CEO tenure is declining, and it could be related to how long boards are willing to remain patient with a CEO’s performance.
shows that the window for chief executives to prove themselves is narrowing. “In 2023, CEO s who departed their role had been in seat for 8.4 years. However, we’re now at the stage where outgoing CEO s have been in their role for 7.
2 years, and that tenure continues to go down,” says Laura Sanderson, who oversees Russell Reynolds’ Board & CEO Advisory Partners team throughout Europe. That decline isn’t just a statistic. It could signal a fundamental shift in how boards evaluate leadership, how long they’re willing to remain patient with a CEO’s performance, and what skills CEOs must have to survive in a volatile era.At the simplest level, CEO tenure comes down to performance. If the company isn’t delivering against expectations, then the board faces pressure to act. Yet, Sanderson notes that the relationship between performance and turnover isn’t as linear as one might think. While some CEOs leave in quick order for non-performance, others manage to hold on to their jobs for longer than expected. “There’s an interesting question around how patient boards are willing to be. There’s also an interesting question around how that level of patience changes depending on where the CEO is in their tenure,” says Sanderson. Still, underperformance doesn’t always trigger immediate change. In fact, Sanderson highlights two scenarios in which underperforming CEOs tend to remain in place longer than expected. “Keeping underperforming CEOs is really interesting, and boards won’t often keep these underperforming CEOs except in certain circumstances.” Sanderson then refers to CEO exit patterns that are apparent in the CEO Turnover Index. “Our turnover index shows that in times of high external uncertainty, boards don’t like to change their CEO. The feeling is to hang on to what we’ve got because we don’t want to layer disruption on disruption by changing the CEO out.” As for the second circumstance when CEOs stay past their proverbial expiration date, it’s quite surprising: meet the “hero” CEO. “CEOs that stick around for a long time can become these types of ‘hero’ CEOs,” says Sanderson. “The fact that they are the CEO has an effect on the share price.” What surprises Sanderson is how many of these hero CEOs are underperforming — but remain in role due to their status.While boards may exhibit surprising patience for performance issues, the same cannot be said for reputational risk. Boards are almost always more patient with underperformance than with a scandal. Misconduct, ethics controversies, or anything that threatens brand trust tends to trigger immediate action. Which makes sense — key performance indicators can be fixed, but reputational contamination is harder to contain.Barclays tracks the level of shareholder activism globally , and reported that Q3 of 2025 had the most shareholder activism events on record — ever.“The first thing that activists tend to campaign for is a change of CEO,” says Sanderson. Because of this, “boards are being too impatient and wanting to change out CEOs too quickly.”“The most important skill to be an effective CEO is the ability to adapt — and to enable your organization to learn and adapt. That requires CEOs who are enterprise-wide thinkers. They’re not leading through command and control. They may be in the CEO seat, but they’re going to throw decisions over to the person who is best placed to take the lead. And that interplay is going to be very free-flowing and improvisational,” says Sanderson. Sanderson notes that there is a “confident humility” in this new brand of CEO that boards and companies are seeking out. They’re looking for leaders who hold conviction, but not rigidity. Leaders who surround themselves with experts and listen to them. CEOs who don’t feel that they have to be superhuman. A CEO who wants to have staying power would do well to embrace this approach.
CEO Turnover CEO Turnover Index Board Pressure CEO Ceos Job Security New Leadership
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