Executive Talent Magazine, Featured
CEO departures have risen to record levels. Tenures continue to fall to new lows.
The modern CEO faces an unrelenting mix of challenges, including surging internal pressure to drive business growth and performance amid social scrutiny, political tension, and economic instability. The weight of these expectations often leads to CEO burnout or boardroom dissatisfaction, resulting in high departures and shorter tenures.
In July 2025, Forbes reported that 1,358 CEOs around the globe had left their job since the start of the year – “more than the entirety of 2022.” According to Russell Reynolds Associates, “The average tenure for outgoing CEOs fell to 6.8 years in the first half of 2025, down from 7.7 years during the same period in 2024—the lowest H1 figure since we began tracking CEO turnover in 2018.”
Changing Times: The Reasons for Today’s Increased Turnovers
The rate at which CEOs choose to depart their current position or are asked to step down is rising at an incredible rate due to a multitude of factors. “CEO tenures are shortening as organisations confront mounting complexity, shifting stakeholder demands, and accelerated cycles of disruption,” says Yvonne Pengue, Director at executive search firm spot on minds Ltd.
WittKieffer’s Managing Director Jennifer Borrer and Global Leader for Commercial Strategy & Insights Saule Serikova agree that today’s CEOs face an “unprecedented convergence of challenges. To start, CEO tenure has shortened dramatically: while tenures of 10 to 15 years were common in the 1980s and 1990s, the global average CEO tenure today is around 7 to 8 years, with many leaving after just 5. This means executives must demonstrate impact more quickly.”
This shortened window to drive growth is compounded by a “complex web of emerging and intensifying pressures, such as geopolitical instability, cybersecurity threats, AI ethical dilemmas, talent shortages, public scrutiny, and relentless financial expectations,” Borrer and Serikova explain. “This dual phenomenon — the compression of time to deliver results, coupled with the exponential expansion of leadership responsibilities – has fundamentally transformed the CEO role.”
Ralica Yancheva, Senior Partner for IT & Digital at Norecu Executive Search GmbH, frequently works with boards facing complex CEO transitions in volatile market environments. Yancheva credits the increased turnover to unrealistic demands of the role.
“In today’s volatile environment, expectations placed on CEOs have increased significantly, particularly in markets like Germany, where companies are simultaneously navigating recession, transformation of business models, digitalization, and demographic shifts,” says Yancheva. “Boards often seek CEOs who can ‘walk on water,’ expected to fix long-standing issues that were neglected for years. This creates unrealistic demands and a high risk of failure.”
Edgility Search Founder and Chief Executive Officer Christina Greenberg attributes some of the shift to the pandemic and its after-affects. She explains that from 2020 into part of 2022, many boards and selection committees hired CEOs via virtual interactions rather than the typical in-depth, in-person engagements they held with candidates prior to the pandemic. This may have “limited their ability to establish strong, enduring connections and to reach a deeper level of understanding with one another from the beginning. Also, as everyone’s lives were upended, leaders sometimes found themselves making job and life decisions that made sense at the time, but after living with them for a while, felt untenable and so they decided they needed to make a quicker change.”
Ripple Effect: The Repercussions of Fast Turnovers
Despite the reasons behind shorter tenues, when a CEO leaves, it’s a shock to their organizations.
“CEO turnover is not only accelerating – it’s leaving a wider blast radius. The impact of unplanned exits is more volatile, more visible, and more existential,” says executive search firm Watson Board Advisors.
Because the CEO is inseparable from a company’s strategy, performance and culture increased turnover can destabilize a company with decreased investor and employee confidence, increased financial costs, and a loss of institutional knowledge.
“The stakes could not be higher. When CEO transitions falter, organizations do not just lose momentum — they risk strategic drift, talent exodus, culture fragmentation, and eroded stakeholder confidence,” underscore Borrer and Serikova.
One of the largest effects of CEO turnover is the high financial cost. According to TRANSEARCH, the cost of losing and replacing a CEO “can translate to as much as 213% of a c-suite level employees’ salary.” The overall economic cost can reach more than $100 billion at global companies, reports Spencer Stuart. To mitigate disruption and financial fallout, organizations must place higher emphasis on CEO succession planning.
Succession Planning as Strategy
Too often, boards and selection committees postpone CEO succession until the current CEO leaves or is pushed out. To mitigate the chaos of CEO turnover, organizations must shift their thinking toward succession as a core business strategy.
