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Forbes
a day ago
- Business
- Forbes
2 Shifts CEOs Can Make To Finish 2025 A Sharper And Healthier Leader
Being a stronger leader by years-end starts with these two things. We've reached the halfway point of the year. For many, well-intentioned resolutions have quietly faded. Even carefully crafted business plans have unraveled in the face of unexpected challenges. Whether you're the CEO of a global firm or a senior leader within an organization, chances are you've felt the strain. The role of the CEO has always been demanding. However, in 2025, it has become even more relentless and often misunderstood. Burnout, emotional fatigue, and quiet depression are becoming more common in the C-suite than most are willing to admit. Recent data from Vistage's CEO Confidence Index indicate a notable decline in optimism among executives with revenues ranging from $1 to $20 million. And it's not just smaller firms feeling the pressure. Russell Reynolds' Global CEO Turnover Index reports that the average CEO tenure dropped from 8.1 years in Q1 2024 to 6.8 years in Q1 2025, marking the sharpest decline in recent years. With expectations continually rising, now is a good time for CEOs not only to review organizational performance metrics but also to conduct a self-audit. Below are two core strategies to help leaders recalibrate and finish 2025 more focused, resilient, and effective than they started. We've all heard the airline safety instructions: secure your own oxygen mask before assisting others. It's a simple concept but one many leaders routinely ignore. Today's CEOs are facing a constant barrage of challenges, including volatile markets, a turbulent political environment, economic uncertainty, and exponential shifts in AI that are difficult to keep up with. Pressure is mounting, and with it, mental health is declining. According to the Vistage survey, 7% of leaders reported feeling emotionally exhausted or burned out daily, while 25% said they frequently experienced this feeling. To shift out of survival mode and return to a state of clearness, CEOs must start treating their well-being as a core business lever, not an optional luxury. Here are a few ways to begin: Trust is fragile. Once lost, whether internally or externally, it's hard to regain. And one of the fastest ways to lose it is poor communication. A recent example: Target CEO Brian Cornell attempted to address various organizational stressors with an internal memo. While he acknowledged the leadership's silence during recent controversies, employees remained dissatisfied. The message lacked direction. And without clear next steps, confidence can erode further. In today's business climate, employees don't just want polished updates; they want honest, human communication. With economic uncertainty looming and AI heightening job-related anxieties, leaders must prioritize transparency and honesty in their communication to maintain trust and confidence. Transparency isn't a weakness. Transparency builds alignment and strengthens loyalty in turbulent times. Start with these small, intentional actions to build trust: When leaders communicate clearly and consistently, they reduce anxiety and reinforce stability—regardless of the external chaos. Leadership, whether over 20 or 20,000 people, is a delicate dance. Like any skilled dancer, a great leader moves with timing, presence, and self-awareness. They adapt without losing rhythm. Sometimes, the tempo speeds up, such as when AI evolves overnight, markets shift, and employee sentiment changes. Other times, the moment calls for stillness and recalibration. As leaders enter the second half of 2025, remember that leadership isn't just about making wise decisions. It's about sensing the shift in music and responding with poise, not panic, because the CEOs who finish the year stronger than they started aren't just reacting. They're leading the dance.
