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The COVID-19 pandemic transformed trends in CEO turnover. As it brought new risks to organizations throughout 2020, the number of CEO departures fell each quarter. And the trend continued alongside the pandemic in 2021, with the global annual turnover rate falling from 9.6% in 2020 to 8.5% in 2021.
In 2022, as countries moved past the pandemic, organizations seemed to regain their risk appetite, and global CEO turnover reached a five-year high of 11.2%.
In the first quarter of 2023, we’re seeing early signs that the pandemic-induced turmoil has settled. Just 34 CEOs left their posts in Q1, a low we haven't seen since Q1 of 2018 (32 departures).
We collected the quantitative data from eleven different global market indices from various publicly available sources. We update the data quarterly, based on the most recent index compositions. We’ve based our industry classifications on those provided by S&P CapitalIQ, BoardEx, and our own classifications.
We used the date of a CEO’s departure from their role as a measurement of CEO turnover and analysed the data on the assumption that the departure of an incumbent CEO would result in the appointment of a new CEO. We did not consider Interim, Acting or Designate CEO roles. We used the role departure date to determine the year and quarter in which the transition happened.
Our analysis included the companies within each index as of March 2023. This means some of the figures for 2018-2022 might not be accurate as the constituents of an index might have changed.
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