Board and CEO Services
Supporting boards and CEOs every step of the way
RHR has partnered with thousands of CEOs and boards as they strive to elevate the performance of their teams and companies. We understand the challenges and opportunities that confront those at the top of the house and offer public and private companies across industries worldwide a full suite of board and CEO advisory services.
As a respected and trusted advisor, we excel at transforming ambiguity into opportunity, helping to evolve leadership and governance for enduring success on today’s global stage.
How to shape world-class leadership at the top.
Discover how RHR’s Board and CEO services elevate leadership and governance for enduring success.
Our Services
We offer the following CEO and board services to a range of clients, across all sectors, worldwide.
CEO Succession
We help boards, CEOs, and CHROs successfully manage every stage of CEO succession. Discover more >>>CEO Transition
We support boards, outgoing CEOs, and incoming CEOs to ensure seamless transitions and successful new-leader launches. Discover more >>>CEO Advisory Coaching
We work with CEOs to help navigate challenges and opportunities across the lifecycle of their tenures. Discover more >>>Board Evaluation
We provide a board evaluation that helps to rigorously assess governance effectiveness, identifying areas of strengths and weaknesses. Discover more >>>Board Development
We help boards and individual board members actively address difficult issues and board dynamics to enhance governance. Discover more >>>What makes a great board?
Download RHR’s newest publication, What Makes a Great Board, to learn how boards in the U.S. are taking many of the steps required to deliver good—even great—governance and where most leaders are pleased with the level of performance their boards deliver.
Our latest publication was produced in cooperation with Corporate Board Member and developed from a 2024 survey of U.S. public company board members conducted by Corporate Board Member and RHR International.
Let’s talk
For almost 80 years, we have helped companies with their CEO succession, transition and advisory coaching.
We also partner and support multiple boards around the world to support their board evaluation and development needs.
Reach out to Deb or David today, for an initial discussion to see how the team at RHR can help.
CEO Succession
Ensuring the right CEO is leading the company is one of the most important responsibilities of a board. A key responsibility of current CEOs and CHROs is to provide their board with several viable internal candidates as potential succession options.
A well-orchestrated CEO succession process supports your organization’s stability, strategic continuity, and marketplace strength. A poor process can bring disruptive turnover at the top, board polarization, a significant decrease in business performance, loss of market value, and a diminished board reputation.
A seamless transition instills confidence among stakeholders. It sustains the momentum of long-term initiatives and helps to create focus and alignment around necessary pivots. When CEO succession is done well, it fosters a positive organizational culture, secures investor trust, and maintains employee morale. In essence, getting CEO succession right is critical for organizational resilience, strategic alignment, and enduring success in a dynamic business landscape.
We have 80 years of experience working with some of the world’s most ambitious companies to help them deliver effective CEO succession.
How We Help You
Whether you’re engaged in a proactive, long-term succession or conducting a nearer-term CEO selection, we can help with:
Board alignment
We help align your board members and other key stakeholders on the company’s vision, strategy, and challenges moving forward, and the implications for what leadership behaviors, experience, and attributes are needed in the next CEO.
The Winning Formula® profile for CEO
We develop the optimum candidate profile to ensure your next CEO has the skills and capabilities to meet the future needs of your company.
Candidate Assessment
We leverage The Winning Formula® profile for CEO to assess your internal and external candidates using a multivariate process. We provide customized feedback on each candidate’s fit, readiness, strengths, and gaps.
Candidate Development
Once we have helped identify CEO candidates, we assist with developing them so they can maximize their viability at selection time and during transition.
Minimization of Bias
We help you ensure key stakeholders view the process as fair with minimal bias while delivering the best possible outcome.
CEO Transition
Once the board has chosen the next CEO, we work with the board, outgoing CEO, and incoming CEO to help minimize the risks associated with the transition.The Complexity Is in The Nuance
- Psychological forces affect every CEO succession. How these are managed determines the effectiveness of the process and the transition.
- Making the right selection is not the only key element of an effective succession process. Ensuring board alignment regarding the selection factors and managing communication, transition, and integration are also critical.
- Unexpected events occur in almost every CEO succession. We can partner with you to vet options and the implications, mitigate risks, and optimize your decision-making.
- Our approach and process are designed to help you maximize retention of non-selected internal candidates and other key senior executives; this is vital to ensuring business continuity.
Why Work With Us?
- We have broad experience guiding the most challenging CEO successions.
- We offer global expertise developed through working with thousands of boards and CEOs around the world.
- We are not a search firm, so there are no conflicts of interest as we help you select the right CEO for your company.
- We start at your point of need, whether that means a long-term succession plan, a mid-term CEO selection process, or a short-term leadership emergency.
Let’s talk
For almost 80 years, we have helped companies with their CEO succession, transition and advisory coaching.
We also partner and support multiple boards around the world to support their board evaluation and development needs.
