The hottest trend in executive leadership: Bring back the White Guy

Analysis by Allison Morrow, CNN

New York (CNN) — Listen up, corporate boards: If you’re looking for the biggest trend in leadership this fall, look no further. Corporate America’s hottest CEO pick is a classic model — the Middle Aged White Guy.

Twenty-twenty-four has been the year of CEO turnover, with some 1,450 having announced their departure so far — up 15% from the same period last year and the highest year-to-date total on record, according to research from executive coaching and outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Companies are increasingly opting to fill those vacant top jobs with a man, the data show.

In August, the rate of new CEOs who are women fell 0.7% to 27.2% compared with the same period last year.

And of course, the ranks of women and people of color have always been thin. Just 52 businesses in the 2024 Fortune 500 ranking were run by women, holding flat from the year before.

Obviously, White Guy CEO never went out of fashion — women have rarely represented more than 10% of Fortune 500 companies. People of color are also wildly underrepresented in the C-suite, with just eight Black CEOs in the Fortune 500 this year (down from a peak of nine last year).

But a rash of recent leadership shakeups illustrates the enduring power of the White Guy as a kind of capsule wardrobe for corporate leadership.

See here:

• CVS Health, America’s largest drug store chain, on Friday gave Karen Lynch the boot and replaced her with longtime executive David Joyner. Lynch was effectively the most powerful woman in Corporate America as head of CVS, the largest Fortune 500 company with a female CEO.
• Starbucks over the summer abruptly ousted Indian-American Laxman Narasimhan after less than two years at the helm, replacing him with Brian Niccol, the former head of Chipotle. (Part of that succession involved Mellody Hobson, the first Black woman ever to chair an S&P 500 company, ceding her director seat to Niccol.)
• This past spring, UnderArmour replaced Stephanie Linnartz after just a year to make way for the return of Kevin Plank, the founder who stepped aside in 2019 amid reports that he and some of the company’s other male executives had a habit of charging strip-club visits to their corporate cards, among other allegations.
• Meanwhile, Disney’s Bob Iger said the company would announce his successor in early 2026. In a shakeup Monday, Disney said that Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman would be taking over as board chair to help lead the search for Iger’s replacement. (For those keeping track at home, that’s Iger and Gorman, both White men, determining the future of the house of mouse.)

To be clear: What a board decides to do with its chief executive is the board’s business. But DEI initiatives have been shown to boost profits, reduce employee attrition and increase employee motivation, as my colleague Nathaniel Meyersohn has reported.

Leadership diversity, in particular, is associated with “holistic growth ambitions, greater social impact, and more satisfied workforces,” according to McKinsey research.

The business case is clear. But the reversion to the mean of a White male CEO also is happening at the same time that many firms are backing off their early-2020s commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI. All of that coincides with the Supreme Court’s decision last year to end affirmative action in colleges.

In other words, giant US institutions have created a permission structure for businesses to revert to muscle memory. There may have been a moment, circa 2020-2022, when replacing a person of color or a woman with a White man may have sparked a public relations debacle.

Clearly, major companies don’t seem to be sweating the optics anymore.

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