Your Board Isn't Ready to Replace You, And They Don't Know It
Match Group needed a new CEO. They didn't run a search. They looked around the boardroom table and picked one of their own directors.
Spencer Rascoff had joined Match Group's board in March 2024. Less than a year later, he was running the company. Not because the board panicked and grabbed the nearest familiar face, but because they'd spent a year watching him work and realized he already understood the business better than most outside candidates ever could.
This isn't an isolated story. Spencer Stuart's research found that 19 of the 168 new S&P 500 CEOs named last year came directly from boards of directors, the highest number since 2020.
Here's what most boards get wrong about that trend. They assume it's a workaround, something you do when you got caught without a real succession plan. Pull a director off the bench because you didn't build a bench anywhere else.
That's backwards.
The boards doing this well aren't improvising. They're getting a return on something they built months, sometimes years, earlier. As insiders, directors already understand the culture, the history, and the strategy. As outsiders to daily operations, they can still challenge how things are done without the baggage of internal politics. That combination is nearly impossible to manufacture in a 90-day external search.
Most boards treat succession planning as a document. A name in a binder, reviewed once a year, forgotten the other 364 days. That's not a plan. That's a liability with a due date nobody's tracking.
Rascoff's board did something different long before anyone needed a new CEO. They gave directors real work. He now has one of his board members personally coaching his marketing leaders. He holds one-on-one meetings with directors between formal board meetings, not to update them, but to build the kind of trust that shows up when a hard call needs to be made.
That's the part conventional succession thinking misses entirely. Readiness isn't built in the meeting where you name a successor. It's built in the eighteen months of unglamorous relationship-building before anyone says the word "successor" out loud.
So here's the uncomfortable question for the board members reading this: when's the last time you gave a director real operating responsibility, not just a seat and a slide deck? If your answer is never, you don't have a succession plan. You have a list of names you'll be scrambling to vet the day you actually need one.
The boards that get this right stop treating governance and development as separate activities. Every board meeting becomes a chance to build capacity, not just approve minutes.
If your board can't name a ready successor today, or can't explain how that person got ready, you're not looking at a planning gap. You're looking at a governance failure waiting for a headline.
If you're seeing these symptoms in your organization and want lasting change, let's talk.
Until next week...
Dr. Neal McIntyre, DPA
Dr. Neal McIntyre is the author of Leadership Is Dead: Why Traditional Leadership Is Failing - And What Must Replace It. He works with executives and boards to turn leadership from a concentration risk into a structural advantage. Through his PRISM™ Leadership Continuity Framework, his clients build organizations where leadership transfers, holds, and compounds so that the next transition strengthens the enterprise instead of destabilizing it.
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