:

• Which parts of this mandate arrived by decision, and which by default? Telling the two apart is the fastest way to find the reliability tax hiding inside a role.

• If we removed the current personalities from the org chart, would this structure still support where the business needs to go? A structure that only makes sense with its current people in place is built around people, not strategy.

• Who actually owns this priority, if three people are each accountable for a piece of it? Shared enthusiasm isn't shared accountability.

• Which responsibilities will we remove to make room for what we've added? A redesign that only adds isn't a redesign.