Five Insights that Shaped CEO Leadership This Year

In 2025, CEOs operated in a world defined by continuous transition. Across our work, we saw top leaders recalibrating how they make sense of change by adapting themselves, their teams, and their organizations with greater intentionality. 

We highlight five major insights that influenced CEO leadership this year and reflect on how those perspectives can guide the year ahead. 

Our CEO Response study, with insights from 1,235 chief executives worldwide, revealed a set of leaders who have stopped waiting for the environment to settle. Uncertainty is now the operating context, and CEOs are learning to navigate through it rather than around it. They are building the personal and organizational adaptability required for a world that will not slow down, with 92% of them agreeing they must cultivate unprecedented levels of adaptability for themselves and their teams. 

Many CEO respondents described a broadening of their own leadership identity. They see themselves not only as stewards of corporate performance but as participants in shaping broader societal realities. They talked openly about the need for new forms of curiosity, confidence, and ongoing personal development. Years of crises have sharpened CEOs’ abilities to lean in rather than retreat—and to accept that agility is no longer a differentiator but a prerequisite for success.

→ Delve deeper: The CEO Response

To explore adaptability more deeply, we spoke with leadership advisor Zander Grashow, whose work has shaped how leaders think about adaptive leadership for nearly two decades. When he first introduced these ideas in 2009 in his book, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, he often had to persuade leaders that adaptation mattered. Today, it has become self-evident. The need is universally acknowledged; the path forward is less clear. 

Zander reminded us that adaptation is not only a natural human capacity, but a deliberate practice. It begins with understanding what to preserve and what to evolve, and at what pace. It requires distinguishing between responses that create new possibilities and those that constrict them. And it demands that CEOs actively train the next version of themselves deepening their tolerance for ambiguity, strengthening long-term thinking, expanding their capacity to navigate conflict, and imagining new forms of human organization.

→ Delve deeper: Learning to Adapt in the Muchness of the Present 

If adaptability defined the inner work of the CEO in 2025, team and board dynamics defined the outer work.  

One of this year’s surprising insights also came from our CEO Response study. When asked whom the CEO turns to for advice when navigating complexity, 75% of CEOs said they turn to their senior leadership teams, and nearly half to their peer CEOs; however, only 23% rely on their board chair. This relationship carries inherent tension: the chair is both counselor and evaluator. That duality often makes vulnerability difficult. 

Yet when constructed well, the CEO-chair partnership can be one of the most stabilizing relationships a CEO has. The challenge for boards is to stay current through continuous education, external expertise, and the integration of active executives to remain a relevant source of guidance in an increasingly complex world. 

Feedback emerged as another area demanding CEO attention. In an article for HBR Executive, we discussed our observation that many boards struggle to provide developmental insights to the CEO. They see results, but not the daily leadership behaviors that shape culture and performance. CEOs consistently reported that their most useful feedback came not from boards, but from their own leadership teams—the people closest to the work. 

For CEOs, this raises the following questions: Who helps you see what you cannot see? Who challenges you constructively? Who supports your growth, not just your results? When boards broaden the inputs they consider, approach feedback as a partnership, and address the whole leader rather than just performance metrics, meaningful development becomes possible. And when CEOs invite and model this developmental vulnerability, organizations follow suit.

→ Delve deeper:  

• Is the Pace of Change Shortening Board Members’ Relevance? 
• Someone Should Give the CEO Some Feedback 
• Under Pressure: How to find a healthy tension in the Chair and CEO relationship?  

CEO succession remains one of the most consequential leadership priorities in 2025 and will continue to be. Many boards still view succession primarily as a decision of selecting the next leader, when the deeper work lies in the entire experience surrounding that choice. That process deeply shapes the experience, retention, and identity of the internal contenders who are not ultimately selected. 

We saw that when boards focus only on appointing the CEO, they unintentionally overlook the constellation of people that must sustain the next chapter. Succession becomes far more robust when boards intentionally support all contenders maintaining communication, offering coaching, and grounding each leader’s development in clarity and respect. 

When handled well, runners-up emerge more informed, more self-aware, and more committed to the organization’s future. When handled poorly, organizations risk losing talent they critically need during transitions. A healthier succession process acknowledges the disappointment inherent in not being chosen, but also builds pathways for continued meaning, growth, and contribution.

→ Delve deeper: Attending to the Runners-Up 

Finally, 2025 brought an important shift in how boards are using CEO transitions. Turnover increased, including among high-performing organizations, according to new research from The Conference Board, Egon Zehnder and Semler Brossy. But this trend is not primarily about failure. It reflects a broader recognition that leadership continuity is strategic, not episodic.  

Many CEOs who delayed transitions during periods of heightened volatility are now completing long-planned exits. Boards, recognizing that uncertainty is now the backdrop rather than the exception, are no longer waiting for stability before initiating succession. External hiring also rose significantly, suggesting that boards are widening their aperture to ensure they have the capabilities required for the next era. 

These trends reveal a growing maturity: succession is becoming a mechanism for renewal. Organizations are beginning to embed succession into governance, connecting it to strategy, risk, talent pipelines, and long-term value creation. When transitions are framed clearly and communicated transparently, they reinforce confidence rather than erode it.

→ Delve deeper: Why CEO Turnover Is Rising in 2025 

If 2025 was the year CEOs accepted that uncertainty is permanent, then 2026 will be the year to act with conviction inside that reality. A consistent message echoed through the conversations we had this year: CEOs are strongest when they evolve deliberately, and when they surround themselves with teams and boards that evolve alongside them. 

In a world defined by accelerating complexity, the most enduring advantage any CEO can cultivate is the ability to adapt with intention. The path forward calls for curiosity, courage, reflection, experimentation, and sustained personal development. It calls for deeper relationships with chairs, richer feedback loops, and more human-centered succession processes. And above all, it calls for CEOs who continue to intentionally grow—both personally and as leaders.