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Companies bet on internal hires and first-timers as CFO turnover rises in Q1
This story was originally published on To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily newsletter. While some industries like professional sports and technology tend to be outliers, finance leadership tenure is consistently the lowest when compared to other members of the C-suite. As a result, organizations seeking financial talent are looking at internal and first-time CFO candidates to take the financial reins of their companies, according to the Russell Reynolds Q1 2025 CFO Turnover Index. The findings show CFO turnover is rising at larger organizations, and companies across the board are taking chances on inaugural CFOs or internal promotions. Nearly 6-in-10 (59%) of CFOs were first-timers, up from 57% during the same quarter last year. Interestingly, the Nikkei 225 (the top 225 companies on the Japanese stock market) saw 12-of-13 (92%) of its new CFOs be first-timers, including Sony's CFO Lin Tao. Globally, female CFO hiring hit records in Japan and Germany and is up 8% year over year, with women accounting for 39% of incoming CFOs in Q1 2025. Internal hires were also on the rise in Q1, with 58% of CFOs being internal appointees. This time last year, the trend was flipped, 48% internal and 52% external, signaling possible ROI around the past year's efforts, like upskilling and using technology to shift finance employees away from remedial tasks. Global tenure on average among finance chiefs this quarter came in at 5.7 years, down from 6.2 years in Q1 2024. By sector, technology had the highest tenure (7.4 years), with financial services (3.6 years) having the lowest. This hints that CFOs who can be more strategic and work closely with founders or product developers to drive business change are more likely to stick around. For large companies, total CFO departures tallied 95 globally in Q1, up from 88 in Q1 2024. S&P 500 CFOs were the most likely to leave and had the highest quarterly turnover rate (6.6%) seen in five years. Other large-cap companies globally saw high CFO turnover as well, including companies on the Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 Index at 8%; the Cotation Assistée en Continu 40, France's benchmark index, at 10%; and the Deutscher Aktienindex 40, Germany's blue-chip index, also at 10%. This embedded content is not available in your region. CFOs who moved on from their roles were nearly split on their destinations, with 51% retiring or joining a board and 50% taking on new roles, up 3.1% year over year. Areas where CFOs are most likely to remain in the workforce include technology (84%) and industrials (67%). The data indicates that finance talent continues to be at a premium, and many organizations are betting on first-timers and internal hires more than ever as a result. However, it's unclear whether these moves reflect strong upskilling processes and succession planning or are simply reactive responses to a tightening talent market. The sharp rise in internal appointments could point to progress in leadership development, but it might also reflect cost pressures or the difficulty of attracting top external candidates. And while nearly half of outgoing CFOs are stepping into new roles instead of retiring, that only makes the talent pool more competitive, as a subset of high-performing finance leaders continue to move from one opportunity to the next. Recommended Reading CFO turnover continued to rise in Q1, up 14% YoY Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Boomerang CEOs are corporate security blankets
UnitedHealth is bringing back a former CEO to right a company in serious trouble. Stephen Hemsley, who retired in 2017 but remained on its board, takes over as the insurance giant faces spiraling costs and a criminal investigation into its Medicare billing, as it's still reeling from the assassination of a top executive late last year. Returning CEOs are corporate-governance safety blankets, brought back (or sometimes elbowing their way) in times of crisis. 'There's safety in someone familiar, who can relatively quickly parachute in,' Constantine Alexandrakis, CEO of search firm Russell Reynolds, told Semafor. Does it mean the board has bungled succession? 'Not necessarily,' he said. 'But it means there was no one ready inside the organization who trumped the boomerang option.' (There is, notably, a boomerang boss in the Oval Office too.) They tend to be big personalities deeply entwined with their companies — Bob Iger at Disney, Howard Schultz at Starbucks — though the low-key Hemsley doesn't fit that bill. Jerry Yang's return at Yahoo was a dud, while Steve Jobs famously saved Apple. Researchers at MIT Sloan School of Management found that boomerang CEOs on average underperform the market. 'Our data and analysis suggest that boomerang CEOs may be either unable or unwilling to make necessary strategic changes when they return to lead the companies they founded,' they wrote. Notably, that underperformance — 10% annually — held firm even when benchmarked against non-boomerang CEOs who were hired in times of reading: One boomeranger to another — Procter & Gamble's A.G. Lafley had some advice for Iger. 'Be humble.' Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Harvard Business Review
16-04-2025
- Business
- Harvard Business Review
Future-Proof Your Business with Smarter Talent Strategies - SPONSOR CONTENT FROM VERIZON
