Glossary · Talent & career
C-suite
The C-suite is a company's most senior executives, the 'chief' officers such as the CEO, CFO, COO, and CTO, who set strategy and own its outcomes.
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C-suite roles are the hardest to fill: the pool is small, the stakes are high, and the best candidates are rarely looking, which is why they are usually filled through executive search rather than a listing.
The term describes an executive team, not a board, and the two are easily run together. In a two-tier structure, common in the Netherlands, a management board runs the company and a separate supervisory board oversees it; in a one-tier structure executives and non-executives sit on a single board. A chief officer may or may not also be a director, which is a matter of company law and appointment rather than of the title on the door.
On one large count, the top seat in 2025 mostly went to people new to it. Russell Reynolds Associates' CEO Turnover Index, which tracks 13 stock indices, found that 86% of the CEOs appointed that year were first-time CEOs who had never held the role at a listed company; it also counts 234 CEO exits in 2025, an eight-year high. A board appointing a first-time CEO is judging readiness rather than a record in the seat, which raises the weight of everything a search can test before the appointment.
In practice
A C-suite brief is written around a mandate rather than a list of duties: what the board needs next — a turnaround, a sale, an entry into a new market — sets the shape of the seat. Because the people who fit that mandate are rarely in the market, the work starts with talent mapping across comparable companies, so an approach can be made privately to people who are performing well where they are.
The process runs quietly, and confidentiality cuts both ways: a candidate still in post has a seat to protect, while the hiring company has a vacancy it may not want signalled. Meetings sit outside working hours and off company premises, and a reference check is taken late and through the network rather than from a supplied list. The gap between agreeing an offer and starting depends on contract and jurisdiction: where notice periods apply, senior terms can be long, and gardening leave may follow the resignation.
In Dutch listed companies the governance code puts a clock on the top seats: management board members are appointed for a maximum of four years at a time, and any reappointment should be prepared in a timely fashion. The seat's neighbours in this glossary follow from that: succession planning, which prepares the next holder; the fractional executive, who holds a C-suite remit part-time; and total compensation, because at this level base pay is often the smaller part of the package.
The Quantum Club works this level from both sides. It holds a direct line to the founders, owners and C-suite of its partner houses, and fills the pipeline from the other side; every approach is confirmed with the principal first.
Common questions
- Which roles count as C-suite?
- C-suite covers the chief executive and the officers reporting directly to them who sit on the executive committee. The core is CEO, CFO, and COO; depending on the business it extends to roles such as CTO, CMO, CHRO, CIO, or chief legal officer. The defining test is remit rather than title — accountability for an entire function, and a seat where company-level strategy is set.
- Is a VP or director part of the C-suite?
- Ordinarily not. Vice presidents and directors sit below the C-suite, owning a region, a product, or part of a function rather than the whole of one. Titles are not standardised across companies or countries, though: in some organisations an executive vice president carries what another would call a chief officer's remit. Reporting line and scope of accountability are more reliable markers than the label.
- Are C-suite roles usually filled internally or externally?
- Both routes are used, and which one applies turns on whether a successor has been prepared. Where succession planning has named and developed an internal candidate, the seat can be filled from inside; where no internal successor is ready, or the board wants a change of direction, the search goes outside. A process can also run both at once, benchmarking the internal candidate against an external shortlist.
- How long do CEOs stay in the role?
- Shorter than they used to. Russell Reynolds Associates' CEO Turnover Index puts the average tenure of outgoing CEOs across the 13 indices it tracks at 7.1 years in 2025, down from 7.4 years in 2024 and 8.3 years in 2021. An average hides wide spreads between markets and sectors, and between a planned handover and an abrupt exit, so it describes the pattern rather than any one seat.
Sources
Placed, not posted.
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