The majority of executives I meet and coach have reached the C-suite in one of two typical ways. The first, internal promotion, has forever been the most common path to the top team. (Insiders account for 77% of all CEOs appointed as part of planned successions between 2012 and 2015.) The second path, external recruitment, includes outside appointees who move into the C-suite immediately, as well as individuals hired as “number twos” who later ascend into a top spot.

Although there is a science to reaching the C-suite along these predictable paths, it is more novel, and perhaps more instructive, to look at leaders who manage to do it differently. These nontraditional paths to the top show that there are multiple ways to reach the C-suite, and opportunities arise when executives can prove their value in distinctive ways:

The Consulting Path. This path to the C-suite is particularly promising when a consultant not only has an unvarnished perspective on emerging industry dynamics and is recognized by its executives, but also when they have an inside-outsider perspective. For example, my past colleague Ruba Borno landed on Cisco’s executive team by way of Big Three consulting. Currently chief of staff to CEO Chuck Robbins, Borno advised Cisco in a management consulting capacity at Boston Consulting Group. At BCG, Borno specialized in digital transformation, postmerger integration, and strategy execution—all things that were core to Cisco’s business. Her on-target knowledge, combined with her familiarity with Cisco operations and executives, made her uniquely suited for the execution-focused role of chief of staff.

Note that this path can be a pipeline into operational C-level roles, like Borno’s, or more general C-suite jobs.

The M&A Path. Mergers and acquisitions drives structural changes in organizations that carve openings for new executive roles. For instance, when a large company acquires a start-up, founding officers may be kept on for the purpose of continuity. Yoky Matsuoka, for one, was vice president of technology at Nest in 2014, when Google acquired the company. Matsuoka left Google to be CEO of a health-data startup, but she returned to Nest in 2017 as chief technology officer. In an acquisition situation, executives are most valuable to acquiring firms when they have deep institutional knowledge and (in the case of tech start-ups) technical familiarity with the acquired product or business. The rub is that post-acquisition executives are seldom brought directly into the C-suite. They often land several levels down and need additional experience before getting in line for a top job.

Board to C-suite. As an extension of the C-suite, board members play a governing role in CEO successions. Less often, board members themselves move into traditional C-suite roles. Research shows that outside directors moved into CEO roles 58 times in Fortune 1000 companies between 2005 and 2016. As the study points out, directors can be an attractive option for the top team because of their experience and big-picture perspective.

Yet, according to one expert I interviewed recently, this path may signal dysfunction in the boardroom. He told me that sourcing a CEO from the sitting board can reflect an organization’s lack of readiness for the succession. In addition, directors turned CEO don’t stay in place long, with those named on an interim basis remaining less than six months and those named permanently staying an average of 3.3 years.