The CFO-to-CEO roadmap

Looking to fill a pending vacancy in the CEO’s chair? We’ve got the perfect candidate: the chief financial officer.

While the typical path to the corner office is through other functions like sales or operations, according to Ash Athawale, SVP of Robert Half’s executive search practice, there’s a common playbook for CFOs to follow to become chief executive.

“For CFOs to move into that role, what they need to do is [obtain] more of a general management oversight and experience,” Athawale said, “because they can bring their fiscal experience easily. It’s already in their DNA. But acquiring these skills helps them become a good candidate for the CEO.”

According to a recent analysis of senior leadership roles at Fortune 500 companies from executive search firm Spencer Stuart, CFOs, along with COOs, are “common steppingstones to the CEO role.”

An intentional move

CFO Brew reviewed eight corporate CFO-to-CEO announcements from this past year and found commonalities that shed light on the CFO’s path to the chief executive’s office. The biggest thread tying them together was the CFO’s experience with and knowledge of the organization.

Each company in CFO Brew’s review opted to promote internally. Mark Witkowski, CEO of distribution company Core & Main, started his tenure as CFO nearly a decade before, in 2016. He’s been with the company since 2007. Michael Kennedy, CEO and president of natural gas companies Antero Resources and Antero Midstream, joined in 2013 and started his tenure as CFO of Antero Resources in 2021. Carmaker Jaguar Land Rover’s new CEO, PB Balaji, came from parent company Tata Motors, where he served as group CFO since 2017.

This tracks with the Spencer Stuart research, which found that the companies it studied hired approximately 60% of C-suite leaders internally, “underscoring the importance of leadership development and succession planning.”

Just over three-quarters of CEO positions were filled via internal hires, according to the study. That’s the second-highest internal hire rate in the C-suite, behind chief operating officers (79%) and ahead of CFOs (65%).

“To move from that CFO spot into the CEO role, you’re now responsible not just for a sliver of the business, but you’re responsible for the entire business,” Athawale said.

The company announcements also play up their new CEOs’ industry and company knowledge.

• Fernando Fernandez took over as CEO of consumer goods company Unilever in March after serving as its CFO since January 2024. In a release announcing Fernandez’s promotion, Unilever Chairman Ian Meakins commended his “profound knowledge of Unilever’s operations.”
• CNX Resources Corp., another natural gas company, noted that its current president and CFO, Alan Shepard, who’ is set to become CEO in 2026, has more than two decades of energy-sector experience and a “deep understanding of our business.”
• Chris Turner, the new CEO of Yum! Brands, which owns restaurant chains including KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut, amassed company experience that went beyond the finance function. Turner became the company’s CFO in 2019, but last year expanded his role to include chief franchise officer responsibilities.

CFOs may naturally have that industry experience that companies look for in their CEOs. Spencer Stuart’s research found that CEOs, CFOs, and COOs were the roles “least likely to be hired from outside the company’s industry” when brought in externally. Industry-specific experience was less an emphasis for roles such as chief information officers, inclusion and diversity leaders, sustainability officers, and communications leaders, according to the study.

What the numbers say

According to a CFO Brew analysis of data from Live Data Technologies, which monitors the current employment of more than 100 million people twice monthly with information compiled on the open web, at least 100 CFOs were promoted to the CEO role annually from 2017 to 2024. 2022 was a high point, with 225 CFO-to-CEO promotions, while in 2024 there were 215 new CEOs who came from the CFO role.

CFOs who became CEOs had held the title of finance chief for a median length of three years and eight months, according to the data. The most common length of the CEOs’ tenure as CFO was 13 months.

Level up those skills

The research and expert insights make clear what CFOs need if they aspire to reach the top of the C-suite. To get there, they must first expand their knowledge base, according to Athawale. Operational management experience is important, he said.

That’s not to say CFOs don’t bring any useful skills or knowledge to the office of the CEO. Understanding how a business runs from a financial perspective is pretty important.

But if coming from a pure finance background, that future chief executive may have blind spots on how to “run the business day to day,” or how to make strategic decisions in a more holistic way, Athawale explained. Some decisions may not make sense when accounting for purely financial outcomes, such as pricing an item as a loss leader. Or even organizational culture. Not everything runs on a spreadsheet.

“The CFOs that we’ve seen who have stronger hands-on operational experience are better equipped to balance fiscal knowledge that they’ve had over the years into long-term growth,” Athawale said, “because a lot of times innovation gets stifled when people are just looking at the numbers.”