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When I work with executives preparing for CEO succession, one of the most common challenges I see is what I think of as borrowed identity. You’ve spent years learning from a leader you respect. You’ve absorbed their instincts, their priorities, their way of reading a room. That’s not a weakness—it's how great leadership works.
But in a succession context, that alignment with the sitting CEO can start to work against you—and it’s one of the trickiest parts of the whole process that you’ll need to navigate. If the board cannot clearly see where you diverge from the sitting CEO, they have no way of knowing whether they’re getting a new leader or an extension of the current one. And that uncertainty rarely resolves in your favor.
At the same time, push too hard against the sitting CEO and you risk looking disloyal. Threading that needle takes real clarity about who you are and what you believe.
The way I like to explain this to succession candidates I advise is this: the board has to do their fiduciary duty. They need to stress-test your independence and alignment to the future-oriented profile needed for the next CEO. They want to know what you see that the current CEO doesn’t, what you’d do differently, and why.
And we must not forget that boards are under ever-increasing pressure to get succession right. CEO turnover is at an all-time high, with 234 CEOs departing the role in 2025 alone, 21% above the eight-year average. And this reality is sharpening what boards are looking for. They’re not just trying to find the most capable candidate. They're trying to find someone with true staying power.
Our research points to three things that distinguish CEOs who endure in the role: a clear-eyed understanding of their own strengths and limitations; a high degree of clarity about their personal values, motivations, and ambitions; and the ability to look beyond themselves to articulate a genuine sense of purpose in the role and the impact they want to have on the wider organization and ecosystem. Taken together, these capabilities are the foundation of durable leadership and something you should carefully reflect on when thinking about your own leadership story and how you tell it to the board.
This is one of the areas where an external mentor can be genuinely invaluable. Unlike your CEO, an outside advisor has no stake in the narrative you’ve built together. They can see your blind spots more clearly, challenge the assumptions you’ve absorbed without realizing it, and help you develop a perspective that is authentically yours, rather than a reflection of the leadership culture you’ve been operating in.
If you’ve relied solely on internal mentorship through your career, this could be the moment to change that. The self-awareness required to make a compelling succession case is much harder to develop inside the same walls where your professional identity was formed.
To truly differentiate your leadership narrative, start by auditing the sitting CEO’s legacy with clear eyes. What has been achieved? What remains unfinished? Where have the gaps been—in strategy, culture, talent, or execution—that have accumulated over time? You don’t need to name those gaps publicly. But you need to know what they are, because your ability to become the next CEO is about being crystal clear on where the business needs to go and what it needs to do differently to get there.
From there, identify what I call your signature priorities: the two or three areas that are unmistakably yours. These shouldn’t borrow from the sitting CEO’s playbook but instead reflect your own analysis of the business situation in front of you. This will largely be inspired by the problems you’ve personally owned, the bets you’ve made, the moments when your judgment diverged from the room—and you were right.
Then find your genuine divergence points. Where do your instincts differ from the sitting CEO’s? Maybe it’s about risk appetite. Maybe it’s a different read on where the market is heading. Maybe it’s how you think about talent, culture, or organizational structure. Whatever it is, you need to be able to articulate it clearly, and with confidence.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, make your narrative forward-looking. While it can touch on what hasn’t worked, or opportunities that have been missed, the largest portion of your story should be on how you would approach the role and the strategies and priorities you would set. The board needs to believe you know where the organization is going—and that you’re the right person to take it there.
This is the part that trips many succession candidates up most. The sitting CEO believed in you before most others did and of course you will feel loyalty. That matters, and you don’t need to disown it in order to get the top job.
What I often tell the leaders I work with is this: the way to honor great leadership is to outgrow it. The goal of any good CEO is to produce leaders who think independently. If you’ve genuinely absorbed the best of what the sitting CEO taught you—and then gone on to develop your own view—that’s not disloyalty. That’s exactly what they were hoping for.
When you’re in front of the board, you can speak with genuine warmth about the mentorship you’ve received from your CEO. You can acknowledge what you’ve learned and why it matters. But in the same breath, you need to be able to say, “Here’s how I see this organization’s future, and here’s why I want to take it in this direction.”
The board isn’t asking you to betray the person who developed you. They’re asking you to prove that you’ve become your own leader.
The successor who wins the room isn’t the most loyal apprentice. It’s the one who walks in knowing exactly who they are, what they believe, and where they’re taking the organization. That clarity—is what succession conversations are really about.
The sitting CEO may have opened the door. But only you can walk through it.
Erin Zolna is a leadership advisor at Russell Reynolds Associates. She is based in New York.
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