When the quarter becomes the enemy of the future
There is a particular tension sitting at the heart of every listed consumer business right now. Boards are expected to think in decades to build leadership pipelines, develop functional depth, and make bets on people that will take three to five years to pay out. Shareholders, meanwhile, are thinking in quarters. The gap between those two-time horizons is not new, but it is widening, and it is doing real damage to the quality of talent decisions being made at the top of some of the biggest companies in consumer and retail.
The consequences rarely announce themselves. They show up quietly: a critical role filled reactively rather than strategically; a senior leader lost because the package wasn’t refreshed in time; a succession process rushed under investor scrutiny into a decision the business will spend years walking back. PLC talent strategy, at its worst, becomes a series of fire drills dressed up as governance.
Short-term earnings pressure is distorting long-term leadership decisions
Publicly traded firms face pressure from equity market investors with short investment horizons, which forces companies to make decisions that favour immediate gains over long-term value creation. When that logic bleeds into talent, and it does, the result is a board that struggles to commit to the kind of sustained investment that producing great leaders actually requires.
The structural dynamic is well documented. More than half of all public company directors surveyed by NACD cited economic fluctuations as the most significant source of short-term pressure, and 41 per cent of directors from publicly traded companies pointed to capital market and investor expectations as a key driver of that pressure. What is less often discussed is how that pressure reshapes hiring logic. When the board is managing analyst sentiment and protecting the share price, the natural response is to reach for the safe appointment, the external name with an established track record, rather than investing in the internal candidate who needs another eighteen months to be ready. It protects the narrative. It rarely protects the business.
CEO tenures in the S&P 500 increased by 21% in 2024 compared to the prior year, and 22% of all CEO departures were the result of a planned succession process, the highest level recorded to date. That last figure is striking. Nearly four in five CEO transitions are still unplanned, reactive, or accelerated by outside pressure. For consumer PLCs operating in categories where category expertise, customer relationships, and commercial judgement are accumulated over years, that is a costly pattern.
Where the market is getting this right, and wrong
Food & Drink:
Marks & Spencer offers one of the more instructive examples in British retail of a PLC that has used leadership investment deliberately rather than reactively. Through its current transformation under CEO Stuart Machin, the business has consistently backed internal mobility alongside targeted external recruitment. M&S continued to attract and promote talent, with Mark Lemming promoted from running the clothing & home supply chain to international managing director, a move that signals genuine investment in developing functional leaders rather than simply buying in experience from outside.
More recently, the business appointed former Asda executive Hayley Tatum as Chief People Officer, with the explicit aim of accelerating the pace of change across people plans and attracting and developing the very best talent in the industry, language that reflects a board thinking beyond the next reporting period. The result, over three years, has been consecutive commercial growth and what M&S itself describes as cultural transformation alongside deep operational change. That does not happen without sustained commitment to people at board level.
Sports, Outdoor, Fashion, & Luxury:
JD Sports Fashion offers a sharper and more cautionary illustration of what happens when shareholder pressure and leadership stability collide. The business has spent much of the past three years navigating the consequences of governance instability. JD Sports bowed to shareholder pressure over its corporate governance, agreeing to split its chair and CEO roles after the departure of Peter Cowgill, before conducting an extensive global search that brought in Régis Schultz as CEO in September 2022.
In April 2026, chair Andrew Higginson departed after making representations to the board that Schultz should be replaced, following a tenure in which the sportswear business reported slowing sales and struggled in its key North American market, only for majority shareholder Pentland to signal continued backing for the CEO and for Higginson to leave instead. Whatever the rights and wrongs of that specific disagreement, it illustrates precisely the kind of governance turbulence that makes sustained PLC talent strategy almost impossible. When the question of who leads the business is in constant flux at board level, every hiring decision below it becomes provisional.
Consumer Goods:
Unilever is the most prominent example in the consumer goods space of a PLC under shareholder pressure making a dramatic leadership call and revealing, in doing so, just how short the fuse has become. Hein Schumacher was replaced as CEO despite the Unilever share price rising approximately 10% during his tenure, with the board demanding not just growth but faster growth.
His successor, Fernando Fernandez, took the helm in March 2025 with a mandate to refresh Unilever’s top 200 leaders, cutting up to 25% of them in a bid to eliminate what he described as pockets of mediocrity. The move is commercially coherent on its own terms, but it also tells you something important: Unilever’s longstanding build-from-within philosophy, the conviction that long leadership pipelines produce better general managers than external hiring at senior levels, is under significant strain. When a business that spent decades constructing one of the finest internal talent machines in FMCG starts cutting a quarter of its senior leadership under investor pressure, the ripple effects on capability, culture, and institutional knowledge are not felt in the next quarter. They are felt in the next decade.
What boards should actually be doing differently
The starting point is clarity about what the board is being asked to govern. Talent is not a people-team problem with a board sign-off. At PLC level, the quality of the leadership pipeline is a strategic asset, one that depreciates faster than most boards realise and requires active investment to maintain. Most companies are now viewing the compensation committee as focused on human capital and talent development, as well as the classic pay questions, and that shift in framing matters. It moves the conversation from reactive to structural.
The best-governed consumer PLCs are doing three things that others are not. First, they are separating the succession planning conversation from the performance review cycle. When succession is only discussed when a seat becomes vacant, it is already too late. Second, they are building the CHRO into board-level discussions on strategy, not as a note-taker but as a genuine voice on capability and risk. Directors in recent surveys named the CHRO as the most valuable voice in the boardroom after the CEO and CFO, yet that recognition is not yet consistently reflected in how boards are structured. Third, they are resisting the reflex to go external at the first sign of performance pressure. Internal development is slower and messier, but it compounds in ways that external hiring rarely does.
None of this means accepting underperformance or protecting leaders who are no longer the right fit. It means having enough visibility over the pipeline that when decisions need to be made, they are made with strategic clarity rather than reactive urgency.
What MacGregor Black sees
Across MacGregor Black’s searches in consumer and retail, the pattern is consistent. The businesses asking the best questions about talent are the ones asking them earliest, before a role is at risk, before performance has become an issue, before the board is under pressure to act. The conversations that go well are the ones where the brief is genuinely forward-looking: who do we need in two years, and how close are we to having them? The ones that go poorly are the ones where the search starts because the problem has already escalated to board level.
We are also seeing a growing divide between PLCs that treat the nomination committee as an active governance function and those that treat it as a compliance requirement. The former are building something. The latter are managing risk. In a sector where consumer behaviour, competitive pressure, and cost dynamics are all shifting simultaneously, the difference between those two approaches will define which businesses emerge with the leadership they need and which spend the next cycle catching up.
If your board is thinking through long-term PLC talent strategy or succession planning at the executive level, get in touch with the team today.