Reach out to Deb or David today, for an initial discussion to see how the team at RHR can help.
CEO Transition
Executing a diligent, objective CEO selection process is critical to effective CEO succession, but it is only the beginning.
Thoughtfully navigating the interpersonal dynamics and business complexities of a CEO transition is imperative to maintaining business focus, retaining key talent, and successfully launching the next leader.
RHR has the proven approach, skills, and expertise to support the incoming and outgoing CEOs and the board in this critical phase to ensure a new CEO is successful.
Our work with incoming CEOs may include:
- Creating strategic clarity and alignment
- Navigating the leadership transition with an outgoing CEO
- Learning to work with the board
- Stakeholder engagement, team talent selection and development, organizational effectiveness, and personal resilience
The Qualities We Bring
In this high-stakes role, it’s crucial that your CEO work with an advisor who can develop trust and support impactful outcomes. When you work with an RHR advisor, you can expect:
- Objectivity – We believe in truth-telling and in our clients’ right to receive candid feedback and advice.
- Credibility – We offer a rare blend of experience, expertise, and perspective.
- “Fit” – The advisor achieves stylistic comfort, rapport, and ease of dialogue.
- Contextuality – We quickly establish a comprehensive understanding of the people, board, organization, strategy, and external landscape.
Let’s talk
For almost 80 years, we have helped companies with their CEO succession, transition and advisory coaching.
We also partner and support multiple boards around the world to support their board evaluation and development needs.
Reach out to Deb or David today, for an initial discussion to see how the team at RHR can help.
CEO Advisory
Leadership is born out of context. Not every CEO role is the same, and the challenges CEOs face change over the course of their tenure.
We help CEOs determine what is needed from them at any given point and time in the trajectory of the company.
In addition, we serve as thought partners to help them successfully navigate the series of challenges and opportunities that emerge within each of the three phases of the CEO lifecycle, across different markets, and with different levels of pace and complexity.
Topics we frequently address through our CEO advisory work include:
- Generating strategic clarity and alignment
- Building high-performing teams and enhancing company culture
- Developing the future CEO pipeline and evolving with the board of directors
- Establishing the CEO’s legacy and navigating their exit
The Qualities We Bring
In this high-stakes role, several CEO advisor factors make for a productive partnership characterized by trust and impact:
- Objectivity – We believe in truth-telling and in our clients’ right to receive candid information and advice.
- Credibility – We offer a rare blend of experience, expertise, and perspective.
- Suitability – We make sure we achieve a rapport with our CEO clients that supports the leader/advisor relationship.
- Contextuality – We quickly establish a comprehensive understanding of the company and its strategy, goals, organization, and business environment.
Let’s talk
For almost 80 years, we have helped companies with their CEO succession, transition and advisory coaching.
We also partner and support multiple boards around the world to support their board evaluation and development needs.
Reach out to Deb or David today, for an initial discussion to see how the team at RHR can help.
Board Evaluation
Effective board evaluation significantly enhances the value a board can bring to the organization it governs.
Our approach is grounded in extensive research as well as direct experience conducting many board evaluations.
Our process includes interviews with directors and senior team members and a proprietary survey that evaluates your board according to eight dimensions of effective governance.
You can also benchmark your board against our database of great boards.
Key Deliverables
We help to facilitate candid, constructive discussions of our board evaluation results in a way that addresses areas of disconnect and helps move the board to action. The entire span of our work may include:
- Customized interview protocol
- Ongoing consultation with key stakeholders
- A board evaluation summary report providing tailored insights regarding your board, including key strengths and opportunities along with actionable recommendations on how to improve governance for the entire and board and committees; results include a comparison of the board against our proprietary Great Boards benchmark norm.
- Individual director feedback summaries and feedback
Let’s talk
For almost 80 years, we have helped companies with their CEO succession, transition and advisory coaching.
We also partner and support multiple boards around the world to support their board evaluation and development needs.
Reach out to Deb or David today, for an initial discussion to see how the team at RHR can help.
Board Development
We tailor our approach to meet the unique needs of both your overall board and individual board members, helping them through the difficult conversations and decisions necessary to maximize their effectiveness. Our typical areas of focus include:
- Aligning the board around purpose and targeted impact with action planning
- Improving the board/management interface
- Foster candid conversations
- Improve trust and transparency
- Mediate chair/CEO interaction issues
- Improve/align role expectations
- Maximizing board member influence and impact
- Assess individual members
- Help new members learn to add value appropriately
- Support onboarding for new members
- Helping deal with problem board members
- Advising the board chair
- Advising the chairs of the nomination and governance committees
- Addressing board refreshment/renewal challenges
Let’s talk
For almost 80 years, we have helped companies with their CEO succession, transition and advisory coaching.
We also partner and support multiple boards around the world to support their board evaluation and development needs.
Reach out to Deb or David today, for an initial discussion to see how the team at RHR can help.