By Christina Schelling When someone asks me, 'What's the most important ingredient every company needs to be successful?' My answer is always great talent. A company's ability to deliver depends on having the right people with the right skills in the right roles. But achieving a workforce ready for the future is easier said than done. Social and geopolitical changes, a global pandemic, the Great Resignation, and tech hiring booms and busts have changed how we live and work, pushing the future of talent management into hyperdrive. It's time to shift from reactive legacy best practices. HR has to function in lockstep with your business to forecast and anticipate what's next. That means knowing and nurturing your talent and building the capabilities you need to lead. It also means HR needs to work side-by-side with business leaders to fully leverage artificial intelligence (AI) as an accelerant for all things talent. So, where do you start? Two strategies are critical: • Investing in leadership capability from the outside in • Accelerating internal mobility with a skills strategy Invest in Leadership C-level executives left their jobs faster in 2024 than in previous years, according to Gartner, and more than half are likely to leave over the next two years. I saw this come into play at Verizon, where eight of the nine roles reporting to the CEO had seat changes within 18 months. The clock is ticking—modernizing your talent strategy needs to include rethinking your approach to succession. However, implementing succession plans, much less updating them, is not always a business priority. Only 24% of C-suite leaders believe their companies are proactive in succession planning, according to a Russell Reynolds report, and that oversight is costly. Our organization assesses our senior leaders annually and updates succession slates based on performance and potential. Like many other companies, we once had a largely internal focus. However, the significant rapid change across our executive ranks led us to conduct a deeper analysis of our pipeline. We used AI-powered tools to compare our executive talent pool with those of our competitors by analyzing several factors: What are our top skills and depth of capabilities? What types of diverse industry and functional experiences do our leaders possess? Where are we investing in additional headcount or leadership capability, and where are other companies investing? What are the profiles and qualifications of the most senior leaders, and what collection of experiences will we need? This assessment revealed our strengths, and it showed us where we should hire externally for additive skills or experience, where we should create leadership positions to expand succession paths to C-suite jobs, and how targeted leadership development planning can create a potent competitive advantage. With organizational design and key external hires, we increased critical capabilities and added top experts within our succession pool in areas including customer experience, solutions sales, supply chain, and AI. Since this initiative, a third of our senior executives have had developmental moves or expanded their scopes. Our top 300 leaders now have individualized development plans. More importantly, they increasingly deliver and exceed performance expectations. We also strengthened our retention efforts by creating a 'poachability' study to determine which executives posed the greatest flight risks. We used AI to calculate a poachability score measuring internal and external factors that increase the risk of top talent attrition, including market demand, company performance, proximity to headquarters, and when an individual's boss had been appointed. The score helps us confirm we have the right financial and other incentives to retain our critical successors. Since updating our succession strategy, we have seen more high-potential talent in C-suite feeder roles, a greater depth of the emerging capabilities that align with our strategic workforce plans, and more successors with cross-business and industry experiences. Key takeaways: 1. Comparing the capabilities within your succession pool to the external competition offers a roadmap for how to develop your top executives and build a pipeline of future leaders. 2. Every career move, scope expansion, and development investment should support creating the most capable and competitively positioned leadership bench. 3. Adding more rigor to analyzing and understanding attrition risk can help your organization retain valuable leaders. Accelerating Internal Mobility For most businesses, external hiring alone will not meet talent demands. Internal mobility should be the cornerstone of a workforce strategy. However, building from within requires more than a cultural shift—you need to develop an enterprise-wide skills infrastructure and use talent intelligence platforms to fire up a culture of growth. To put this strategy to the test for a company of over 100,000 employees and 3,000 unique jobs across retail, corporate, customer service and more, Verizon built Talent GPS, an AI-powered tool that encourages individuals to map their career journeys, create development plans, and envision roles two or three moves ahead, aligning their aspirations with the organization's evolving needs. This approach requires accurate real-time data on employees' skills and experiences—and that poses a significant challenge. About 90% of companies say they are on the journey to becoming a skills-based organization, but fewer than 5% have the data to do so, according to Joanna Riley, CEO and co-founder of Censia. Like many other organizations, we found that our employees were far more likely to update their profiles on external platforms like LinkedIn than on internal platforms, which gave us only a limited understanding of our workforce. To solve this issue, we