CHAPTER 03 CEO Succession Trends and Best Practices
Spotlight: MasterCard: A CEO Succession Plan a Decade in the Making
– S tart early. Planning for the next MasterCard CEO began almost contemporaneously with Banga’s appointment. For the next 10 years, Banga and Haythornthwaite committed to identifying talent early on with an open mind, allowing them to take their time pinpointing the best person to fill Banga’s shoes. – Cast a wide internal net. At the outset, Banga and Haythornthwaite identified 42 potential internal candidates. They then spent years monitoring and evaluating each person in order to narrow down their list. Starting with such a large talent pool list minimized the risk of overlooking qualified individuals and enabled board members to build relationships and critically evaluate candidates over a long period of time. – Give candidates opportunities to grow. Banga ensured that candidates were shuffled to different departments and roles every few years to allow them to gain broad exposure to the entire company and build expertise in multiple areas. Banga moved Miebach out of his role as head of Asia to chief product officer, helping him gain competencies in areas that his previous role could not offer.
On February 25, 2020, NYSE-listed MasterCard announced that its CEO, Ajay Banga, would be stepping down and that Michael Miebach would be appointed to lead the company. In a subsequent interview, Banga and then- board chair Richard Haythornthwaite revealed that an extensive CEO succession planning process had been in place at MasterCard for the previous 10 years – essentially from the moment that Banga had been appointed. The MasterCard approach highlights many key features of a successful succession planning process.
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Davies | dwpv.com
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