夯实开局：新任CEO利益相关者影响力构建指南（英）

November 2025Strategy & Corporate Finance PracticeNail your firsts: A new CEO’s guide to stakeholder impactNew and incoming CEOs are often unprepared for the intensity of internal and external stakeholder engagement. The right mindset, communication skills, and actions can make all the difference. This article is a collaborative effort by Blair Epstein, Carolyn Dewar, and Richard Steele, with Eric Sherman and Kate Freeland, representing views from McKinsey’s Strategy & Corporate Finance Practice.Dear new CEO,First, congratulations on your new role. This is a true unfreezing moment for you and the organization at large. It’s a personal achievement and—when done the right way—a public good. But the path ahead is unlike what many CEOs have faced before, and it will demand new levels of adaptability, resilience, and communication. New and incoming CEOs like you are being asked to take on the job at an increasingly accelerated pace, partly because of new time pressures: CEO tenure is now at an all-time low of 6.8 years.1 And there’s real value at stake—research shows that poorly managed C-suite transitions in the S&P 1500 wipe out nearly $1 trillion in market value annually.2 As Allianz CEO Oliver Bäte has said, “Nothing prepares you for becoming the face of a company. Nothing.”3 New and incoming CEOs tell us that one of their most common hurdles is engaging a whole new range of stakeholders, including investors, regulators, media, employees, board members, and broader communities. You’ll be shifting (seemingly overnight) from a private leader within the four walls of a company to a much more public profile. This shift, compounded by social media and a proliferation of new technologies and channels, can make for a steep learning curve, particularly given that only 1 percent of Fortune 100 CEOs have a formal background in communications or public affairs, according to McKinsey analysis.That’s why we’ve put this article together for you. Think of it as a handbook to help you proactively and sustainably engage your stakeholders. We drew on research from our newly released book A CEO for All Seasons,4 which features insights from more than 80 interviews, and from our New York Times best-selling book CEO Excellence.5 We also held targeted conversations with more than 20 CEOs, heads of marketing and communications, leaders at 1 “Global CEO appointments hit a historic 8-year H1 low in 2025 amidst slow leadership turnover,” Russell Reynolds Associates, July 30, 2025.2 Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, Gregory Nagel, and Carrie Green, “The high cost of poor succession planning,” Harvard Business Review, May–June 2021.3 Ruth Umoh, “The McKinsey CEO pipeline: How the consulting giant built an empire of influence and filled the world’s corner offices with its alumni,” Fortune, September 25, 2025.4 Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, Vikram Malhotra, and Kurt Strovink, A CEO for All Seasons: Mastering the Cycles of Leadership, Scribner, 2025.5 Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, and