The 2026 Heidrick & Struggles CEO & Board Confidence Monitor found that while companies have become highly disciplined at delivering against strategic plans, they are far less prepared for the leadership demands that follow a CEO’s arrival or departure. Only four in 10 surveyed CEOs and board members feel confident that their CEO succession planning positions the organisation better for the future. Legoete attributes this failure to boards overestimating the depth and readiness of their internal CEO bench strength and readiness.
“A strong executive bench can fall short of being CEO-ready,” he explains. “Senior executives may perform well in the roles they already hold, while still needing deliberate preparation for the weight, visibility, and judgement required of the CEO role. Boards often underestimate how much work is needed to move internal candidates from strong executive performance to genuine CEO succession readiness.”
He adds, “Big organisations can no longer afford to muddle through extraordinary change and hope incremental adjustments will carry them through. Governance must function as foresight in action, with boards creating enough productive discomfort to challenge confirmation bias and invite dissent before decisions settle into consensus. CEO succession also has to test whether executive incentives are pushing leaders to think beyond immediate performance, and whether the people in key roles have the range to lead through what comes next rather than defend what has worked before.”
“Readiness also has to mean more than continuity. A successor might maintain current operations but fail the next chapter if the strategic context or growth agenda shift, the growth agenda has changed, or the organisation needs to move in a different direction. Boards must therefore ask what they need the next CEO to do, rather than simply looking for a better version of the current leader.”
Developing future-ready CEOs
Boards need to understand future CEO fit while the current CEO is still in place, including leaders outside the most visible executive roles. That insight must cover how these leaders think, where they have been tested, and whether their experience matches the scale of the role.
Incumbent CEOs themselves have a responsibility to identify leadership potential inside the executive bench long before succession becomes urgent. “Their role is not to create a successor in their own image, but to prepare leaders for the organisation’s future needs,” Legoete notes.
“A CEO must also not view a potential successor as someone who may one day usurp them. Most CEOs who leave an organisation aren’t specifically replaced, but rather move onto another opportunity, retire, pass away, or reach the natural end of their tenure. The responsibility is to leave the business with enough leadership depth to remain strong after they are no longer in the seat.”
The board and CEO need to work from the same talent picture, rather than treating succession as either a board exercise or an incumbent-led process. The CEO can help potential successors move beyond narrow functional or divisional experience, while the board builds its own direct understanding of talent at least three levels below the CEO.
Bringing boards closer to the bench
Boards excel at setting aside time to interrogate strategy and understand where the business is heading but are less prone to taking time to get to know the people on the executive bench. Boards need to improve the signal-to-noise ratio by cutting through the chaos of global affairs and increasing the quality of insight flowing into the business. Legoete and Watt propose a solution: institutionalising “board people days”, which are, essentially, structured sessions with no competing agenda that give boards firsthand exposure to the internal bench and high-potential leaders beyond it.
Watt explains that a people day should not be reduced to a sequence of short presentations or formal interviews. “Boards learn little from candidates who feel pressured to perform in a room built around evaluation. The point is to create enough space for directors to see how potential leaders think, speak, listen, and engage when they’re not trying to deliver their idea of the perfect answer.”
Legoete adds, “There’s a reason business lunches or meetings on the golf course became such a familiar fixture. Walking a course with someone or sharing a meal removes a lot of the formality that comes with a boardroom. People speak differently when they’re not sitting across from a panel, being asked to prove themselves. People days should create that same kind of space.”
Ultimately, the boards that will handle leadership change best are the ones that know their bench strength well before they need it, understand what the next chapter of the business will demand, dial down the noise and up the signals to the business, and refuse to let the future of the organisation depend on a rushed decision made after the departure has already unsettled the room.