Vestd's C-suite Churn Report: benchmarking FTSE100 retention and leadership in 2025
Leadership at the top of Britain’s biggest companies is undergoing a quiet transformation. While roles like Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer are mainstays, the people in these roles - and how long they stay for - are changing.
Senior executives, known as the C-suite, are at the centre of an evolving business environment shaped by global economic uncertainty, rapid digital disruption, and shifting workplace cultures.
Today’s C-suite leaders are under immense pressure to streamline costs, reinvent business processes, and lead technological innovation, without losing sight of shareholder expectations.
These changes come as 82% of CEOs believe their competitors will be out of business within a decade if they fail to adapt, while two in five executives are actively planning a major restructure of their operations.
But change and advancement are not being felt everywhere. While gender representation in leadership has improved in recent years, women remain significantly underrepresented in the C-suite and progress has slowed.
At current rates, it is predicted to take more than two decades for women to reach gender parity at an executive level.
The trend in C-suite resignations and stalled progress on female representation also points to a deeper issue: leaders are simply not being incentivised to stay.
As companies rethink what leadership looks like, they have the opportunity to re-examine how they retain it by aligning executive priorities with the future of the business through tools like growth shares and unapproved share options.
To understand dynamics in executive leadership, our team collected and analysed employment trends across C-suite roles in the UK’s FTSE100 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange.
We explored key factors such as average tenure, roles, gender, educational backgrounds and first names across the following roles: Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Chief People Officer (CPO), and Chief Marketing Officer (CMO).
We further analysed Glassdoor employee sentiment data to assess CEO approval ratings, as well as average scores for compensation and benefits across sectors.
Together, these insights provided a comprehensive insight into the patterns shaping leadership in the UK’s FTSE100 companies.
Our ‘C-Suite Churn Report’ reveals a significant variation in tenure, turnover, and gender representation in leadership across FTSE100 companies.
While some roles enjoy more relative stability, others are experiencing a rapid turnover, which could signal shifts in organisational priorities and long-term strategies.
Turnover appears especially high in roles tied to customer service, digital transformation, and workforce responsibilities.
Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) emerged as the most transient, with an average tenure of just 3 years and 6 months (41.6 months).
Chief People Officers (CPOs) had a similarly shorter tenure, with an average of 3 years and 10 months (45.6 months). People in both roles also held similar average tenures at the company overall, although CPOs experienced a slightly quicker route to leadership with an average of 2.3 roles held overall.
This may indicate increased pressure to deliver fast results, with both roles often facing rapidly changing brand perceptions, employer value proposition, and talent retention, all of which may be contributing to shorter tenures.
This compares starkly to the 6 years and 2 months (74.3 months) average tenure for Chief Executive Officers (CEOs), who remain the longest-serving executives on average.
Holding both the longest tenure in the C-suite and the longest tenure at a company overall at 13 years and 2 months (158 months), this suggests CEOs are typically promoted internally, with an average of 2.9 roles, more than any other executive position.
In the middle ground, Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) have an average tenure of 4 years and 6 months (53.5 months), while Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) stay for just 3 years and 10 months (46.3 months). Both roles hold similar overall average tenures of 8 years, and approximately 2.5 and 2.4 roles are held at the company.
CEO exits have been hitting record highs in recent years, with January 2025 alone recording 222 resignations, which signalled the most in a single month since records began in 2003.
Across 2024, CEO departures rose by 16% year-on-year, driven in part by ongoing political and economic volatility that continues to impact leadership confidence and decision-making. The technology sector was among the hardest hit, with CEO turnover up by 50% against its six-year average.
Despite these challenges, the report found that FTSE100 CEOs maintained strong support from employees. The average approval rating for CEOs across all sectors stood at 77%, suggesting a steady confidence in leadership.
Employee sentiment was at its highest in the automotive and insurance sectors, where leadership scored 97% and 91% respectively. Both sectors were also among the highest rated for benefits and compensation offerings, at 4.4 out of 5 for automotive and 4.0 for insurance.
The insurance sector was ranked in the top 10 for employee benefits in 2024, and in the top 2 for provision of company share schemes - indicating a strong investment into employee benefits and wellbeing.
In contrast, leadership in hospitality and in marketing and advertising appears to be under pressure. These sectors recorded the lowest CEO approval ratings at 60% and 62%, respectively, and further underperformed in employee satisfaction with benefits and compensation (3.4 out of 5 for hospitality and 3.2 for advertising and marketing).
This comes after the 'Employee Retention Report' revealed that both sectors had the lowest employee tenure. On average, workers stayed just 2.8 years with firms in advertising and marketing, and 3.0 years in hospitality.
At an enterprise level, tenure only slightly improved to 3.3 years in both sectors, which fell well below the cross-sector average of 4.1 years.
Female CEOs make up just 10% of FTSE100 CEOs, despite far outperforming their male counterparts in employee approval. On average, women CEOs earned an 83% approval rating, compared to 76% for men.
They also scored higher than average on employee reviews for benefits and compensation offered (3.8/5), highlighting the positive impact of diverse leadership.
Despite this, female CEOs typically face heightened scrutiny and bias over performance and leadership. A recent media analysis found that female CEOs were both 2.1x more likely than males to be described as “too ambitious”, and 2.1x more likely to be described as “lacking ambition” than male CEOs.
Gendered language also remains a persistent issue, with female CEOs 27% more likely to be described using people-orientated language, while male CEOs are 34% more likely to be described for their task-orientated skills. Men are also twice as likely to be labelled as “innovators”, while females are 72% more likely to be described as “inspirational”.
