By Month Six, the Room Already Knows

Boards face a question that rarely gets asked out loud, and Lila MacLellan puts it at the center of The Right Time to Judge a New CEO in The Wall Street Journal: "How do we know we got it right?"

Drawing on INSEAD professor Stanislav Shekshnia, author of 21 Questions About CEO Succession, she reports that boards should evaluate a new CEO six to 12 months into the role, years earlier than most do. Shekshnia suggests looking at continuity, whether the CEO has been accepted as a legitimate leader by employees, customers and partners, whether top people stayed, and whether the predecessor has truly let go. German Herrera, global chair of Egon Zehnder, estimates that only about 20% of boards run timely evaluations.

The question is urgent. Challenger, Gray & Christmas counted 782 CEO exits in the first five months of 2026. Behind every one of those transitions is a board that will eventually have to answer whether it chose well.

Shekshnia's checklist is practical and wise. I would add one more measure, because it is often the earliest and most honest signal of all.

The Room Knows First

Long before results show up, people inside the organization have formed a judgment about a new leader. They decide whether it is safe to disagree. They decide whether to bring bad news early or late. They decide whether to keep contributing their best thinking or to keep their heads down until they see which way the wind blows.

Those decisions do not appear in a quarterly report. But they shape every quarterly report that follows.

Legitimacy, one of Shekshnia's measures, captures part of this. But a CEO can be accepted as legitimate and still create a room where people edit themselves. From the boardroom, compliance can look a lot like acceptance.

That is why the most useful early signals are behavioral, not financial.

Five Questions That Read a Room

In my work on Leadership in the Age of Personalization, five indicator questions measure the environment a leader creates. They are simple enough for a board to ask at month six.

Who does the new CEO let in? Are differing perspectives part of key decisions, or has the inner circle narrowed?

How do they see people? As individuals with distinct capabilities, or as boxes on an org chart?

Who do they let people be? Do leaders across the company still bring their own judgment, or are they performing what they think the new CEO wants?

What do they let people do? Are talented people being given real authority, or is control concentrating at the top?

How do they let them do it? Is there room for different methods, or only one acceptable way?

None of these requires a survey to begin. Board members can ask them of the executive team, observe them in meetings and listen for them in conversations with employees, customers and partners. The answers reveal whether a new CEO is building conviction across the organization or just compliance.

Why Boards Hesitate

Shekshnia offers an honest explanation for why boards delay. Admitting a mistake is unpleasant, a new search is a headache, and people quietly withdraw from the problem.

That is a conviction problem, and it lives in the boardroom as much as anywhere else. I define conviction as the earned capacity to act on what you believe before the outcome is certain. A board that waits for perfect certainty about a CEO will almost always wait too long.

The same is true in the other direction. Shekshnia notes that boards sometimes move too quickly, often under pressure from a predecessor or founder. Conviction is not haste. It is clarity about what you are measuring and the willingness to act on what you see.

As I explored in Culture Is What You Tolerate, every behavior a leader permits sends a message about what really matters. That applies to boards too. What a board tolerates in a new CEO's first year becomes the culture of the next decade.

Three Questions for Boards at Month Six

Add three questions to the early evaluation.

Are people bringing problems to the new CEO sooner or later than before? The speed of bad news is one of the most reliable signals of trust.

Who has gone quiet? Notice which strong voices on the leadership team have stopped challenging.

What does the CEO say will stay the same and what will change? A leader who can answer clearly is building alignment. One who cannot is leaving people to guess.

Results take years to judge. The room can be read in months. As I wrote in Legacy Is Built in Every Meeting, the way a leader shows up day to day is legacy in progress.

By month six, the room already knows. The best boards make sure they know too.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.