used AI to integrate publicly available data into more than 65,000 internal career profiles. We then asked employees to review and edit these AI-augmented profiles: a much easier lift than having to write them from scratch. This approach delivered remarkable results. We went from a profile completion rate of less than 10% to 100% in a matter of weeks. The externally sourced information was 90% correct, while AI-inferred data achieved 70% accuracy and will continue to improve as the system gets smarter. Since we launched Talent GPS, employees apply for and move into new roles at a 10% higher rate than before. Mobility across the business units and job families, such as shifts from retail to corporate roles or technology to B2B, has also increased, fostering diverse experiences and skill development. We now better understand each employee's skills and goals and have a predictive aerial view of how our strengths and gaps can affect our growth. Key takeaways: 1. By integrating enterprise-wide skills intelligence and a data-driven approach to internal mobility, employees can build meaningful careers within the company and navigate career growth in a personalized and real-time way. 2. Organizations need to break down silos to tap hidden talent and unlock meaningful cross-functional development across business units and job families. 3. Aligning skills with workforce planning and long-term business goals gives leaders confidence that they have the talent they need to deliver and respond to emerging opportunities and challenges, even in the face of rapid change. Blending Art and Science Talent management isn't a static process. Along with workforce expectations and market demands, talent management is an ongoing evolution. However, that one defining factor—great talent—is at the core of every successful business. No matter how technology advances, or how industries transform, it's the people who drive innovation, fuel growth, and create lasting impact. That's not to say emerging technology and AI aren't critical co-pilots. So much of what we modernized and enhanced was only possible because of AI. It's not a trend; it's a tool, and possibly the most important one for HR practitioners to master right now. When threaded throughout an organization, AI allows far greater precision and access to information to build at scale with confidence and speed. The delicate blending and balancing of art and science will always be at the center of effective talent management. It's our job to help reinvent and reimagine business and build a culture where the most enviable talent chooses, every day, to stay. To learn more about Verizon for your business, visit
Yahoo
09-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Webster Bank risk chief to retire
This story was originally published on Banking Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily Banking Dive newsletter. Daniel Bley, Webster Bank's chief risk officer, will retire after 14 years with the lender, the company said last week. Bley will continue in the CRO role until Webster finds a replacement, after which he will move to an advisory role to ensure a smooth transition, Webster said. 'Dan has been instrumental in driving a strong risk culture at Webster and significantly advancing the risk management programs and capabilities across the company, in support of the bank's substantial growth,' John Ciulla, the bank's CEO, said in a statement last week. Stamford, Connecticut-based Webster has appointed management consulting firm Russell Reynolds to conduct the search, who will do so in conjunction with Webster, a spokesperson for the lender said via email. The search involves internal and external candidates and does not have a set timeframe, the spokesperson added. Bley manages the bank's enterprise risk functions, including operating, compliance and regulatory risk. He also oversees Bank Secrecy Act/anti-money laundering and fraud programs at the bank. 'It has been my privilege to work with the Webster Board and executive management team that has always been committed to ensuring a strong risk culture at the bank and investing in risk management personnel, processes and technology necessary to support our growth,' Bley said. Before coming to Webster in 2010, Bley served in credit-risk positions at Royal Bank of Scotland for two years and ABN Amro for 18, according to LinkedIn and a bio on Webster's website. As Webster nears the $100 billion-asset threshold that would make the lender a Category IV bank, it is stepping up its hiring efforts and bolstering its cybersecurity infrastructure, Vikram Nafde, the bank's chief information officer, told Banking Dive last month. Webster has plans to strengthen its risk framework and controls, Nafde said. The bank, which has around 4,300 employees, plans to hire about 200 people this year – out of which, about 25 will hold technology and cybersecurity roles on the IT team. Webster is also investing to boost its risk and compliance infrastructure and is preparing for higher capital and liquidity requirements and more frequent regulatory reporting. Ciulla has indicated the lender is building technology, risk and data infrastructure that would also enable it to execute a whole-bank acquisition in the next one to three years if regulatory conditions become more favorable. 'What we have to do for that is a series of things in the space of data, cybersecurity, but also digital and the regulatory reporting,' Nafde said last month. 'There's a big component of technology … as we get closer and closer to the $100 billion mark.' Recommended Reading Citi faces rebukes, new orders from regulators: report Sign in to access your portfolio
