Intel, December 2024.
CEO Pat Gelsinger steps down. Two interim co-CEOs take over. No scandal. No uproar. Just a calm announcement—and a quiet signal that the system cracked.
Intel has been here before: In 2018, Bob Swan had to step in as interim CEO after a corporate affair went public. The plan wasn’t broken. It just wasn’t there.
But for those who’ve seen succession systems from the inside, that kind of arrangement usually says more than it shows. When interim steps in, something underneath didn’t hold. And often, that moment isn’t the first sign. It’s the last.
Prof. Rob Langan from ESADE and I found that poor succession can drain $350 million in profit over 3 consecutive years. In fast-moving sectors like finance or tech, it can quietly stretch into the billions—and Return on Assets can halve.
In fact, roughly one in five Fortune 1500 companies currently operates under interim leadership. Most of the time—not because it was planned that way. But because, when the moment came, there was no system strong enough to execute anything else.
Yet succession remains one of the least-resourced and most quietly avoided governance responsibilities.
Yes, CHROs raise it. Executive consultancies flag it. Boards acknowledge it. But when pressure hits, the system often falters.
I’ve worked alongside board members and advisors trying to implement succession with systems that looked solid on paper—but couldn’t hold when the moment came. It’s rarely loud. More often, it’s the silence that signals something’s wrong.
This article is about what fails long before the interim announcement is made. I’ll walk through four traps—grounded in recent research on effective succession governance and shaped by my work with CHROs, board members, and leadership consultancies—that quietly derail transitions at the top. They don’t show up in planning decks or dashboards. But when they converge, even capable organizations end up improvising under pressure.
What could have cost a few hundred thousand investment in strategic HR planning to get right ends up bleeding hundreds of millions. These failures are rarely about a person.
They’re about whether your system can hold when it’s tested—and why strengthening the HR function’s governance role is the most effective but often overlooked move to prevent it.
Four Traps That Quietly Undermine CEO Transitions
Research on strategic management and governance is clear: succession planning is the single biggest predictor of a successful CEO transition. It leads to smoother handovers, faster decision-making, greater market confidence, and a higher chance of choosing the right candidate.
Yet for most boards, it remains an underfunded afterthought. That’s not a tactical gap. It’s a governance failure. In fact, a survey published by Harvard Business Review and Spencer Stuart found that 50% of companies don’t even have a formal succession plan in place. Not a broken plan—no plan at all.
A senior partner at one of the top executive consultancies put it bluntly:
“You probably wouldn’t believe how many of the biggest firms I’ve worked with don’t even have a real plan.”
The reason? Decision bias—overconfidence, sunk-cost fallacy, and escalation of commitment. The same forces that make succession planning hard are often the ones that turn existing plans into traps.
Trap 1: When Everyone “Owns” Succession—But No One Drives It
This is the most common trap—and one of the easiest to overlook. Succession shows up in board agendas, CEO talking points, and HR dashboards. But when alignment breaks or timelines tighten, it becomes painfully clear: no one is actually accountable for moving it forward.
Boards discuss the next CEO decision. CEOs reference their plans. HR maps potential. But no one is empowered to make the call when pressure hits.
A senior partner in CEO succession once told me:
“You’d be surprised how many companies we work with that technically have a succession plan—but it was last updated five years ago, never tested, and has no real owner.”
What looks like shared responsibility becomes a decision vacuum under pressure:
- Boards raise the topic but often defer to the CEO’s preferred direction
- CEOs mention succession publicly but rarely invite challenge or redesign
- CHROs build succession grids and readiness models—but lack decision rights
- Consultants deliver reports—yet aren’t empowered to drive resolution
No one is mandated to call the decision when opinions diverge—which leads to two dangerous dynamics: diffusion of responsibility, where everyone touches the topic but no one owns the outcome; and delayed execution, where plans remain theoretical until urgency forces improvisation.
The result?
A succession plan that looked fine on paper stalls the moment it’s actually needed.
Trap 2: When the Successor Is Named—But Never Tested
This trap is harder to see—because on paper, everything looks right. The heir apparent is in place. The board has visibility. HR has a plan. But when pressure hits, the plan folds.
