The Three Gaps

The 3 gaps in my experience working with senior executives, the gap between manager level and C-suite level, comes down to 3 things. The first is strategic thinking. Not just understanding the strategy, but contributing to it. Being able to zoom out from your function and think about the whole organisation. Understanding how your piece fits into the bigger picture, and being able to articulate that clearly to the people above you. Most strong managers are excellent functional thinkers. The C-suite requires enterprise thinking. That's a different muscle, and it needs to be deliberately developed. The second gap is influence without authority. At the manager level, a significant part of your influence comes from your position. You have direct reports, you have a budget, you have a defined remit. At the C-suite level, much of what you need to achieve happens through people who don't report to you. It's peers, cross-functional stakeholders, the board, external partners. The ability to influence without authority, to build genuine credibility and trust across the organisation— this is one of the most important skills the C-suite effectiveness, and it's one that most managers haven't had to develop yet. The third gap is the interior game. This is the one that surprises people most. The C-suite puts you in a different kind of spotlight. The decisions are bigger, the stakes are higher, and the scrutiny is more intense. How you show up under that pressure, how settled you are, how clearly you think, How you make decisions when the data is incomplete, that is being assessed constantly. The managers who make it to the C-suite have usually done some deliberate work on this. They understand how they operate under pressure. They've closed the gap between how they think they lead and how they actually lead.