The Nordic countries and the Benelux bloc follow distinct corporate governance models. In Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland, employees have the right to board representation once a company grows beyond a certain size—though the thresholds vary by country.
Despite their small size, these economies rank among the world’s most stable and have produced global powerhouses, including Novo Nordisk, Spotify, and Ericsson. Large Dutch companies, meanwhile, legally separate management from oversight, requiring a non-executive supervisory board to hold the executive team accountable.
“These are high-trust cultures built on collaboration and consensus,” says Esha Mendiratta, an associate professor at Vlerick Business School in Belgium. “Hierarchies stay flat, and major decisions wait until every stakeholder has weighed in.”
If any region should feel secure in its choice of CEO, it’s these. A new survey suggests otherwise.
Heidrick & Struggles’ Route to the Top report, based on a 2026 poll of 1,033 CEOs and directors worldwide found that nearly four in ten European respondents doubt their CEO’s strengths match what their company will need over the next two to three years. In the Nordics and Benelux, that number jumps to half.
Tenure may be the culprit
There are several reasons why these consensus-driven systems might be experiencing, or simply reporting, this heightened mismatch.
One possible explanation is how long chief executives stay in the job. “CEOs in the Nordics and Benelux stay in their roles far longer than in other markets,” says Jenni Hibbert, who leads Heidrick & Struggles’ Europea and Africa business. The average tenure for Belgian CEOs is nine years, the second longest in Europe, according to the firm’s data. In Sweden and Norway it’s seven years, while Finnish CEOs have the shortest average tenure, at two and a half years.
Data analyzed by Spencer Stuart reveals a similar trend. Norway had the lowest CEO turnover rate among major European listed companies in 2025, with no new CEO appointments reported. France, in comparison, recorded 18 and Italy, six.
“In the context of ongoing economic and technological volatility, one might argue appointments aren’t keeping pace with the shift in capabilities needed in the role,” Hibbert says. Today, those running an organization must contend with a multitude of pressures, from geopolitical headwinds and energy-price shocks, to AI disruption. It is little surprise, given these developments, that 90% of executives surveyed by Heidrick & Struggles’ expect their firm strategy and operating model to change in the near future.
The concern is that business conditions are shifting faster than boards can respond. “Boards are currently struggling to find chief executives who can lead major organizational change,” observes Martin Hartley, group chief commercial officer at emagine, a talent consultancy headquartered in Denmark with a presence across Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. “It’s difficult to find candidates who have the ability to combine technology leadership, commercial acumen, and transformation experience.”
The real danger, Hartley adds, is a boardroom that has lost faith in its CEO and chooses to do nothing about it. “Decisions take longer, transformation loses momentum, and talented people grow frustrated while the organization keeps telling itself the CEO just needs a little bit more time.”
Insularity may be compounding the problem
Mendiratta highlights a preference in parts of the Benelux for promoting leaders from within. “Boards that draw CEOs from the firm’s internal ranks are sometimes less likely to bring in the fresh outside perspective needed to spot problems and shake things up,” she says.
In the Netherlands, the average time an internal candidate spends at a company before becoming CEO increased from 9.5 years in 2023 to nearly 15 years in 2025, according to Heidrick & Struggles’ data.
“Insiders are not inherently the wrong choice,” Mendiratta continues. “They typically bring deep firm-specific knowledge, which tends to be an advantage when conditions are relatively stable. However, during periods of turbulence, externally hired CEOs tend to outperform.”
In the 87 years Heineken has been listed on the stock exchange, the Dutch brewer had never appointed an outsider as chief executive. That changed in January 2026, when Dolf van den Brink announced he would step down. Facing pressure to break from precedent, the board turned to Rafael Oliveira, CEO of JDE Peet’s—someone with no prior experience in the beer industry—to take over in October.
Demand is growing for leaders with broader perspectives and experience across different markets and cultures, says Mendiratta. She adds: “In today’s landscape of intense geopolitics, with tariffs rising and supply chains moving closer to home, the traditional strategic playbook these CEOs rely on is breaking down, exposing a starker gap between their built-up strengths and what their companies need.”
Retiring the old playbook
The gap between current skill sets and future strategic needs reflects a deeper weakness in how boards approach succession planning, according to Hibbert.
“The pre-anointed candidate is a very passive way of thinking about succession planning, which no longer passes muster,” Hibbert says. This pass-the-baton type of approach is unlikely to work in the current context where the external environment shifts frequently, she continues. “Naming an heir apparent years in advance risks handing the job to someone whose strengths no longer fit the moment or undermining their credibility even if they still do.”
Mendiratta goes further, arguing boards should generally avoid naming a single successor until just a few months before a handover, keeping several viable candidates in play instead. “Boards should be asking: What type of CEO am I going to need in six months, two years and five years?” Ongoing feedback and reflection on the CEO’s leadership is vital, she adds.
In Mendiratta’s experience, candidates who are identified early in their career tend to enact less strategic change once they take the top job. Similarly, outgoing CEOs who move into the chairman’s seat can create the same drag, she argues, constraining a successor’s room to reshape the company.
For Hartley, it’s not a matter of choosing between insiders and outsiders. CEOs should not be assessed in isolation at all, he argues. “A better question is: Do they have the right executive team behind them? Boards are already paying closer attention to the rest of the C-suite, because that wider bench signals who the real succession candidates will be.”
Candor, not crisis
The report findings are not necessarily a sign of organizational dysfunction. “It’s possible companies in the Nordics and Benelux are simply more willing to admit misalignment than most,” Hibbert says.
In these regions, major strategic decisions are structurally required to pass through more hands, whether through employee representatives or supervisory boards. Consensus-driven governance is built to surface disagreement rather than bury it, Hibbert explains, which may translate into more candid survey answers. “If governance quality alone explained confidence in leadership, these boards might report less uncertainty than most, not more.”
Hartley warns that Nordic niceness must not be mistaken for soft-headednesss. “There’s a temptation for outsiders to see slower, more deliberate decision-making as a flaw, but that’s not the case,” he says. “What I see is more controlled, pragmatic, and rigorous processes that can still move very quickly when needed.”
Perhaps the most important—and apt—lesson from the report is that even the most deliberate boardrooms, the ones built to weigh every voice and guard against rash decisions, canend up choosing a leader built for the world as it was, not the one now arriving.
