Most African boards have a strong executive bench but no CEO-ready successor, Heidrick and Struggles warns

Most African boardrooms have a deep bench of strong executives. What they do not have, according to new research from leadership advisory firm Heidrick and Struggles, is a CEO-ready one.

The 2026 Heidrick and Struggles CEO and Board Confidence Monitor, released this week, found that only four in 10 surveyed CEOs and board members feel confident that their CEO succession planning leaves the organisation better positioned for the future. The gap between having senior executives who perform well in their current roles and having leaders who are genuinely prepared for the weight, visibility and judgment demands of the top seat is wider than most boards want to admit.

Thabiso Legoete, Partner-in-Charge of Heidrick and Struggles Africa, says boards are consistently overestimating the readiness of their internal candidates. "A strong executive bench can fall short of being CEO-ready," he said. "Senior executives may perform well in the roles they already hold, while still needing deliberate preparation for the weight, visibility, and judgement required of the CEO role. Boards often underestimate how much work is needed to move internal candidates from strong executive performance to genuine CEO succession readiness."

The problem is not unique to any one sector or geography, but its consequences are acute in African markets where institutional memory, stakeholder relationships and contextual business knowledge are often embedded in individual leaders rather than distributed across teams. When a CEO leaves unexpectedly in those conditions, the search for a replacement quickly becomes a test of whether the board has done the work over years, or whether it is about to do it badly under pressure.

Mark Watt, Partner at Heidrick and Struggles, identifies the chairperson as the critical variable in whether succession discipline holds across a board's tenure. "Succession is not a new concept, but the discipline to keep it on the agenda has dissipated," he said. "Boards need to continually test internal candidates against future business and leadership requirements rather than current performance or today's context."

His broader diagnosis is blunt. "Big organisations can no longer afford to muddle through extraordinary change and hope incremental adjustments will carry them through. Governance must function as foresight in action, with boards creating enough productive discomfort to challenge confirmation bias and invite dissent before decisions settle into consensus."

The research draws a distinction that boards frequently collapse into a single category. A successor can maintain current operations and still fail the next chapter if the strategic context has shifted. A person shaped by the previous CEO's methods and assumptions may struggle when the organisation needs to move in a different direction rather than continue the trajectory it is already on. The question boards should be asking, the report argues, is not who would be the best version of the current leader, but who can lead the organisation through what comes after.

There is also a structural problem in how boards access information about the people who might eventually run the organisations they govern. Most boards are built around strategy reviews, financial oversight and formal executive presentations. Those formats are poorly designed for developing genuine insight into how potential leaders think, respond under pressure or engage when they are not trying to deliver a polished answer to a panel.

Legoete and Watt propose what they call "board people days": structured sessions with no competing agenda that give directors firsthand exposure to the internal bench and high-potential leaders beyond the most visible executive roles. The concept echoes something the corporate world largely abandoned along with its more formal culture: the value of unstructured time with people you might one day need to rely on entirely.

"There's a reason business lunches or meetings on the golf course became such a familiar fixture," Legoete said. "Walking a course with someone or sharing a meal removes a lot of the formality that comes with a boardroom. People speak differently when they're not sitting across from a panel, being asked to prove themselves. People days should create that same kind of space."

The report also addresses what it describes as a failure mode among incumbent CEOs. The natural human tendency to see a potential successor as a rival, or to unconsciously prepare someone in one's own image rather than for the organisation's future needs, produces successors who are well-suited to yesterday's version of the company. "Their role is not to create a successor in their own image, but to prepare leaders for the organisation's future needs," Legoete said.

The monitor suggests that the boards that will handle CEO transitions best are those that have built direct, informal knowledge of their leadership bench well before it is needed, understand the specific demands of the next chapter of the business, and have refused to let urgent succession decisions get made in the disorienting days immediately after a departure has already unsettled the room.