What makes a great executive? Is there a specific set of skills that marks someone as an effective leader? The short answer is that yes, there are powerful executive skills that any leader should take the time to learn. The longer answer is that these abilities and competencies vary widely — some are highly specific, while others are general, overarching soft skills that touch every corner of your work.

Executive education programs provide a helpful way to build your leadership competency. By engaging directly with industry-leading faculty members and networking with ambitious fellow participants, you can gain a thorough view of the way great leaders truly function today, adding to your personal tool kit.

Whether you're taking on age-old competencies or gaining cutting-edge knowledge of how to manage people in today's business environment, there's value in specifically targeting your executive skills.

Read more: Learn the power of soft skills in management or find out how to build a future-ready organization.

What are executive skills?

Simply put, executive skills are the abilities that allow executive leaders to thrive in their roles. Some of these abilities are specific, hard technical skills, dealing with subject matter expertise and aptitude; the majority of executive competencies are soft communication skills.

Soft skills are interpersonal abilities, circling around emotional intelligence and an executive's ability to engage their fellow workers and encourage them to align with the company's mission. Collaboration, motivation, mentorship, and more are all soft skills, and they're all essential pieces of the executive tool kit.

Skill sets tailored for today's leaders

Leadership styles in general have evolved in recent years to support this focus on highly developed soft skills. Today's managers are more focused on coaching and motivation, which is a contrast with old-fashioned command and control models. Excelling in this people-development environment is something that can be learned and nurtured through executive education.

For an executive with ambitious long-term goals, simply receiving a promotion into a leadership role isn't enough. Once there, you need to feel equipped to thrive within the position. This is the true value case for executive education focused on skill-building, equipping you to be a better day-to-day people leader. 

Read more: See how skilled executives can take the reins on complicated matters like building organizational resilience and implementing strategic change.

Top executive skills to develop

Rather than one standard list of leadership skills to develop, there are a few different frameworks and collections of abilities you can work within. Within the context of MIT Sloan Executive Education's offerings, these include the 4-Caps+ Framework and inquiry for problem-solving, each of which is worth exploring in detail.

The 4-Caps+ Framework

This list of key competencies is a living concept, constantly growing and developing: the "4-Caps" in the title are four key capacities, and the "+" reflects the addition of "building credibility" as a key leadership competency. As the framework stands today, it consists of:

• Visioning: Developing a vision for a new project that inspires you and uplifts the other members of your team.
• Relating: Staying attuned to the feelings and options of your teammates, alongside influencing decisions and negotiating with others.
• Inventing: Combining creativity and practicality to develop new and interesting ways to get things done and bring your visions to life as practical products and solutions.
• Sensemaking: Creating order out of uncertainty and taking in new information wherever you can get it, while always being on the lookout for interesting and helpful new concepts.
• Building Credibility: Acting with integrity and gaining the respect of colleagues. This is both a condition of the other four capacities and a result of them, and is a central leadership priority.

The framework is dominated by soft, interpersonal skills based on emotional intelligence. These are the abilities that elevate someone to executive success regardless of their chosen field or duties. The model was developed by a team of MIT faculty members, led by Deborah Ancona, and is updated to reflect their observations about what really works for great leaders today.

Inquiry for problem-solving

Another powerful executive skill is inquiry. This means learning to ask the right questions and then use those as springboards into developing powerful new solutions. Leaders who are able to ask "catalytic" questions are able to generate several useful outcomes, including:

• Fostering transformative change: Shepherding teams and whole organizations through periods of transformation without losing their identity, a vital skill amid ever-shifting norms.
• Shifting behaviors and beliefs: Encouraging changes in individual approaches to get a team on board with overall evolution and embrace new paradigms.
• Generating value: Drawing value out of individual contributions and raising the overall performance of the company through prescient decision-making.

These methods are under development by the MIT Leadership Center, led by Executive Director Hal Gregersen. Taking questions as a starting point is an open-ended approach that has evolved to incorporate new technologies and methods, recently including AI-enhanced reasoning.

Read more: See an example of executive skills in action from Suzanne Abair, CEO of the Atlanta Dream.

How to build your executive skills

Actively pursuing executive education from a top institution is the most reliable way to develop leadership skills. Beyond the framework of undergraduate education and graduate degrees, there are countless non-degree certificates and individual courses that directly target leadership as a subject and can bring you in contact with the most prominent thinkers in the field.

One prominent reason to keep updating your skills through executive education is the ability to gain insights into the current needs and demands of leadership. For instance, with so much integration of AI into everyday business processes, it's worth asking what AI-specific leadership abilities look like. There are courses that can teach you those exact concepts.

Other valuable topics include the evergreen question of how best to lead an innovative business and how to get the most out of your people. Leaders in the tech field can study the unique challenges and rewards of directing IT teams and technical personnel, while executives in specific situations, like family offices, can gain insights relevant to their situations.

MIT Sloan Executive Education Offerings in Leadership

With a world-class faculty and infrastructure, MIT Sloan Executive Education's courses can bring you up to date on the management skills modern executive leaders need. Valuable courses to try include:

• Transforming Your Leadership Strategy: This course is dedicated to the ongoing evolution away from top-down control-based leadership toward styles based on cultivating and coordinating employee performance. It introduces participants to the MIT-developed Distributed Leadership Model.
• Global Executive Academy: This extensive eight-day program confers an Executive Certificate in Management & Leadership. Its curriculum covers a full spectrum of management topics: general management, leadership presence, enterprise strategy, systems thinking, innovation, negotiation, analytics, finance, and productivity.

Ready to develop your executive skill set?

Whether your primary goal is to move up within your organization or you're building a resume to target other open executive roles, building your abilities through dedicated soft skill learning can help. Both achieving leadership positions and excelling within those roles can depend on a strong, up-to-date 

MIT Sloan Executive Education is uniquely positioned to provide a strong grounding in management skills, with an expert faculty innovating in the space and a group of motivated fellow participants for collaboration and networking.

Enroll in courses like Transforming Your Leadership Strategy or programs including the Global Executive Academy and add to your personal executive skills list.