Hey and welcome to Trendy CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content material officer of Mansueto Ventures. Every week this article explores inclusive approaches to management drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Quick Firm. For those who acquired this article from a good friend, you’ll be able to sign up to get it yourself each Monday morning.
With apologies to T.S. Eliot, some CEOs are discovering that February, not April, stands out as the cruelest month. In current weeks, Workday, PayPal, and The Washington Submit parted methods with their chief executives, suggesting that top CEO turnover, which reached document ranges lately, could proceed in 2026.
CEO turnover stays excessive
Russell Reynolds Associates, the worldwide management advisory agency, discovered that 234 CEOs of worldwide listed firms departed their roles final 12 months, up 16% from 2024 and 21% above the eight-year common. Final 12 months marked the second consecutive record-breaking 12 months for CEO exits, in response to the agency’s Global CEO Turnover Index Report.
The Russell Reynolds report attributes the excessive turnover partially to strain from activist buyers who need sooner outcomes. (Its analysis reveals that 32 CEOs resigned inside one 12 months of an activist marketing campaign in 2025, in comparison with 27 in 2024.) The information additionally means that boards are prepared to drag the set off earlier when efficiency stalls.
“It’s too early to foretell whether or not 2026 will set one other document for CEO turnover, however the underlying macro pressures—together with activist affect, market volatility, and ongoing transformation—stay in place,” says Laura Mantoura, managing director in Russell Reynolds’s U.S. Board & CEO Advisory apply. “Because of this, sustained excessive ranges of CEO turnover must be anticipated.”
Nevertheless, not everyone seems to be satisfied that is the brand new regular. Andy Challenger, chief income officer at international outplacement agency Challenger, Grey & Christmas, sees turnover leveling off after three years of brisk govt change, which adopted a reluctance to vary leaders in the course of the COVID-19 disaster in 2020 and 2021.
“I believe our preliminary expectation proper now’s that the demand for change on the high is cooling a bit regardless of some massive current examples,” he says.
Challenger notes that there’s one state of affairs that would set off one other document wave of CEO exits: a recession.
Expertise wins
Investor calls for look like pushing boards to favor skilled CEOs at public firms. Of the CEOs who took the reins at S&P 500 firms in 2025, 79% had been first-time CEOs, down from 83% in 2024, and decrease than the eight-year common of 85%, in response to Russell Reynolds.
That development is taking part in out in 2026 succession situations: Alex Chriss, who had been an govt vice chairman at Intuit earlier than changing into CEO of PayPal, is being changed by Enrique Lores, who spent six years as president and CEO of HP. Workday cofounder Aneel Bhusri, who has served because the software program firm’s CEO or co-CEO at numerous factors over the last 15 years, takes over from Carl Eschenbach, who had been a associate at Sequoia Capital and president and chief working officer at VMware earlier than becoming a member of Workday.
Whether or not the current spike in CEO turnover represents a brief surge or everlasting shift, govt recruiters and advisers say boards need to prioritize succession planning, they usually want to consider the corporate’s wants within the coming years.
As management knowledgeable Invoice George has said: “Work out what [the company] goes to want for the subsequent 10 years, and discover folks with the psychological agility and braveness to have a look at it in a different way than you checked out it.”
Your management outlook
Do you see CEO turnover persevering with at a speedy tempo? Or are you, like Challenger, anticipating it to stage off? Let me know your ideas. My electronic mail tackle is stephaniemehta@mansueto.com.
Learn extra: CEO turnover
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- AI is rewriting the CEO job description. Are you prepared?
