Study date: 9 August 2026
Institution: MTF Institute
Author: MTF Institute Editorial Team
Faculty reviewer: Igor Dmitriev

Abstract

This pilot study asks which capability families were explicitly requested in a small cross-sector snapshot of English-language senior-management vacancies. Ten employer-controlled applicant-tracking pages were captured on 9 August 2026 and coded against eight predefined capability families. Strategy, execution/operations and stakeholder communication appeared in all ten listings. Commercial or financial capability appeared in nine; people leadership in nine; data or evidence capability in eight; AI or broader digital capability in eight; and governance or risk capability in three. The result should not be interpreted as a labour-market prevalence estimate. It is a transparent pilot showing how senior-role demand can be converted from anecdote into a reproducible evidence table.

Research question

Which broad management capability families are explicitly present in a purposive pilot sample of current senior-management vacancies, and how often do they co-occur?

Why this question matters

Executive-skills commentary often isolates one fashionable capability—AI, strategy, leadership or finance. Actual senior roles combine capabilities. A vacancy can ask one person to set direction, operate a system, influence stakeholders, lead people, interpret evidence and own commercial outcomes. The unit of analysis should therefore be the capability portfolio, not a ranked list of disconnected buzzwords.

Method

Sampling frame

The study used public, employer-controlled Greenhouse vacancy pages discoverable through four English-language search queries on 9 August 2026:

  1. site:job-boards.greenhouse.io/jobs "Director" "[Button: Apply]" "2026" "strategy"
  2. site:job-boards.greenhouse.io "Head of" "[Button: Apply]" "leadership" "2026"
  3. site:job-boards.greenhouse.io "Vice President" "[Button: Apply]" "strategy" "2026"
  4. site:job-boards.greenhouse.io "Executive Director" "[Button: Apply]" "2026"

This is a purposive pilot, not a probability sample. It deliberately favours pages that are publicly readable and sufficiently detailed for coding.

Inclusion criteria

  • English-language vacancy.
  • Senior title containing Director or Executive Director.
  • Public employer-controlled applicant-tracking page.
  • An active application interface was visible in the captured page or current indexed page.
  • Responsibilities or requirements contained enough text to code at least four capability families.

Exclusion criteria

  • Agency reposts without an identifiable employer role.
  • Duplicate vacancies.
  • Pages that redirected to a general jobs catalogue and no longer exposed the sampled role at collection time.
  • Roles below the selected senior-title boundary.
  • Pages requiring authentication.

Two initially discovered records (Flex Director, Revenue Strategy and Operations; GiveDirectly Director, Mothers & Babies) were excluded after their URLs redirected to general job catalogues during verification. They were replaced with currently exposed records meeting the same criteria.

Unit of analysis

One vacancy page equals one record. The coding tests whether a capability family is explicitly present at least once; it does not count keyword frequency.

Coding framework

Capability family Inclusion rule
Strategy Explicit ownership of strategy, planning, strategic choices or direction
Execution / operations Implementation, operating systems, delivery, scaling or process ownership
People leadership Hiring, line management, mentoring, coaching, team development or culture ownership
Stakeholder communication Cross-functional influence, clients, partners, boards, C-suite or external representation
Commercial / financial Revenue, growth, pricing, fundraising, finance, P&L, capital allocation or deal responsibility
Data / evidence Analytics, research, KPIs, measurement, evaluation, models or evidence-based decisions
AI / digital Explicit AI, automation, digital platform, digital-channel or technology-enabled responsibility
Governance / risk Board governance, compliance, controls, risk, safeguarding or regulatory responsibility

The binary code is 1 when the vacancy explicitly meets the rule and 0 when it does not. A zero means “not explicit in the captured text,” not “unimportant to the role.”

