The New CEO Is Ready. What About The One Walking Out?
- Marion Heil
- vor 2 Tagen
- 8 Min. Lesezeit
When a new CEO is announced, attention shifts immediately to the incoming leader.
The person stepping out of the CEO role barely gets a paragraph – at best a send-off, a LinkedIn post, and a firm handshake on the way through the door.
That's a mistake.
Research consistently shows that CEO transitions are among the highest-risk moments in a company's life.
Research consistently shows that CEO transitions are among the highest-risk moments in a company's life. McKinsey estimates that roughly 30% of Fortune 500 CEOs last fewer than three years, a number that suggests far more transitions fail quietly than are reported. The clinical emphasis in most succession research falls on the incoming CEO: their first 100 days, how they build legitimacy, how they read the organization.
What that research largely ignores is the behavior of one central protagonist who could make or break the whole thing: the person who is leaving.
The outgoing CEO's conduct in the months around the handover considerably shapes what comes next.
In my experience working with boards and incoming CEOs, the outgoing CEO's conduct in the months around the handover considerably shapes what comes next. Their footprint can determine whether the handover becomes a successful new beginning or just an expensive restart.
Why it matters so much
A study by Russell Reynolds of 30 departing CEOs found that where the outgoing CEO was actively involved in the succession process, had a strong relationship with the board, and approached the handover constructively, outcomes were substantially better. Executive defections were lower, trust held, and the new CEO could actually get to work. Where outgoing CEOs felt excluded, ambivalent, or pushed aside, things got messy – senior executives left, trust eroded, the new CEO walked into a weakened organization.
Boards generally invest heavily in finding the right successor, and often relatively little in thinking through how the predecessor behaves in the final chapter.
Boards generally invest heavily in finding the right successor, and often relatively little in thinking through how the predecessor behaves in the final chapter. The assumption seems to be that once the decision is made, the outgoing CEO's role is essentially over. In reality, it's just entering its most consequential phase.
Korn Ferry's analysis of European CEO transitions adds another dimension. Six in ten CEO exits across Europe are now unplanned, driven by performance pressure or activist shareholders rather than an orderly retirement. That means the majority of outgoing CEOs are leaving under difficult circumstances they didn't fully choose, which makes what they do in the transition both more difficult and more consequential.
Four types of departure, four different challenges
Not all transitions are the same, and the outgoing CEO's task varies considerably depending on how and why the departure happened. It's worth distinguishing between four broad situations.
The planned exit is the rarest and the cleanest. The CEO has chosen the timing, the successor has been developed over time, and there is ample opportunity to transfer knowledge, relationships, and institutional memory deliberately. This is where successful handovers become possible. Succession is hard on the incumbent, too, but this scenario – with a little active effort – stands a chance of getting it right for both sides.
The performance-triggered exit is far more common. The board has lost confidence, results have deteriorated, and the CEO departs under pressure, sometimes quickly. Many recognizable examples come to mind, when a CEO is stepping down ahead of schedule as the company faces falling earnings and a loss in trust, and the new CEO is parachuted in to repair relationships and rebuild momentum. In these situations the outgoing CEO is often in a difficult emotional position, but the organization's need for a clean handover is arguably even greater than in a planned succession.
The scandal or misconduct exit leaves little room for the outgoing CEO to play a constructive role, and often none at all. The priority becomes protecting the organization, not preserving relationships.
The sudden exit, through unexpected resignation, illness or death, is the most disruptive. There is no handover. The institutional knowledge walks out the door in a moment, and whoever steps up has to reconstruct context from whatever is documented and whoever is still around. This is the scenario that makes continuous succession readiness so important, and it illustrates what is lost when outgoing CEOs fail to invest in transferring what they know.
The biggest failure: unavailability
The most common failure I see is often the same: The outgoing CEO is simply not available enough to their successor, whether through choice, awkwardness, organizational politics, or the pull of whatever comes next in their own life.
The most common failure: The outgoing CEO is simply not available enough to their successor.
This isn't usually deliberate. It's a combination of factors. The board stops consulting them the moment the announcement is made. The executive team shifts its attention. The outgoing CEO, often for the first time in years, has a clear calendar and no particular obligation to fill it. And the incoming CEO, eager to establish their own authority, may not ask for the help they actually need.
The result is that the institutional knowledge that took years to build, the understanding of how decisions really get made, which stakeholder relationships need careful handling, what the real story is behind a strategic choice that looks different on paper, starts evaporating at the exact point in time when it is most needed.
Across all departure types, the single biggest gift an outgoing CEO can give is their time.
