CEO Succession Advisory | Nadler Advisory Services

Advising boards and CEOs through each phase of the succession process

The CEO succession planning process is among the board’s most critical responsibilities. It’s also one of the most complex, involving the delicate interplay of procedural, political, and personal dynamics. Our goal is to help clients manage those complexities through any or all phases of the succession process.

In recent years, overall responsibility for the succession process has been shifting from the CEO to the board of directors. While the board’s primacy represents sound governance, it often leads to truly messy situations, fraught with personal conflict, political in-fighting, and dangerous risks of losing top talent.

Boards – particularly those who are taking a leading role in succession for the first time – are looking for help not just with assessing potential CEO candidates but, just as importantly, with designing an effective succession process that properly balances the important roles to be played by both the board and by management.

Examples of Our Work

Replacing the Reluctant Founder

We were asked by the board of a Fortune 500 manufacturing company to design and execute a CEO selection process at a time when the aging founder was actively resisting retirement. We helped the board create a process for identifying and assessing candidates, all the while keeping the CEO informed and seeking his input without allowing him to disrupt or take over the process. We helped everyone agree on assessment criteria, conducted the assessments of internal and external candidates, and then facilitated the board’s discussion of the results as they selected the candidate who ultimately ascended to the top job.

Easing the Transition

We designed the succession process at a more than century-old, $800 million family-owned consumer products company, where the CEO and “family patriarch” was nearing retirement without a family successor in sight. We developed a formal process for the corporate board to be involved in succession for the first time, then involved them and the incumbent CEO in a collaborative process to develop selection criteria. We helped them use the results of our candidate assessments to agree on the selection of the first non-family CEO in the company’s history.

Family Company Succession

At a California-based regional bank, we worked with the board to help determine whether the Chief Operating Officer, who had been hired with the hope that he would one day become CEO, was ready to assume the top job, or whether the bank should first do an outside search. Based on our thorough assessment, the board decided the COO was exactly what they needed and fulfilled all their expectations. Then, literally on the eve of the board’s formal selection, the incumbent CEO decided he wanted to stay another year – which would have resulted in the COO’s resignation. We worked with board leaders to navigate the crisis and move ahead with the transition as planned, on time

Retaining Top Talent

We worked with the Chairman and the CEO of a Midwestern community bank to design a CEO succession process involving several internal executives who were credible candidates, and all of whom the bank wanted to retain if at all possible. We helped write the charter for the nominating committee, assessed the candidates, and then helped to design attractive executive roles for the unsuccessful candidates which helped to keep the senior team intact throughout the new CEO’s first two years in the job.

Advising boards and CEOs through each phase of the succession process

Examples of Our Work

Replacing the Reluctant Founder

Easing the Transition

Family Company Succession

Retaining Top Talent

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