2023 marked a 20-year high for CEO turnovers

·Host and Reporter

January 2, 2024 at 12:15 PM

C-suites were afflicted with a rapid rise in CEO turnovers in 2023, with many chief executive successors starting their new roles in the new year.

Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. SVP and Head of Sales & Media Andy Challenger discusses trends seen across CEO positions and what that may indicate for the labor market in 2024.

"There was a big spike, higher than 2019 when people were heralding it as an exodus of CEOs," Challenger tells Yahoo Finance. "But, what I think we're seeing is a couple of factors, pent-up demand for turnover. There were a lot of CEOs asked to stay on for the COVID crisis, not to leave their companies in the middle of a lot of turmoil."

Click here to watch the full interview on the Yahoo Finance YouTube page or you can watch this full episode of Yahoo Finance Live here.

This post was written by Luke Carberry Mogan.

Video Transcript

[VIDEO LOGO] - Some CEOs starting new jobs today.

The big question, will 2024 be the year of C-suite shakeups?

Prominent companies like Morgan Stanley, Krispy Kreme, and Sherwin-Williams starting this year with brand new CEOs.

Plenty more are expected to add new names to executive positions throughout the year.

So how will all of this turnover impact business models as we start off this year?

Here to answer that question, we've got Andy Challenger, senior vice president and head of sales and media at Challenger, Gray & Christmas Andy, thanks so much for coming on with us to talk about this.

We're going to talk a lot about the overall jobs market.

But I got to start on this CEO shakeup.

I mean, what's going on with all the CEOs?

Why are we seeing so much turnover in this position?

ANDY CHALLENGER: It is an under-reported story.

We're seeing the highest level of CEO turnover over the course of 2023 as compared to any year that we tracked over the prior 20.

It was a big spike.

It was higher than 2019 when people were heralding it as an exodus of CEOs.

But what I think we're seeing is a couple of factors pent up demand for turnover.

There were a lot of CEOs that were asked to stay on through the COVID crisis, not to leave their companies in the middle of a lot of turmoil.

And now, they're feeling more comfortable and able to leave.

And also companies feeling more certainty about what the post-COVID world is going to look like, and bringing in new leaders to adjust to strategies that are based in this new world.

- Andy, what are you seeing sector-wise and when it comes to what this all means then for 2024?

This trend that we saw play out in 2023, is that something that you see sticking here then in the new year?

ANDY CHALLENGER: Yeah, I think we're going to continue to see an elevated rate of turnover both at the C-suite level and in the rest of the labor market.

We really saw a concentrated in a handful of industries that saw the biggest spikes in growth during the COVID years, but maybe some coming back down to the Earth in 2023.

So finance, health care, technology, a few areas where there was an extra concentration of turnover at that top role.

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Video Transcript

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