Across all departure types, the single biggest gift an outgoing CEO can give is their time.
The outgoing CEOs who handle this well treat the handover as seriously as any business transition they've ever led. They don't wait to be asked. They map the relationships the incoming CEO will need and make active introductions, saying something real rather than just forwarding an email. They surface the issues that never made it into a board paper. They explain how the organization actually works, not how the org chart suggests it does. And they make themselves available for the transition, or even the first year.
The psychology of letting go
What makes all of this hard to do is not organizational. It is personal.
Research on departing CEOs describes something closer to grief than retirement.
Research on departing CEOs describes something closer to grief than retirement.
Identity, purpose, status, the ability to make things happen: all of it changes at once, and faster than many leaders expect. Russell Reynolds' study found that CEOs were consistently surprised by how quickly allegiances shifted after the announcement, sometimes within days. People who had worked closely with them for years suddenly had a different center of gravity.
CEOs who saw the role as their identity experienced significantly more turbulence during the transition than those who saw it primarily as a job.
What the same research found is that CEOs who saw the role as their identity experienced significantly more turbulence during the transition than those who saw it primarily as a job. That distinction matters. When stepping down means losing a core part of who you are, the rational behavior, staying available, briefing generously, supporting someone else's success, becomes emotionally very difficult to sustain.
This shows up in subtle ways. Not briefing the successor as fully as they could. Staying in conversations a beat too long. Letting the new CEO discover things independently that they could have shared. Introducing relationships without really vouching for the person. None of it deliberate, but all of it costly.
The identity crisis tends to be most acute for founders, whose professional biography and the company's history are deeply intertwined. But it is not a founder problem alone. Long-tenured CEOs in family companies, in institutions, in organizations that have been shaped around a single personality for a decade or more: they face the same dynamics. The common thread is not the ownership structure - it is the depth of identification with the role.
Involuntary exits: when generosity is hardest and matters most
The most difficult cases are the ones where the CEO didn't choose to leave. A board-initiated exit, especially after years of loyal service, carries a particular kind of sting. The outgoing CEO has every reason to disengage, and many do.
And yet this is precisely where the offer matters most. A departing CEO who quietly signals to their successor that they are available, that the door is open, that they are willing to help navigate what comes next, will be remembered very differently from one who goes silent. It takes a certain character to offer that generosity under difficult circumstances. It is also, in my experience, the choice that defines a legacy far more permanently than anything that happened during the tenure itself.
What boards could do differently
The board carries more responsibility here than it typically claims.
Most boards treat the departure as an administrative moment.
Most treat the departure as an administrative moment: the contract is handled, the announcement is managed, and attention moves immediately to onboarding the new CEO. Almost no one asks systematically what the outgoing CEO's involvement should look like over the following twelve months.
The questions are not complicated: what access does the new CEO have to their predecessor, which relationships need active transfer rather than just a mention in a briefing, and has anyone simply asked the outgoing CEO what they are willing to offer?
Some boards do this well. They establish a clear framework for the transition relationship, give the outgoing CEO a real and clearly defined role during an agreed period, and treat knowledge transfer as a deliverable rather than an assumption. Those transitions tend to go better: The successor has context, the senior team stays more stable, the first year is less chaotic.
Boards that treat the outgoing CEO as an afterthought to the succession process are leaving significant value on the table.
Boards that treat the outgoing CEO as an afterthought to the succession process are leaving significant value on the table. Building the transition relationship into succession planning, not as a formality but as a substantive piece of work, is a governance responsibility. It just rarely gets treated that way.
The CEO footprint that lasts
The conventional understanding of a CEO's footprint and legacy focuses on what was built: the strategy, the acquisitions, the culture, the results. That is fair.
But there is another kind of legacy that is harder to measure and probably more durable: whether the person you left behind was set up to succeed.
The outgoing CEOs who invest in that tend to find that generosity returned in how they are spoken about for years afterwards. The ones who disappear, or who make the transition harder than it needed to be, are remembered for that too.
A transition is not just a chapter ending. It is also a choice about what kind of leader you turned out to be.
For further reading, HBR published a useful reading list on CEO transitions this month, triggered by the Tim Cook announcement at Apple. It covers the full arc from succession planning through to the harder second year and the outgoing CEO's role. The May-June 2026 issue also carries a strong piece on interim appointments worth reading alongside it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marion Heil is the founder and managing director of Board+CEO Advisors, a Vienna-based executive search and board advisory boutique. She advises listed companies, family businesses and investors on C-suite, leaders and supervisory board appointments across DACH and CEE.
