My thinking has always been that great a manager should be able to go “one step down” and still do a competent but necessarily great job at any role that report

My thinking has always been that great a manager should be able to go “one step down” and still do a competent but necessarily great job at any role that reports directly to them. The CEO certainly shouldn’t be expected to have the skills of every expert across the entire organization. But if they were to be the executive in charge of Marketing/Sales/Engineering/whatever they’d ideally do a passable job. Now that is kinda unreasonable at the very top (CFOs and CLOs are very specialized roles) but from the VP level down it works out quite often.