Source inventory

The ten employer-controlled vacancy pages captured on 9 August 2026 were:

  1. Instiglio — Director, Anglophone Africa
  2. DoorDash — Director, Strategy & Operations, New Business
  3. Keep A Child Alive — Executive Director, US
  4. Ogilvy UK — Social Strategy Director
  5. DEPT — Associate Director, Social & Content Strategy
  6. DoorDash — Director, Enterprise Sales & Strategic Partnerships
  7. Home Solutions — Director of Strategy & Business Operations
  8. Engine — Director, Sales Enablement
  9. GiveDirectly — Director, Global Talent Acquisition
  10. PagerDuty — Director of Pricing & Monetization

The PagerDuty page was withdrawn after initial capture and before final publication review. It remains in this explicitly time-bounded snapshot because it met the inclusion rule when collected.

Results

Aggregate counts

Capability family Vacancies coded present Share of pilot sample
Strategy 10 of 10 100%
Execution / operations 10 of 10 100%
Stakeholder communication 10 of 10 100%
Commercial / financial 9 of 10 90%
People leadership 9 of 10 90%
Data / evidence 8 of 10 80%
AI / digital 8 of 10 80%
Governance / risk 3 of 10 30%

Calculation

For each capability family:

pilot share = records coded 1 / 10 × 100

The complete row-level coding, source URLs and notes are preserved in coded-vacancies.csv.

Interpretation

1. Senior roles are strategy-to-execution roles

Every sampled vacancy combined strategy with execution or operations. The practical signal is not that executives should choose between “strategic” and “operational” identity. Employers describe senior value as the ability to translate direction into systems, priorities, delivery and measurable outcomes.

2. Stakeholder work is part of the job, not a soft add-on

All ten records explicitly required cross-functional, client, partner, board, C-suite or external influence. Communication is therefore better understood as an operating mechanism: it aligns decisions, resources and action across boundaries.

3. Commercial and evidence capabilities travel together

Nine vacancies contained commercial or financial responsibility, while eight required analytics, research, KPIs, modelling or evidence. The pattern suggests that senior managers are expected to connect recommendations to economic consequences and observable results.

4. AI appears inside a broader management portfolio

Eight records included AI, automation, digital platforms or digital-channel responsibility. Yet none presented digital fluency as a substitute for strategy, execution or stakeholder management. In this pilot, AI is a force multiplier embedded in general management work—not an isolated executive identity.

5. Governance may be under-observed by generic searches

Only three records explicitly met the governance/risk rule. This does not show that governance is unimportant. The search strategy emphasised “strategy” and “leadership,” and the sample over-represents commercial and technology-oriented employers. A later stratified study should deliberately sample regulated sectors and board, risk, compliance and public-administration roles.

A practical executive capability portfolio

The pilot supports a five-part development model:

  1. Set direction: frame choices, priorities and trade-offs.
  2. Build execution: translate direction into operating rhythms, resources and accountable delivery.
  3. Mobilise people: lead teams and influence stakeholders across organisational boundaries.
  4. Prove value: use financial, commercial and evidence-based reasoning to test outcomes.
  5. Govern change: use AI and digital tools within explicit risk, control and accountability boundaries.

This model is a synthesis from the coded co-occurrence pattern, not a claim that the five parts have been causally validated.

Implications for executive development

The practical development question is not whether a leader should learn strategy, finance, operations, people management or AI in isolation. It is whether the leader can combine those capabilities in one accountable decision process. A useful learning plan should therefore produce evidence across direction-setting, execution, stakeholder alignment, economic reasoning and governed digital adoption.

Leaders seeking an integrated professional pathway can review MTF Institute's Advanced Executive Program in Management & Business Administration. It is professional education rather than an academic degree; prospective learners should compare its published curriculum and assessment model with their own development goals.

Limitations

  • Ten records are too few for population inference.
  • The sample is purposive, English-language and platform-specific.
  • Search-engine ranking affects discovery and is not stable over time.
  • United States, technology, marketing and mission-driven organisations are over-represented.
  • Binary coding ignores the intensity and seniority of each requirement.
  • Job advertisements describe employer intent; they do not prove how work is performed after hiring.
  • Active vacancies can change or disappear. One sampled vacancy was withdrawn after initial capture and before final publication review. The source inventory records URLs and collection date, but copyrighted vacancy text is not redistributed in full.
  • Single-coder judgement can introduce classification error. The faculty review corrected one AI/digital code during the final integrity check.