One board member put it plainly: “We usually just sign off on the plan the CEO or CHRO presents. We don’t really know how tested the person is—and we don’t have the time or tools to evaluate them properly.”
Most successors are developed in curated settings. They shine in presentations, lead structured projects, and build internal visibility.
But leadership is revealed when alignment breaks, decisions become political, and people still follow.
Resilience is not trained—it’s developed and tested in real company challenges:
- Leading without clear authority—or backing
- Making calls when priorities shift and resistance surfaces
- Recovering trust after missteps—without a safety net
Without that exposure, readiness stays theoretical. The moment the plan is activated, its weakness shows.
Trap 3: When the Profile Stayed Still—But the Strategy Didn’t
Succession profiles are often built for today’s strategy—or worse, yesterday’s.
By the time they’re needed, everything around them has shifted:
- The strategy has evolved
- The market has moved
- The candidate has left
- Or stayed—but no longer fits
The issue isn’t lack of planning. It’s that no one checked if the plan still made sense.
Boards rarely revisit the successor brief once it’s agreed. Even fewer challenge whether the next CEO fits the actual role—not just the one described years ago. Instead, they refer back to the plan. And only then realize it’s out of date.
In our analysis we’ve seen this play out especially in firms facing transformation. A successor is named and developed for the strategy of two years ago. But by the time the handover approaches, the context has shifted. The board’s expectations have changed. And the candidate, while capable, no longer matches the mandate.
So the plan holds. Until the moment it’s meant to activate. Then it breaks.
Because when succession profiles aren’t updated alongside strategy, organizations don’t just delay—they appoint the wrong person with full confidence.
And the fallback becomes interim.
Trap 4: When Governance Gets Stuck—and No One Breaks the Deadlock
This one’s uncomfortable to say out loud—but it’s common:
- A board member pushes their preferred candidate, even as doubts emerge.
- The CEO resists alternatives—because backing down means admitting they were wrong.
- The CHRO or search partner presents hard evidence—but gets sidelined the moment politics take over.
The frameworks exist. The data is clear. But no one is willing—or empowered—to cut through the conflict.
What begins as disagreement quickly calcifies into something harder to move: legacy, face-saving, status dynamics.
And so the board does what complex systems often do under pressure: It defaults, not decides. Sometimes that means pushing through the wrong choice. Other times, it means no choice at all.
Either way, the fallback becomes the plan. And the cost isn’t just delay—it’s erosion of trust in the process itself.
It’s Time to Give Succession—and C-Suite Effectiveness—the Governance It Deserves
Most failed CEO transitions don’t collapse on impact. They unravel long before—when influence overrides evidence, decisions stall, and readiness turns out to be performance, not proof. It’s rarely the absence of a plan. It’s that the system behind the plan couldn’t hold when pressure hit.
That failure is costly. In a study of 50 in-depth interviews with CHROs, Board members and a survey across 117 companies about high-stakes CEO transitions, Prof. Schepker and colleagues found a direct link between structured, evolving succession systems and successful outcomes.
HR as a Governance Watchdog for Shareholder Value
In several cases, the difference between failure and a smooth transition amounted to hundreds of millions in enterprise value—not because the successor was perfect, but because the process behind them was built to adapt, to decide, and to act.
This isn’t about better planning decks or upgraded talent grids.
It’s about treating succession as infrastructure:
A system that evolves with strategy, assigns ownership with real authority, tests readiness in real-world conditions—and includes interim not as an afterthought, but as a scenario with a playbook.
Succession—and broader C-suite effectiveness—must become a core governance function. Whether led by HR or a dedicated unit, it needs structural authority, direct access to the board, and the mandate to align decisions and act when alignment breaks.
You don’t need a perfect plan. You need a system—and an HR strategy—that holds when it matters most.
👉🏻 If that’s what you’re building—or what you know you’ll need—let’s talk.
About the Author
Dr. Nicolas T. Deuschel is a strategic HR advisor and professor with over 15 years of experience in organizational change. As an executive at a Fortune 500 company and former strategy consultant, he led initiatives that saved €8 million annually by transforming human capital management. He empowers leaders to navigate resistance and achieve real ROI using evidence-based strategies.
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