Start by putting yourself in the shoes of your fellow C-suite leaders. Understand what’s keeping them up at night. When you align your work with their goals and challenges, not just your own, you stop being a functional leader and start becoming a trusted partner.
Empathy isn’t a “soft skill” in this context. It’s a business imperative.
Why Empathy is a Strategic Superpower
Empathy builds high-performing executive teams. It enables you to:
- Break silos: Cross-functional collaboration starts with mutual understanding.
- Make better decisions: Consider long-term impacts on all departments.
- Drive alignment: Shared goals are easier to build when you know what matters to your peers.
Empathy also raises the bar. When you genuinely understand a leader’s constraints and pressures, you earn the right to hold them, and yourself, to a higher standard.
Thanks for reading Profitable Growth! This post is public so feel free to share it.
Inside the C‑Suite: 2025 Priorities & Pressures
Below is a quick snapshot of what your peers are up against this year and how you can show up as a real partner.
🎯 Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)
- Top Challenge: Proving ROI, especially for brand building, amidst a constantly changing, AI-influenced marketing mix. They need cost-effective lead generation and long-term brand equity.
- Key Focus: Championing the brand, unifying messaging, aligning customer-facing teams, and crafting compelling customer experiences.
- Pressure Point: Demonstrating measurable results for marketing spend while navigating algorithm changes and budget shifts that don’t yield instant results.
Strategic Partner Takeaway: CMOs need agile yet stable strategies. Support them by connecting operational efficiencies to innovative marketing programs and understanding that quick pivots don’t always yield instant results.
📈 Chief Revenue Officer (CRO)
- Top Challenge: The relentless pressure of hitting revenue targets month after month (“starting from zero”), improving sales rep performance and efficiency, and expanding revenue streams (upsell, cross-sell, new markets).
- Key Focus: Driving revenue growth, optimizing the sales process, increasing conversions and Average Revenue Per User (ARPU), and ensuring strong alignment with Marketing, Product, and Success teams.
- Pressure Point: Constantly needing to adapt to market shifts, which may require experimentation and unplanned resources.
Strategic Partner Takeaway: CROs need room to experiment. Partner creatively on funding pilot initiatives, understanding that a shared focus on ROI means embracing “fail fast” learning when necessary.
🙋♂️ Chief Customer Officer (CCO)
- Top Challenge: Championing customer-centricity often with underinvested internal tools, while reducing cost-to-serve and churn, increasingly leveraging AI responsibly.
- Key Focus: Advocating for the customer, gathering post-purchase feedback, pushing for a customer-centric culture, and leveraging data for customer insights.
- Pressure Point: Balancing the need for resources to enhance customer experience and support internal teams against pressures to reduce costs and improve margins, especially as organizational complexity grows.
Strategic Partner Takeaway: Help the CCO by advocating for integrated solutions where every function contributes to a seamless customer journey and experience, fostering a true 360-degree view of the customer.
🧠 Chief Product Officer (CPO)
- Top Challenge: Translating AI investments—especially generative AI—into measurable outcomes like greater efficiency and personalized services. Balancing long-term product vision with current market demands is a constant tension.
- Key Focus: Harmonizing innovation with customer needs, influencing internal stakeholders, and aligning cross-functional teams to drive product development that builds long-term enterprise value.
- Pressure Point: 35% of product leaders cite stakeholder alignment as a primary challenge. 60% of CPOs report feeling lonely in their role, and nearly half say they lack organizational empowerment to experiment or take risks.
Strategic Partner Takeaway: CPOs thrive with robust data and true cross-functional collaboration. Support them by advocating for experimentation, backing long-term bets, and reducing organizational friction that blocks product-led growth.
💻 Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
- Top Challenge: Scaling infrastructure while addressing tech debt. What got the company to its current stage (monolithic architecture, rapid feature shipping) may now be holding it back.
- Key Focus: Transitioning to scalable systems, reducing bugs and outages, mentoring engineering talent, and protecting long-term code quality amid shifting priorities.
- Pressure Point: Engineering teams often have to deal with context switching, leading to burnout, growing technical debt, and frustration. Junior engineers need mentorship, not just pressure to deliver fast.
Strategic Partner Takeaway: CTOs often need to balance scale innovation with maintaining stability. Be a true ally by aligning technology investments with business priorities and reinforcing best practices in quality, risk, and team development.
👥 Chief People Officer (CPO/CHRO)
- Top Challenge: Building leadership capabilities at every level. 51% cite manager development as a top priority, especially as orgs scale quickly.
- Key Focus: Embedding a strong culture, addressing wage inflation, and managing HR issues that often stay behind closed doors but consume significant time and energy.
- Pressure Point: People teams face economic pressures (61% cite wage inflation, 45% cite cost management) yet often lack analytics support to justify strategic programs.
Strategic Partner Takeaway: Support the People function by aligning budget decisions with investments in culture, leadership, and wellness –key levers for long-term performance and retention.
💰 Chief Financial Officer (CFO)
- Top Challenge: Balancing growth and efficiency. 70% of CFOs report difficulty reducing costs without hurting performance, while still being expected to fund new initiatives.
- Key Focus: Financial forecasting, enterprise-wide data ownership, and serving as the organization’s “single source of truth” for performance and decision-making.
- Pressure Point: The pressure to adopt AI is rising, but finance is more cautious due to risk and compliance implications. Add to that market volatility, which makes forecasting even more difficult.
Strategic Partner Takeaway: CFOs prioritize data, risk, and accountability. Partner by bringing forward cost-aware strategies that are aligned with performance goals, while enabling selective, smart innovation.
Final Thought: Collective Leadership Wins
Becoming a true strategic partner to your fellow execs starts with empathy. Step into their shoes. Earned the right to hold others and yourself to a higher standard, because you’ve taken the time to really understand what’s on the line for them. That’s how great teams align faster and push each other to be better.
What has been your experience? Anything else you’d add or change?
