One of your most consequential decisions as a board director—selecting your next CEO—has never been more important, or harder. With CEO turnover in 2024 reaching a six-year high,  boards face mounting pressure to get this decision right first time.

The CEO you select will be expected to face an increasingly complex operating environment: technological disruption, geopolitical tensions and heightened stakeholder expectations, which, taken together, create a perfect storm of leadership challenges. Yet for female executives in particular, another layer of complexity exists—one that thoughtful boards need to recognise and address.

Too ambitious? Not ambitious enough?

Our research has shown that female CEOs often face a double bind. A comprehensive analysis of news articles covering 750 CEOs across the FTSE 100, S&P 500, and Euronext 100 companies found that women CEOs were twice as likely to be described as both “too ambitious”—for instance ruthless or self-interested—and “lacking ambition” compared to their male counterparts. They were also three times more likely to be characterised as “lacking confidence” than male CEOs.

Women leaders are often damned if they do, and damned if they don’t. When female CEOs display traits such as assertiveness or decisiveness, they’re often perceived as aggressive or unlikeable; when they demonstrate collaborative or nurturing leadership styles, they’re perceived as lacking in authority and executive presence. Women are often expected to meet an ever-shifting bar of requirements—something that their male counterparts rarely encounter with the same intensity.

This research fleshes out one of the key barriers to companies considering—and leveraging—the full range of CEO succession talent available to them. In an operating environment which is ever more challenging to lead in, it’s particularly critical that companies focus on increasing leadership optionality—in other words, taking advantage of the full extent of the leadership pool during the succession process.

As stewards of your organisation’s future, you have both the power and opportunity to address the double bind. Here, we set out three transformative approaches that forward-thinking boards can implement to start that work.

1. Challenge traditional CEO archetypes

The competencies that have traditionally helped leaders ascend to the CEO role are no longer enough to help them stay there. Leadership is rapidly evolving, requiring boards to reconsider what makes an effective CEO. Research shows that four key skills equip CEOs to grow and evolve in today’s business environment:

• Drive and resilience: the determination to pursue ambitious goals despite setbacks
• Curiosity and adaptability: the willingness to question assumptions and embrace new approaches
• Systems thinking: the ability to understand and manage complex interrelationships across the organisation and ecosystem
• Social intelligence: the capacity to navigate relationships and influence diverse stakeholders

Beyond these factors, truly transformational CEOs possess self-knowledge and a clarity of purpose that allows them to realise their potential—and help others do the same. Our research shows that one of the areas female executives tend to spike on is purpose-driven leadership—their ability to drive value and positive impact for investors, customers, employees, and communities. By focusing CEO ‘success profiles’ on these forward-looking competencies, rather than traditional leadership stereotypes, boards can identify candidates whose strengths might otherwise be overlooked or mischaracterised through a gendered lens.

2. Combine instinct with objective assessment

Choosing the right CEO requires both art and science. But too often, boards rely heavily on ‘gut feelings’: instincts that can be influenced by established patterns and preconceptions. Instead, objective assessment tools such as psychometric assessments can be used. They provide quantifiable insights into CEO candidates’ cognitive abilities, behavioural tendencies and decision-making patterns. These assessments reveal how candidates process information, handle uncertainty and respond to stress—key indicators as to whether they’ll be an effective CEO.

Another objective assessment method board directors can use is real-life simulations. They complement these insights by testing CEO candidates’ abilities in controlled yet realistic scenarios. By replicating high-stakes situations without consequences, boards are given the opportunity to observe how CEO candidates respond and collaborate under pressure. These exercises provide concrete evidence of capabilities in action, rather than relying on assumptions about how different types of leaders might perform—and boards are increasingly opting to add this assessment into the process.

These assessment tools can help neutralise the double bind by focusing their evaluation on measurable performance rather than conformity to leadership stereotypes. When boards anchor their discussions in objective data, they create a more consistent evaluation framework for all candidates.

3. Adopt an ‘opt-out’ approach to successors

Research consistently shows that women tend to underestimate their capabilities and readiness for leadership roles, often requiring complete confidence in their qualifications before pursuing advancement. In contrast, men frequently advance with significantly less concern about meeting all requirements.

The opt-out approach to succession planning represents a paradigm shift in how organisations identify future leaders. It involves proactively identifying all qualified candidates and automatically including them in the succession pool unless they opt out. By using this approach, boards create more robust leadership talent pipelines. It rebalances a playing field that has historically favoured hand-raisers over demonstrable capability.

Double bind, singular purpose

Understanding and appreciating the nuances and the ubiquitous nature of the double bind is an important first step in strengthening your pipeline of leadership talent for CEO and senior leadership roles.

By challenging traditional CEO archetypes, implementing objective assessments and adopting opt-out selection approaches, you are well equipped to navigate beyond the double bind and take the risk out of hiring decisions, so as to increase leadership optionality and identify the most capable leader for the leadership role in question. The board’s critical responsibility—selecting and evaluating CEOs—becomes more objective as well as more effective, setting the stage for sustained organisational success in our rapidly evolving world.

Hetty Pye is a member of Russell Reynolds Associates’ board and CEO advisory practice