Speaking the same language: Why leadership now depends on value translation

Leadership looks different from how it did five years ago. The leaders we speak to describe the same shift: it is less about running a function brilliantly, and more about helping other functions see why that function matters.

We are reminded by the leaders we speak to how much leadership has changed.

Few of them describe it as a single moment. Many start with 2020, then list what followed: Hybrid working, tighter scrutiny on budgets, a faster pace of technology change, and AI moving from a conference theme to a line in the plan. Almost all of them end in the same place. The job now involves a lot more time spent with peers from other parts of the business, and a lot more explaining.

This piece looks at what the research says about that shift, why it has happened, and why one skill keeps coming up: being able to describe the value you add in a way that someone from a different function would recognise and repeat.

What has changed

The ground is less certain. In Spencer Stuart's Measure of Leadership survey of 1,036 CEOs and 1,285 directors, 78% said they felt a high level of business uncertainty. Seventy-seven percent saw at least some room to improve how nimbly their organisation responds, and a quarter called their company "sluggish".

Work is harder to read. Hybrid working is one of the biggest changes since 2020. In the same study, 72% of leaders said their company had adopted a hybrid approach, but only 21% of employees described their own company's policy that way. A similar gap showed up on culture. More than three-quarters of leaders said they were actively working on it, while 51% of employees saw it that way. Spencer Stuart suggests part of the explanation may be that some organisations lack a shared language about their culture.

The skills mix has moved. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 still puts analytical thinking first among core skills, with seven in ten employers calling it essential. Resilience, flexibility and agility come next, then leadership and social influence. Compared with the 2023 edition, leadership and social influence showed a marked increase in relevance. The WEF reads this as the growing importance of adaptability and collaboration alongside cognitive skills.

Technology has moved closer to the centre of the business conversation. CIO.com's State of the CIO 2026 describes the CIO role as continuing to become more business-oriented and less purely technical. Deloitte's 2025 survey of 622 senior US technology leaders found that half had four or more C-level technology roles in their organisation. Technology is now a leadership team in its own right, and it needs to be understood by everyone else at the table.

The rules of engagement are shifting too. Josh Bersin's 2026 analysis of what has changed in leadership points to leading what he calls a "voluntary army", treating progress as iteration rather than a straight line, and a renewed focus on trust, ethics and inclusion.

Why it has changed

Several forces arrived together.

1. Pace. In Experis's CIO 2026 Outlook (1,930 technology leaders across 12 countries), 44% named the pace of technological change as their top business barrier, up from 34% a year earlier.
2. Complexity. Spencer Stuart notes that the list of challenges facing CEOs and boards seems likely to grow "to the point where few individuals can alone cope with its demands".
3. Scrutiny. Investment is being examined more closely. In the same Experis study, 54% of technology leaders said their AI investments were already producing positive returns, while 31% believed their organisation was overinvesting. Marketing budgets face a similar level of questioning.
4. Distance. Hybrid teams, larger leadership groups and more specialist roles mean fewer chance conversations. Understanding a peer's world now takes more deliberate effort.

Why cross-functional collaboration matters more now

Collaboration across the C-suite is not a new idea. Deloitte's 2019 Human Capital Trends research found that only 17% of C-suite executives regularly collaborated on long-term, interdependent work, down from 34% the year before. So the aspiration has been around for a while.

What has changed is the cost of falling short. Technology, AI and data now cut across every function, so they can't be owned by one of them. Deloitte's 2025 survey calls for "close collaboration across the C-suite to create a shared vision of technology as a driver of growth and value". Its US Chief Strategy and Technology Officer, Ranjit Bawa, adds that where the C-suite leads the shift, more value is realised, and where adoption is fragmented with no central directive, progress can slow.

Spencer Stuart reaches the same conclusion from the CEO's side: "agility and resilience demand the breaking down of siloes." Its advice is that C-suite leaders should see themselves as enterprise leaders, not just heads of a function, and that closer communication among the top team improves decision-making and removes some of the bureaucracy that slows organisations down.

The value translation gap

If collaboration is the goal, translation is what makes it possible. Every function is fluent in its own measures of success. The trouble starts when those measures are the only thing it shares with colleagues.

Two recent datasets suggest the gap is real.

• Technology. In Experis's research, 61% of technology leaders said their senior peers do not fully understand the CIO role, up from 49% a year earlier. At the same time, 48% said that aligning IT strategy with business objectives is the most important thing a CIO can do, up from 34%. It overtook cybersecurity as the top priority for the first time. These are technology leaders describing their own experience, but the direction of travel is clear.
• Marketing. A Perion and Advertiser Perceptions survey of 167 senior US and Canadian marketers (reported by Marketing Dive) found that just 21% felt completely aligned with their CFO on marketing budgets and metrics. Sixty-two percent said they need better tools to show how marketing contributes to the bottom line. The sample is small and the research was vendor-commissioned, so it is best read as a signal rather than a benchmark. Even so, it fits what many leaders tell us.

Neither finding says that technology or marketing is failing. They suggest that the value is there but is often being described in terms that only the function itself finds meaningful.

Two examples of translation in practice

How do technical solutions contribute to business outcomes?

A technology leader might say: "We have completed the migration to the new platform and reduced latency by 40%." That is a real achievement, and it tells a finance, sales or operations colleague very little.

