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Why the Boardroom Has a Succession Problem of Its Own
Cowen Partners Executive Search President and Founding Partner Shawn Cole published in Forbes Business Council with a pointed challenge to how boards think about succession: the directors charged with solving the problem are, demographically, part of it.
In his article “Why The Boardroom Has A Succession Problem Of Its Own,” Shawn draws on Cowen Partners’ Leadership Inflection Point research, which pulled CEO and CFO ages directly from SEC proxy filings across a representative sample of S&P 500 companies rather than relying on survey sentiment or projection. The result is a structural picture of the executive bench as it stands today, and his central argument is that boards are treating a structural problem as though it were a timing one. A timing problem can be managed with a faster search once the need is acute. A structural problem cannot, because the ready successor was supposed to have been built years in advance.
The article lays out two findings. The first is that a substantial share of sitting CEOs are within five years of retirement, and at a meaningful number of companies the CEO and CFO sit inside that window at the same time, exposing an organization’s entire internal succession architecture at once. As Shawn notes, producing a genuinely ready internal successor takes 15 to 20 years of developmental runway, and none of that compresses into a 12-month search.
The second finding is the one that tends to catch directors off guard: the boards overseeing these transitions are aging in parallel and refreshing slowly. Adding strong directors who share the same demographic profile as the executives approaching retirement doesn’t refresh a board’s capacity, Shawn argues. It extends the same clock by one more cycle. A board can’t fully oversee a succession problem it is structurally embedded in, which is why board composition deserves to be treated as a long-cycle succession asset rather than a governance formality.
With the peak wave of CEO and CFO retirements projected between 2029 and 2034, Shawn’s closing point is that succession, at both the executive and board level, is a standing governance responsibility rather than an episodic search, and the exposure is far from evenly distributed across sectors and ownership structures.
Read Shawn Cole’s full article in Forbes.
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