How Many Restructures is Too Many?
How many organisational restructures are acceptable for a CEO to have on their record with one company?
One is probably expected, particularly in the first 12 months post the CEO joining the company. Those first 100 days in the job reveal many opportunities for optimisation and for strengthening brand positioning.
Two in a five-year period might be acceptable if the market experiences rapid changes. Certain sectors move at a dizzying pace. Take, for example, technology. You sometimes need to change the organisation for it to be able to create the real and necessary change that keeps people in jobs. Then there’s sectors like advertising where restructures due to mergers and acquisitions are par-for-the-course when an agency is succeeding.
What would you say, though, to five or more restructures in a 10-year period? What does that tell you about the CEO and the C-Suite?
Provided legal and regulatory obligations are met, there is technically no upper limit to the number of restructures a business can execute. Sadly, this gives some reckless leaders a green light to continuously experiment with the organisation, regardless of the human impact. This means that the mere whiff of a restructure could be saying a lot about the CEO’s approach to people vs profit.
That said, how long would you keep a CEO after they hit their fifth restructure?
Now, this is an interesting full-circle question. Because a CEO's ability to craft, inspire, and steward a clear vision determines whether the business avoids the chaos of constant restructuring and reputational fallout that often ensues. It forces us to ask THE question that no one ever should: Does a leader who relies on this many restructures actually know how to set a vision?
But the real issue is what happens when the board keeps a CEO in place longer than they prove to be successful. Because keeping them in the job communicates to employees four important things:
That the psychosocial safety policy is a sham.
That the CEO is a protected individual who is insulated from the consequences of their decisions.
That the perceptions and experiences of people are irrelevant to achieving social license to operate.
That the wrong people have been hired into the wrong roles for the wrong reasons.
All of which signify a crass and obstinate feat: The culture is dirt.
Culture, however, is not a human resources issue. It’s a fiduciary responsibility. And both the board, the CEO and, depending on entity structure, the entire C-Suite are all required to get the culture right. Because, as we all know: Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
The trouble is, creating a good culture is easier said than done.
In 2022, the prestigious leadership consulting firm Russell Reynolds published its ‘CEO Turnover Report’ showing that CEO churn amongst organisations on the Major Global Stock Market had hit a five-year high at 10.9%. In 2024, it hit that mark again before ratcheting it up to 12.7% in 2025. That’s 234 CEOs replaced at the world’s most powerful organisations in a year. It’s also the second year in a row that CEO turnover has reached record levels.
If the CEO succession plan is one of the most crucial responsibilities the board can have to ensure it maintains stable leadership, the confidence of shareholders, and doesn’t attract media attention over excessive restructures, then the rate of CEO turnover might have you wondering: What definition of capability is the board using to select these leaders?
Well, up until 2000, the Chief Operating Officer was the dependable person, most likely to move into the CEO’s office. Since then, succession plans have shifted and now show a steep rise of executives from other disciplines inhabiting the gig. None more interesting than the Chief Financial Officer. None less interesting than the Chief Experience Officer, who didn’t even manage to make it to Spencer Stuart’s list of the top 10 C-Suite leaders promoted to CEO. The reason behind that is that it’s assumed people who make money, know how-to make more of it. But, as it turns out, having profit and loss responsibility for a department isn’t the right prerequisite skill for creating a culture of happy workers.
And workers are, in fact, unhappy.
See, for example, Gallup’s ‘State of the Global Workplace Report’, 2026, which revealed a dismal 20% of employees feel engaged at work. Many leaders will dismiss this as the by-product of poor leadership acumen and, instead, attribute this to a trend called “people don’t want to work these days”.
But that line of thinking is thrown out the window when you read iHire’s ‘Toxic Workplace Trends Report’, 2026. The stats here point to a different and more compelling root cause. That is, 68.9% of employees have worked in a toxic workplace and a further 79.1% cite poor leadership and management as the cause of workplace toxicity.
What you already know is that happy workers make happy customers. The current state of unhappiness means the CEOs leadership is failing and the root of their failure is not a lack of diversity, certificates or funding. It’s believing they are merely stewards of business continuity, rather than recognising that – in a modern economy where evolution and innovation are required – they are also the stewards of experiential creation.
This article contains an abridged extract from The Experience-Suite available on Amazon.
