CEO turnover is rising at a pace not seen before. In the first four months of 2025 alone, 1,028 CEOs departed, 19 percent above the same period last year and the highest on record. In the S&P 500, the projected annual succession rate has reached 13 percent, up from 10 percent in 2024, with external hires now accounting for nearly a third of all appointments.
Boards are making more leadership decisions, under more pressure, than at any point in recent history. In a system moving this fast, leadership change is often necessary.
The problem is that the decisions are not getting better.
The pattern is increasingly visible. Boards continue to search for the “complete” CEO; the individual who can balance transformation, execution, culture and market signaling at once. When that person inevitably falls short, the transition is labelled a failure. But the failure rarely sits with the individual. It sits with the lens that selected them—i.e., the board. Some boards are attempting to resolve this through co-CEO structures, and in the best cases they are creating extraordinary value. A Harvard study of 87 co-led public companies found average returns of 9.5 percent, compared to 6.9 percent among single-CEO peers. But the variance is just as striking as the upside. When the structure works, it accelerates performance. When it fails, it accelerates breakdown.
The difference comes down to a board that understands with precision, which behaviors were present at the top, which were missing and had the discipline to staff for the gap rather than the comfort.
What the Best and Worst Pairings Actually Reveal
The gap between the highest- and lowest-performing co-CEO structures is stark. And it is not explained by industry, timing or the caliber of the individuals involved. It comes down to something more fundamental: whether the two leaders brought genuinely different capabilities to the table—not just different skills on a CV, but different ways of showing up when the pressure is on.
The pairings that created value
Chase Bank (Rockefeller & Aldrich). While a historical reference, still the gold standard. Rockefeller looked over the horizon, envisioning where global finance was heading, expanding the footprint, reading signals in markets others had not yet noticed. Aldrich made it operational: prioritizing, managing risk, steering a complex institution through the grind of execution. They did not divide the job by geography or product. They divided it by what the organization needed from the top: one person shaping the future, the other making today’s machine capable of reaching it.
Workday (Bhusri & Eschenbach). When founder Bhusri stepped back from daily operations, the board resisted the obvious move of hiring another visionary. They brought in Eschenbach for operational rigor, the discipline to prioritize, staff for the future and convert ambition into delivery. Steering remains CEO’s exercise of authority to set the pace of change, continuously prioritizing the few things that drive impact and possessing the institutional grit to kill legacy projects that no longer serve the ambition. Workday maintained 19 percent higher stability in earnings guidance during the 2024 tech volatility than its peers. That result was designed, not inherited.
Goldman Sachs (Whitehead & Weinberg). This pairing worked for a different reason. Both leaders were willing to step forward into a version of themselves that did not yet exist—to personally embody the shift from lone-wolf banking to partnership culture. They did not simply announce a new strategy; they changed how they showed up, leading from the front, the side and behind depending on what the moment required. That visible willingness to transform—while holding firm on the non-negotiable core of what Goldman stood for—is what made the cultural shift hold, and what gave the rest of the organization permission to follow.
The pairings that destroyed value
Salesforce (Benioff & Taylor). Two exceptional strategists, both gifted at seeing what was next. Benioff himself described the co-CEO structure as one that had delivered “tremendous success previously” at Salesforce, and the appointment formalised a dynamic that had been building for a year. But no one, neither the leaders nor the board, ensured that the operational steering was clearly owned: the day-to-day prioritisation, the decisions about what not to do. The result was creative tension without resolution. The partnership dissolved in 14 months, with significant stock volatility following. Redundancy at the top is not resilience. It is a fuse.
Chipotle (Ells & Moran). Both leaders excelled at imagining the future and expanding the footprint. “Food with Integrity” was a genuinely compelling vision, and the store growth was rapid. But the board did not ensure that either leader was wired for the disciplined, unglamorous work of operational risk management and execution under pressure. It was a shared blind spot. When the 2015 E. coli crisis hit, there was no one at the top whose instinct was to steer rather than envision. Billions in market cap evaporated, not because the leaders were bad, but because the same strength was represented twice and a critical gap was left exposed.
Viacom (Freston & Moonves). Both leaders arrived with formidable track records, each shaped by years running distinct, successful operations. But neither showed an appetite for stepping into a genuinely new way of working together. Publicly, the structure looked like unity; in practice, each continued to lead from the assumptions and operating rhythms of their previous roles. The organization experienced this not as dual leadership but as two competing centers of gravity, forcing teams to pick sides. The board eventually split the company to resolve the tension. The lesson is not personal; it is structural: If the people at the top are not willing to embody a shared future, to visibly evolve how they lead, no reporting line will compensate.
Capabilities vs. Behaviors: The Distinction Boards Keep Missing
The pattern across these cases is consistent. The pairings that created value had clear differentiation: Each leader brought a genuinely different way of operating, and the board understood which organizational need each one served. The pairings that failed had overlap where they needed contrast, or gaps where they needed coverage.
One might call this the stability fallacy, the assumption that naming co-CEOs ensures continuity. In reality, it only works when the board has been precise about which behaviors need to be present. Who is shaping the long-term direction? Who is expanding the ecosystem and reading the signals beyond the quarterly data? Who owns the hard operational choices? These three demands can be split. But the fourth; embodying the future the organization is building, cannot. Both leaders have to show up for that, or the culture fractures beneath them.
Embodying is not a soft skill and it is not charisma. It is the willingness to step forward and transform, visibly, not theoretically, and to unlearn what made you successful in the last chapter. To lead from the front, the side and behind depending on what the moment requires. And to do all of this without losing hold of your non-negotiable core—the identity and organizational DNA that cannot be traded away in the name of reinvention. Distinctive, transferable and continuously growing—it is also the behavior boards are worst at assessing on their own, which is precisely where an independent, behaviorally precise lens changes the outcome.
And this is not limited to co-CEO structures. The same diagnostic gap appears in every CEO transition. Research from the Conference Board and Heidrick & Struggles shows that 42 percent of S&P 500 companies changing CEOs in 2024 were in the bottom performance quartile, up from 30 percent in 2017. Meanwhile, “boomerang CEOs”, former leaders reappointed by boards lacking ready successors, as an attempt to reclaim the body and soul of the company, hit a decade high in 2024–25, despite evidence that second-tenure CEOs deliver materially lower shareholder returns. Boards are screening for credentials and familiarity when they should be auditing for the specific behaviors the organization is missing.
What Needs to Change
The board that cannot evolve its own lens will keep cycling through leaders. Every four years, another transition. Another search for “the right person.” Another explanation to shareholders about why this time will be different. Before a board can staff for a new era, it has to be willing to step into one itself. That means questioning the assumption that the “Hero CEO” is the only viable model. It means being rigorous about the board’s own blind spots, not just the CEO’s. If the board cannot embody the change it is demanding, it will not recognize that capacity in others.
Move from credentials to behaviors. Standard executive search asks: Does this person have financial acumen? Do they know our industry? Those questions are necessary but insufficient. The questions that predict success are different. Who at the top is spotting the disruption before it is consensus, envisioning what the organization must become? Who is expanding the ecosystem, reading the signals beneath the rhetoric? Who is steering the hard operational choices that move the organization from ambition to execution? And who is willing to personally embody the transformation to unlearn the past and step into the next version of themselves?
Any board that cannot themselves embody the change, challenge their own inherited assumptions and know what to protect and what to challenge will struggle to recognize that capacity in others.
Activist investors are no longer just replacing underperforming CEOs. They are replacing the boards that appointed them. That means the central question is no longer whether your board has the right leader at the top, but whether your board has the lens to know.
