When Picking a New CEO, Ask Them for a Growth Plan

Peter looked like a sure thing. The board of directors was deciding on the next CEO, and Peter was a star performer from the C-suite. He’d succeeded in every role given to him. His past performance reviews, executive assessment reports, and managerial skill assessments were all outstanding.

But six months into his tenure as CEO, the company hit a rough patch. At first Peter said he had a plan on how to handle it. But over time, the board began to feel his plan wasn’t aligned with their expectations. Directors worried Peter wasn’t sharing information openly, and that he was becoming defensive during meetings. A year later, the board fired him and went back to the drawing board.

Why had their initial selection process been flawed? They realized they had primarily relied on backward-looking data on the candidate. Sure, they had conducted the usual interviews asking about his views on the future, but he had answered with generic, reassuring statements that the directors declined to press. With hindsight, they realized that they had made their appointment decision by overweighting his past successes and falling for confirmation bias.

This is a common problem. Corporate boards regularly appoint leaders to the CEO position after a selection process that focuses mostly on track records and past accomplishments. (This is also a challenge for selecting leaders in the C-suite.) They might know a lot about how a candidate built up a business and drove growth, but not enough about how they make sense of and would tackle current or looming pressures.

Interviews reveal useful information, but at this level of seniority, short Q&A sessions often fail to reveal a structured and precise perspective on what the candidate would likely do at this new level. Most data is also hard to compare across the candidates—boards can’t conduct side-by-side reviews, and interviews tend to generate intriguing but general sound-bites.

To supplement the candidate’s track record and interviews, companies need to take disciplined, comparative, detailed looks at how each candidate envisions the company’s future. The way to do this is to ask each candidate to develop a growth plan. By asking candidates to chart their growth aspirations, boards can add a future-oriented dimension into the calculations. They can project how each candidate is likely to respond to the company’s strategic commitments.

As a leadership advisor, I’ve worked on dozens of CEO and C-suite appointment situations at leading global companies across industries, and I often utilize growth plans as a tool to compare the way candidates envision the company’s future and identify corresponding priorities.

What a Growth Plan Involves

A growth plan pushes executives to reflect on the company’s needs first before applying their own talents, while generating useful information for C-suite appointment committees. By putting the growth plan on paper, committees can create some accountability on what actually happens after the promotion or hire.

The aim is to generate a concise two-page writeup, with a couple of sections supporting the vision of success: 1) business impact, 2) organizational impact, 3) stakeholder impact and 4) personal leadership impact. For each section, the candidate should get specific on what success would look like 12 months from now and how it might be measured.

Instead of sending the candidates off to write their plans in isolation, like homework, some companies utilize their chief learning officer, a senior leadership development professional or an outside leadership advisor to serve as a facilitator with candidates on their plans. Sometimes this process includes in-person sessions with whiteboard exercises and discussions. The candidate should feel free to express themselves, brainstorm, and think out loud, with confidence that the selection committee will see only the final written plan. (The facilitator will treat the conversation as confidential.) The written plan should be unique to the candidate, not externalized to what the company seems to want.

The facilitator can jumpstart this conversation in different ways. They might discuss what risks derailing the candidate’s growth plan. One popular approach is a “pre-mortem,” imagining the executive has failed after 12 months. What risks can the CEO and the company manage to reduce the likelihood of failure?

The facilitator might also engage the candidate in discussion about how to translate the plan into priorities for the executive starting on day one after attaining the new position. Where should they focus, and what actions should they start or stop in each of the four areas? What specific leadership behaviors should they make a priority? A good answer is one that is clear, specific, and with measurable actions.

Finally, how does all of this fit with their personal and professional aspirations and values? Most likely they’ll say they are ready, eager, and comfortable with the challenges, but some interesting details might come out.

After the Growth Plan

With growth plans for each candidate in hand, boards can proceed directly to follow-up interviews. I’ve seen selection committees use growth plans to facilitate structured and transparent conversations. They learn about candidates’ assumptions and ways of thinking, levels of ambition, thoughtfulness around risk factors, self-awareness, and openness to be vulnerable. Along the way, the committee’s members might discover they are themselves less aligned on their vision for the company than they thought.

Committees tend to center on the candidate’s vision for success and how it would inspire and motivate colleagues. They also probe how well it aligns with the company’s strategy. Throughout, they can take note on how “growth agile” the candidate appears. Is the candidate flexible in responding to challenges, defensive in the face of questions, or overly confident about a certain approach?

Unlike outside assessments created by search consultants or recruiters, a growth plan allows the candidate to take control of the process. Their plan sets the agenda for subsequent conversations. The plan, of course, can complement commercial goal- and KPI-setting, where forward looking planning and transparency are common. And ideally the process should generate insights for the candidate, not just for the committee.

Once the new CEO is in place, the committee can track progress against the growth plan. Perhaps more important, the process strengthens corporate governance as the board-CEO relationship gets off to an accelerated start, with fewer surprises.

While the board gains specific, comparative information, the process has benefits even for candidates who aren’t chosen. They all feel invested in developmentally, in a “real” experience. Many candidates start off as jaded skeptics, but become engaged as they realize they have full agency over the process. They appreciate going through an open, reflective exploration process—yet one that captures their insights in a structured, time-efficient way.

Growth plans have the added advantage of forcing an executive to think about personal growth in the context of corporate needs. Many longtime executives have stopped working on their growth; they chase the brass ring and forget about self-fulfillment and real improvement.

They’re also grateful for a different kind of facilitated dialogue with their board, regardless of how well they know each other and how often they speak on other topics. The conversation encourages some vulnerability on both sides.

The committee benefits from this added dimension on how the candidate might act in the C-suite. High-level executive positions are both important and exhausting; the chosen candidate must be ready to work on big questions with a lot of engagement. If the company intends to go in one direction, and a candidate is inclined to go in another, the selection committee needs to know that – for everyone’s benefit.

Ideally, internal candidates will have generated growth plans long before seeking a CEO position, as part of an annual process for senior leaders who are mapped on succession plans. But growth plans are useful even for the first time.

A Growth Plan Can Reveal Red Flags

Sometimes a growth plan can help avoid hiring the wrong candidate. For example I worked with the board of a thriving company that was looking for a new CEO to lead the way to the next phase of growth. One candidate stood out from the others, but her growth plan suggested she was oriented to organic growth, while the board foresaw M&A as the main driver. The interviews confirmed this difference, and the board chose someone else.

The board of a large regionally divided company had a different challenge. It was looking to appoint a CEO for one of its biggest regions. One candidate’s vision of success involved leading the revenue pie globally within the firm—a challenge given the company’s existing regional focus. This was a red flag to the board, which sought a leader focused on external, not internal competition.

Growth plans can also surface a concerning level of narcissism. One candidate’s write-up focused mainly on why the role was great for him, versus how he could be of service in the role.

Another board used the growth plans to give vital feedback to the candidate they ultimately picked. The candidate was inclined to work on his areas of weakness, while the directors saw the highest return from what he thought was already a strength: “Challenging others to drive high performance and results.”

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Growth plans can be a valuable tool in succession planning, not just for CEOs, but for any C-suite or equivalent leadership position. By engaging candidates in exploring future possibilities, they surface vital information for boards while offering value even for the candidates not selected.

Copyright 2025 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.

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