Changes at the top of American companies are accelerating. According to the Russell Reynolds CEO Turnover Index, the global average tenure of a departing CEO will be 7.1 years in 2025, up from 8.3 years in 2021. Decreasing tolerance for poor performance and behavior, increasing activist pressure, and intensifying technological, geopolitical, demographic, and stakeholder demands are reshaping their role, favoring agility over stability. For boards, the implications are clear. CEO turnover is becoming more frequent and more significant.
But while many corporate boards profess to seek “future-ready” CEOs, their selection processes often remain traditional and backward-looking. In a world defined by complexity, uncertainty, and confusion, inconsistency creates risk. Boards can strengthen succession and selection by incorporating future readiness as a key lens throughout the hiring process. Four practical shifts can move boards closer to that goal.
1. Start with the future, not the resume
Recruiting a forward-thinking CEO starts with basing your search on the company's future, not its past. Amid uncertainty about a company's vision and strategy, boards can identify key inflection points going forward. These include the adoption of AI and artificial intelligence, technological disruption, changing competitive dynamics, supply instability, changing consumer behavior, and changing stakeholder expectations. By aligning on where the company needs to go, boards can translate those mandates into the capabilities and characteristics that matter most.
This future-first approach turns traditional models on their head. Rather than scrutinizing resumes for background and proven strategies, boards should ask what capabilities will enable them to succeed in an ambiguous and volatile environment. Leaders who demonstrate agility to learn, comfort with ambiguity, narrative building, energy generation, focus and simplification, and sound judgment during structural change and crisis are often better positioned for future performance than those with a track record firmly in the rearview mirror.
2. Test your judgment, not just your track record.
Good results are necessary but not sufficient. Decisions made under pressure and uncertainty reveal much more about preparedness than the results achieved in stable conditions. Boards should examine how candidates made critical calls with incomplete information, balanced short-term performance with long-term updates, adapted when circumstances unexpectedly changed, elevated their teams, and proactively managed reputational risk.
Exploring a candidate's decision-making story – how they considered trade-offs, took stakeholder perspectives, learned from customers and competitors, and corrected themselves after failures – provides insight into not just what they deliver, but how they think. This is often the clearest indicator of cognitive agility in volatile environments.
3. Assess the CEO-chair relationship before day one
The CEO-chairman relationship is critical to sustainable value creation and effectively addressing future risks and opportunities. Forward-looking CEOs need a chair who can challenge them constructively, translate board expectations into focus, and act as a strategic partner.
During selection, boards should examine the candidate's philosophy in working with the board, approach to sharing bad news, role expectations, time allocation, and early engagement, especially during the first 100 days. Boards also need to pressure test candidates on how they respond to challenges, show empathy and listening, and demonstrate candor and appropriate vulnerability.
4. Seek corporate leadership, not functional excellence
Finally, forward-thinking CEOs must be leaders of their companies, true “connectors of the dots.” Disruption cuts across silos, and functional excellence alone rarely equips leaders with the ability to align vision, strategy, culture, and execution. Boards should look for evidence that candidates can bridge silos, build collaborative leadership teams, reduce counterproductive friction, and effect systemic change.
Corporate leadership also requires the courage to challenge conventional thinking, including your own. Boards should ask how candidates have challenged stereotypes, reduced low-value complexity, and introduced new ways of thinking, while leveraging the organization's history to anchor change. These qualities distinguish leaders who manage complexity from those who shape it.
Proactive leadership is the result of intentional board governance. Building future readiness into CEO succession requires rigorous testing of judgment, resilience, and adaptability. Imagination that goes beyond the family tree on a resume. and the courage to prioritize medium-term value creation over short-term protection. Boards that instill this mindset not only hire for the future, but also help shape it.
