It’s a tough time to be a CEO, if the throngs of people leaving the top job are anything to go by.
HSBC’s Noel Quinn unexpectedly announced Tuesday that he will step down as bank boss once the board chooses his successor. Paramount Global’s Bob Bakish resigned from the media titan on Monday, while Dr. Martens’ Kenny Wilson recently said this would be his last year at the helm of the shoe company.
Their departures are part of a broader trend. There were a record 622 CEO changes at U.S. companies in the most recent quarter, an increase of 48% from the same period last year and 27% from the previous quarter. This is what the recruitment firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reveals, which has been following these movements since 2002.
“C-level executives have had an incredibly difficult few years and are leaving their roles, whether for new opportunities or for a fresh start elsewhere,” Andrew Challenger, the company’s senior vice president, said in the latest report.
“Rapid technological advancements, plus an election year, could make this an acceptable time to make changes at the top.”
In recent years, business leaders have faced everything from labor shortages and strikes to layoffs and culture wars, real-world conflicts, the boom in remote work, blocked supplies, pandemic shutdowns, historic inflation, rising interest rates and a deeply uncertain economic outlook. .
Perhaps not surprisingly, the median tenure of S&P 500 bosses has fallen from six years in 2013 to less than five years in 2022, according to an analysis of CEO longevity.
Pressure, stress and loneliness
Big bosses have been denouncing the difficulties of their work for years.
“Being a CEO sucks,” Emad Mostaque, the former boss of Stability AI, said in March.
“After five intense years, now is the right time for me to find a better balance between my personal and professional life,” HSBC’s Quinn said in a press release on Tuesday, highlighting how top performers struggle to juggle between their work and their others. responsibilities.
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, lamented that running a company is “really not that fun” and “just horrible” at times. CEOs are lumped in with the “shittiest problems in the company” that no one else can solve, he said.
Musk also lamented in 2022 that he sometimes feels “pretty lonely” if he lives alone while working on a project and doesn’t even have his dog for company.
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla. Grzegorz Wajda/SOPA/Getty Images
Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, had a similar experience. “The depth of loneliness I experienced as a CEO is difficult to express in words,” he said. posted on in January.
The combination of immense pressure, stress, loneliness and lack of work-life balance that often accompany being a CEO could well explain why few people stay in the role for long. The series of recent challenges likely fueled the exodus from top positions last quarter.
But there are exceptions to every trend: Warren Buffett has been the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway for more than half a century.
The 93-year-old has likely held on so long because he employs an army of CEOs to manage the dozens of companies he has acquired over the years.
“We delegate almost to the point of abdication,” he writes in his “Owner’s Manual” for Berkshire shareholders. Shifting day-to-day responsibilities allows Buffett to focus on what he loves doing: allocating capital inside and outside of his business.
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