Through our portfolio of services, we help you make informed decisions about the leadership you need to build an organization that outperforms, inspires and grows.
We help you find and develop outstanding leaders, improve team and board performance, and align culture with your strategy.
Explore our insights on leadership, board and governance issues, organizational culture and more.
How can you foster more effective top teams, make more informed choices about leadership and improve the odds of merger success? Read more.
We have 60 years’ experience in leadership consulting. We've built a reputation for delivering real impact for our clients — from the world’s largest companies to startups to nonprofits.
We are committed to building relationships with exceptional leaders who may qualify as candidates, now or in the future. To maximize your visibility, we encourage you to register with both Spencer Stuart and BlueSteps.
Spencer Stuart uses cookies that are essential for this site to function well. Please click “Accept” to help us improve its usefulness with additional cookies. Learn about our use of cookies and collaboration with trusted partners in our Cookie Policy.
No leadership position has a greater impact on an organization’s success than the CEO. Yet, very little data exists on how chief executive officers tend to perform over time.
To better understand CEO performance, we launched an extensive research study: The CEO Life Cycle Project.
Our team of researchers tracked year-by-year financial performance, spanning:
7,000
data points over a 40-year timeframe
747
S&P 500 CEOs' complete tenures
42
in-depth interviews with CEOs and board directors
What we found was a surprising pattern of headwinds and tailwinds that CEOs are likely to face during their years in the role, upending some common views about CEO tenure and value creation. Insights from this research have important implications, including:
Read the full article in the November/December issue of Harvard Business Review.
Download the PDF