The same achievement, translated, might sound like this: "Customers now complete orders faster, which should reduce abandoned baskets. The new platform costs less to run, and we've retired a system that carried a security risk."

The bridge usually runs through four questions:

1. Does it grow revenue? Does it make it easier to sell, retain or serve customers?
2. Does it lower cost? Does it reduce cost-to-serve, remove duplication or avoid spending?
3. Does it reduce risk? What loss, outage or exposure does it prevent?
4. Does it speed up decisions? Does it give leaders better data, sooner?

How does marketing support revenue and EBITDA?

Marketing has the opposite challenge. Its work is often described in terms of reach, engagement and brand sentiment, which are legitimate measures that a CFO has to translate before they connect to the P&L.

The translation runs through a few steps:

1. Revenue. Marketing contributes to pipeline and sales through demand creation, conversion and retention. The useful numbers are pipeline contribution, customer acquisition cost and customer lifetime value, not impressions.
2. EBITDA. Marketing influences earnings through efficiency (the cost of acquiring each customer), through margin (brand strength can reduce reliance on discounting), and through retention (keeping a customer usually costs less than winning a new one).
3. Time horizon. Part of what marketing builds, such as brand and trust, pays back over years. Finance often has to make decisions on shorter timelines. Naming that difference openly tends to be more productive than arguing past it.

One finding from the Perion study is worth noting. Among marketers working from a single, unified system, 97% said they were aligned with their CFO on budgets and metrics, compared with 66% of those whose data sat across multiple platforms. Shared definitions and a single version of the numbers appear to make the conversation easier.

Understanding the abstract

Translating your own value is half the task, and it runs in both directions. A CFO who can explain how brand, customer behaviour and retention feed future earnings makes it easier for peers to bring their own work into the same conversation. The other half is understanding the perspective a peer is working from, particularly when it is abstract, long-term or hard to measure.

Research published by Google, as summarised by Elevated Marketing Solutions, found that marketing and finance leaders broadly agreed marketing contributes to long-term growth. Marketers placed more weight on long-term brand building and positioning. Finance leaders were more likely to prioritise profitability and margin under shorter-term pressure. Neither is wrong. They are looking at the same decision through different time horizons and different definitions of risk.

Brand, technical debt, culture, cost of capital and regulatory exposure are all examples of ideas that feel concrete inside one function and abstract outside it. Leaders who can ask "what are you optimising for?" and listen to the answer tend to find the common ground sooner.

This is also why leaders look beyond their own organisation. Spencer Stuart found that 53% of CEOs were drawing on personal networks outside the business for support, and that leaders were keen to hear from one another. Peers who face similar pressures, but sit in different functions and organisations, offer a different vantage point.

3 questions to carry into the next leadership meeting

1. If a peer had to repeat my contribution back in one sentence, using their own vocabulary, what would they say?
2. What is the colleague across the table being measured on, and what would they need to see to feel confident?
3. Where do our time horizons differ, and have we said so out loud?

None of these needs a new framework. They simply invite us to get curious about how the business looks from 
another seat.

Where this leaves us

The research points the same way as the conversations. Leadership has become more collaborative because the problems have become less contained, and the leaders who make the most of it are those who can move between their own function's language and everyone else's.

That kind of fluency tends to develop through exposure, with peers from other functions, in the right setting, over time. It is a large part of why The Leadersphere exists: to bring senior leaders together so that connections formed in the right context can endure and deepen.

Sources

1. Spencer Stuart, Measure of Leadership: CEOs and Directors on Navigating Change (2024; survey of 1,036 CEOs and 1,285 directors, plus 1,225 US and UK employees): https://www.spencerstuart.com/research-and-insight/measure-of-leadership-ceos-and-directors-on-navigating-change
2. Deloitte, Tech Exec Survey press release (June 2025; 622 US senior technology leaders): https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/about/press-room/new-deloitte-tech-exec-survey-spotlights-a-moment-of-reinvention.html
3. Deloitte Insights, Team-based organizations and cross-functional collaboration, Human Capital Trends 2019: https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/talent/human-capital-trends/2019/team-based-organization.html
4. Experis (ManpowerGroup), CIO 2026 Outlook (June 2026; 1,930 technology leaders in 12 countries): https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cios-face-mounting-pressure-to-deliver-ai-roi-as-the-business-it-divide-reaches-a-new-high-302797593.html
5. Marketing Dive, The CMO-CFO relationship: Here's what the numbers say, reporting Perion and Advertiser Perceptions research (fielded Aug–Sept 2025; 167 marketers): https://finance.yahoo.com/news/cmo-cfo-relationship-numbers-094800805.html
6. World Economic Forum, The Future of Jobs Report 2025, skills outlook: https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/in-full/3-skills-outlook
7. CIO.com, State of the CIO, 2026: CIOs set the course for AI ROI: https://www.cio.com/article/4178006/state-of-the-cio-2026-cios-set-the-course-for-ai-roi.html
8. Josh Bersin, The World Is Accelerating: What Has Changed About Leadership? (February 2026): https://joshbersin.com/2026/02/the-world-is-accelerating-what-have-we-learned-about-leadership
9. Elevated Marketing Solutions, Why Your CFO and CMO May Both Be Right About Marketing (summarising Google research): https://elevatedmarketing.solutions/why-your-cfo-and-cmo-may-both-be-right-about-marketing

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