While female CEOs outperform in approval ratings, women remain significantly underrepresented across nearly every C-suite role, making up for just 37.3% of executive positions.
Even when they do reach leadership, female executives serve much shorter tenures of just 3 years and 2 months on average, compared to 5 years and 2 months for men.
Some roles appear to be a more accessible path to leadership, with CPO (82.6% female) and CMO (62.5% female) notable exceptions. Women in CMO positions also outstay their male counterparts by around 3 months (43.3 months versus 40.9 months).
However, tenure gaps persist with female CPOs, despite dominating the position, staying 1 year and 8 months less than men.
The disparity is most acute in CEO, CFO, and CTO positions, which are traditionally tied to long-term business growth and decision-making.
Women have the shortest tenure in the Chief Financial Officer role at just 2 years. This is closely followed by Chief Technology Officer, where women have a tenure of 26 months, which is approximately 2 years and 9 months shorter than male CTOs tenure.
On average, female leaders spend around 2.5 years less at their organisations than men (92 months vs. 123.4 months overall), with CTOs showing the starkest gap of nearly 4 years’ difference (63 months vs 107.8 months).
While the most influential roles (CEO, CFO, and CTO) continue to be dominated by males, the number of women being appointed to these positions has slowly increased over the last five years.
While this shift suggests that more women are reaching executive roles than in previous decades, the rate of progress is slow.
Based on the current trajectory of appointments, women are not expected to achieve equal representation in C-suite roles for another 18 years and 1 month.
This pattern at the C-suite level points to deep-rooted structural barriers in progression and retention at the top of FTSE100 companies.
It indicates that women are entering senior leadership roles later, staying for shorter periods, and often doing so without the benefit of long-term organisational experience, which may be impacting their influence, continuity, and progression to leadership.
For organisations to accelerate change effectively, appointment strategies must go beyond headline diversity goals to actively address systemic delays in promotion, internal progression, executive burnout, and retention.
What does it take to be an FTSE100 leader? Our analysis reveals a clear pattern in the backgrounds of today’s C-suite, as well as a growing trend towards more diverse and non-linear paths to leadership.
Across the C-suite overall, Mark is the most common first name, accounting for 2% of all senior leaders. The name also ranks in the top ten male names across the broader UK workforce, according to the ‘First Names Report’, representing 4.8% of employees overall.
David ranked as the most common for the CEO position, while Rachel, Emma, Amy, and Nicola came joint top for Chief People Officer.
Academically, Economics and Computer Science dominate as go-to degrees for strategic and technical leadership roles - most notably CEOs and CTOs. In contrast, people and brand focused positions like CPO and CMO showed a far wider academic variety, led by Business, History, and Law degrees.
While many leaders followed traditional academic routes into their roles, there was a surprising mix of unconventional degrees which underlines the growing recognition of transferrable skills and non-linear career paths.
Where most CTOs leaned predictably on more technical degrees, some had more niche degrees like Genetics, Public Administration, and German Language and Literature.
Equally, economics remained the most prevalent degree for CEOs, yet Veterinary Medicine and Town and Country Planning degrees also cropped up.
This suggests that as leadership teams evolve, companies are more open to talent from broader backgrounds, particularly in roles focused on people, culture, and brand. This further highlights the vital role that diversity plays within leadership, with experience and adaptability beginning to outweigh conventional qualifications.
The revolving door at the top of businesses is not just a leadership issue, but a strategic vulnerability. Our research shows an alarming trend where executive tenures are shrinking while external hire rates climb.
This instability is particularly acute in pivotal roles like CMO, CFO and CTO - positions which are now central to critical future-facing decisions around brand, innovation, and digital transformation.
This is where equity-based incentives can help tie leadership performance to long-term company success. When senior leaders are financially invested in the long-term future of a company, through meaningful equity stakes, they become invested partners in the sustainable growth and success.
Transparent and performance-linked equity schemes also provide a powerful counterbalance to the short-term pressures and bonuses.
One effective tool is growth shares, where recipients are provided with a share in the future capital growth of the business. By granting leaders a stake in the long-term value creation, this enables businesses to:
While HMRC-approved schemes offer tax advantages, unapproved share options provide greater flexibility that businesses need to attract and retain, as they are not subject to the same restrictions on who can benefit, what value can be rewarded, or how vesting must occur.
This makes them a particularly attractive option for high-value roles, as companies can:
By embedding equity from the very top, companies not only improve executive tenure but also further the investment and drive for the long-term success of the business.
However, equity schemes shouldn’t stop at the boardroom door. Extending ownership opportunities to wider teams through Enterprise Management Incentives (EMIs) creates a culture of shared accountability.
This allows equity to become integral to the company’s DNA, encouraging internal mobility and promoting retention to drive innovation, commitment, and sustainable growth.
Find out more about this in our Enterprise Hub.
Vestd analysed C-suite data from FTSE100 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange as of April 2025.
Executive profiles were sourced from public company websites and LinkedIn to find the average tenure in current C-suite roles, the number of internal roles held overall at the company, and the average overall tenure at the company.
Data collected also included first names, university degrees (where findable), gender, and the year of C-suite appointment.
To calculate years to gender parity, Vestd used the average number of appointments by gender over the last five years (2020-2024) against the number of appointments overall, to find how long it would take to hit a 50% gender split based on the current average rate of appointments.
Finally, Vestd analysed the Glassdoor profiles of each company to calculate the average approval rating for CEOs, and employee review ratings for ‘compensation and benefits’.
All data is correct as of April 2025.