A board chair, three weeks after her CEO resigned without warning last spring, put a question to her fellow directors that governance circles are still turning over: how is it possible that the board spent two days a year on strategy off-sites and zero hours on what happens if he leaves? The honest answer is that it is not just possible, it is the norm. And that norm is quietly one of the more consequential openings in the market for experienced leaders positioned to step into a vacuum.
The data show that German boardrooms are facing the same succession pressure, only in a more concentrated market: 2025 saw eight CEO exits in the DAX, up from three the year before, while Russell Reynolds’ global index recorded 234 departures, a 16 percent increase year over year and a drop in average CEO tenure to 7.1 years. Yet formal succession planning still appears uneven in Germany, and the broader message is clear: too many companies are still managing leadership transition reactively rather than building a deeper internal bench
That gap is worth sitting with. In Germany, boards are replacing leaders faster while the pool of ready internal successors remains too shallow. THE governance evidence points to slower supervisory-board refreshment, shorter CEO tenures, and a growing reliance on external candidates. This is not a governance footnote. It is a structural opening — and one that should shape how a sitting executive in Germany reads their own timeline, leverage, and succession window
The gap isn’t incompetence — it’s an incentive problem
Boards are not failing to plan for succession because nobody has thought of it. Succession planning forces an uncomfortable conversation while the current CEO is still in the room, and most boards would rather defer discomfort than schedule it. Naming a potential successor, even informally, signals something to the sitting CEO, to the market, and to the executive team that boards often are not ready to signal until the crisis is already underway.
That reluctance is itself the opening. When the crisis does hit. Spencer Stuart’s own governance research makes clear it will, since 34 percent of S&P 500 CEOs have already served eight-plus years and are approaching a natural transition point (Spencer Stuart). Companies without a bench do not reach first for a hastily assembled shortlist of unfamiliar external candidates. They reach for someone who already carries credibility, has seen a transition up close before, and can walk in without a six-month onboarding curve. That is rarely a 38-year-old rising star. It tends to be someone with two or three decades of pattern recognition who has been through exactly this kind of discontinuity before, in some form, personally.
What the gap means for a leader still holding a senior role
For a sitting CEO, the implication is blunt: the job is no longer something to simply hold, but something to manage toward a deliberate exit. The strongest leaders treat that inevitability as a strategic window — using their remaining time to build leverage, shape succession, and position themselves for the next mandate before the board starts looking elsewhere.
Reinvention, not retreat
That gap is someone else’s opening. When boards have no real bench, they eventually turn to leaders who have already lived through a transition like this, and that experience becomes the advantage — not a detour. Reinvention is not a retreat; for the right executive, it is the credential that makes the next role possible.
