Areas of Focus

Succession + Transition

Choosing a replacement chief executive is among the most consequential decisions a company may ever tackle.

Dolus understands the diverse challenges and requirements of executive succession and transition, and we help boards, CEOs, and other stakeholders successfully prepare for and navigate the complex demands of leadership transition.

There’s no recipe for picking good CEOs or even the right one for any given organization. But a distinguishing feature of our work involves accurately separating signal from noise in psychological and psycho-social predispositions—discerning the critical differences between character and ability.

Dolus’ practice looks beyond superficial assessments of prospective leaders’ apparent suitability or desirability to forecast how certain core character traits, often masked by persuasive social presentation, will impact organizational culture and performance.

Over years of guiding clients through the CEO succession process, we’ve refined our expertise and practices to help clients in a range of leadership transition scenarios:

• Removing an incumbent CEO—the decision to remove a standing CEO is a complex and often painful institutional inflection point. We serve as a sounding-board to the Board in its determination process, frequently including a forensic review of events leading to the decision, and then as it coordinates the strategic management of de-risking institutional reputation and shareholder confidence, stewarding the change with minimal disruption to the organization while also creating as graceful an exit as possible for the outgoing leader.

• A planned leadership transition—We assist the Board in assessing the organization’s requirements and expectations of a new leader and with interviewing and selecting a new CEO. We evaluate the short-listed candidates, whether advanced internally or externally by a retained executive search firm, with particular focus on character, leadership strengths, weaknesses, growth potential and culture fit, leading to our making objective, evidence-based recommendations to the board.

• Transitions from Founder-led to next generation leadership—Founders’ decisions to depart their company can be triggered by burn-out, serial-entrepreneur wanderlust, a self-assessed recognition of the importance of stepping aside or board or investor mandate. In each circumstance, we help the stakeholders select the right successor CEO for the enterprise’s current and future needs. We then work with the new CEO in an advisory role to help her or him assimilate into the organization, form a new management team if needed, and establish the necessary conditions for success. 

• Special Situations—In matters involving fraud, bankruptcy proceedings, and enforcement actions, court-appointed receivers assume institutional leadership with narrowly focused value-preservation requirements. In M&A transactions and activist investor take-overs, incumbent leadership may be ousted and replacements installed in haste or without comprehensive due diligence, preparation and planning. We assist in stabilizing performance in distressed circumstances.

In all of these situations, we usually continue in an advisory role to assist the incoming CEO, the management team and the Board in a seamless transition.