“These shifts in the leadership landscape have elevated CEO succession planning from a periodic governance exercise to a strategic imperative and the main responsibility of boards,” say Borrer and Serikova. “Boards must recognize that CEO succession is not a discrete event but an ongoing process of strategic importance.”
“Boards are rethinking succession, not as a one-time decision, but as a continuous, strategic discipline,” Pengue concurs. “Leadership pipelines must evolve from static lists into adaptive ecosystems that track readiness, learning agility, and contextual fit.”
Greenberg has seen first-hand an increased level of interest in succession planning and transition support from organizations. “Some CEOs and board members have even contacted us 18-24 months before they are announcing a transition to start to think through their options.”
Proactive Succession Planning Lessons Learned
As organizations around the globe tackle high CEO turnover, several new priorities and lessons have emerged:
1. Make succession a full-board priority.
Watson Board Advisors recommends that boards elevate CEO succession “into the governance calendar with deliberate scenario testing and emergency preparedness. At the center: a clear, forward-looking CEO Success Profile, focused on what will differentiate and accelerate a future leader, and what might derail them.”
2. Ensure alignment and organizational integration.
Norecu Executive Search Managing Partner Marlind Scharpf, who advises extensively in the public sector and has deep experience with planned successions and long-term leadership continuity, explains “Even at the C-level, leadership should not operate in a feedback vacuum. Whether contracts are fixed or open-ended, regular, structured check-ins between shareholders and executives are essential to align expectations and foster development.”
3. Involve the outgoing CEO.
Scharpf advises organizations actively involve the outgoing CEO – “not as the decision-maker for their successor, but as a source of valuable context regarding the organization’s current challenges and the shareholder relationship. Respect for their contribution and structured knowledge transfer are key.”
4. Expand the successor slate and strategic optionality.
Watson Board Advisors suggests: “Go beyond the 1-2 ‘obvious’ candidates. Map a dynamic pipeline – internal and external – to see the full chessboard of moves and implications. Assess and develop the full executive bench so the organization is ready and resilient for range of scenarios.”
5. Implement phased onboarding and/or interim roles.
Several consultants noted the importance of sufficient onboarding, typically well beyond the initial 90 days and sometimes extending through the first year. In some cases, consultants advocated for deploying interim leadership as a means of transition or mentorship. Borrer and Serikova explain “strategic deployment of interim leadership can provide valuable breathing room, enabling more thoughtful transitions, accelerating critical strategic initiatives, or offering much-desired mentorship to first-time CEOs navigating unfamiliar terrain.”
“Interim leadership, once seen as a stopgap, is increasingly used as a strategic lever to enable recalibration, deepen stakeholder engagement, and support cultural realignment,” says Pengue. Yancheva provides an example of how Norecu Executive Search has recently used phased onboarding: “In one recent case, we created an interim leadership role, giving the incoming CEO 6–12 months to understand the business before formally taking over.”
6. Stress-test readiness of leadership and the board.
Not only should organizations have a forward-facing approach when it comes to external candidates, but they should also extend that mindset to developing internal talent. Such an approach “enables the identification and development of internal talent well before needs arise, providing potential successors with meaningful opportunities to grow and develop their leadership competencies — ultimately strengthening both their current performance and organizational effectiveness,” explain Borrer and Serikova.
Watson Board Advisors recommends organizations “use stretch roles, structured coaching, and robust assessment to develop executives readiness and agility under pressure. For the board, use scenarios and table-tops to refine the playbook and skills that accelerate decisions in volatile conditions.”
7. Use robust leadership diagnostics.
Every consultant stressed that robust leadership diagnostics and assessments are critical to ensuring candidates not only meet technical criteria but also align in personality, values, cultural fit, and leadership potential.
Spot on minds says “The most forward-looking boards now expect incoming CEOs to articulate not only their track record, but a concrete, actionable growth thesis rooted in the organisation’s specific context. This shift is reshaping how candidates are assessed: not just on operational competence, but on their ability to interpret the present and define a credible path to long-term value creation.”
A Path Forward: Navigating the Tenure of the Modern CEO
As organizations around the world continue to navigate the tenure of the modern CEO role, they must reshape how they think about leadership transitions and succession planning. “By treating succession as a continuous governance priority rather than a reactive necessity, boards can transform one of their most significant risks into a powerful catalyst for organizational renewal and sustained performance,” say Borrer and Serikova.
“The boards that outperform in succession are the ones that lean into tension, challenge assumptions, and make leadership a shared, strategic act,” adds Watson Board Advisors.
