Co-CEOs: Are Two Heads Better Than One?

It’s been a big business-news item lately: high-profile firms deciding that for the role of the CEO, two heads are better than one. In the latest development, one of the world’s largest business-software companies promoted two internal executives to co-CEO. Earlier this year, two other Fortune 500 firms and one of the world’s largest media-streaming services also announced a switch to co-CEOs.

Only about 1% of the largest 3,000 publicly traded US firms are run by two chief executives, according to the executive-research firm Equilar. However, experts say, the current environment of rapid-fire disruptions has made firms more open to the idea. The only question is whether the structure can work. “My bias is that co-CEOs aren’t a very good construct,” says Alan Guarino, vice chairman of Korn Ferry’s Board and CEO Services practice. “It creates a partnership which is almost always complicated.”

Still, experts say the rise of co-CEOs, along with an uptick in interim CEO placement, could be an acknowledgement of two big-picture challenges facing many organizations over the next couple of years. First, companies across industries are facing many volatile headwinds at once, including technological disruption, a lack of organic growth, corporate-culture issues, activist stakeholders, and constantly changing regulations. Boards are betting that two CEOs can more effectively cover all of these areas, with each one focusing on what they do best while also honing their skills on other issues. “This type of move is, ostensibly, to hopefully lead to faster decision-making and problem-solving,” says Tierney Remick, Korn Ferry vice chairman and co-leader of the firm’s Board and CEO Services practice.

Another factor may be surprising—namely, a lack of available, successful, and seasoned CEOs capable of doing the job by themselves. Filling the vacancies left by the massive CEO turnover of the last two years has pushed many people who were ready for CEO roles already into the spot. So has retirement: Among the more than 1,500 US CEOs who’ve left their posts in 2025, 332 of them, most in their mid-60s or older, have retired. “The talent pool for ready-to-go CEO talent is small,” says Remick.

But the issue with co-CEOs often boils down to who decides what. Employees and investors can become confused when it’s not clear who is calling the shots. Indeed, some earlier high-profile co-CEO attempts collapsed over this very issue. When decision-making rights become fuzzy, Remick says, decisions slow down or get second-guessed. That’s why it’s imperative that boards explicitly define which executive owns which decisions, as well as how to escalate—and ultimately resolve—disagreements.

“Over time, the co-CEO model almost always collapses into one leader,” says Guarino. A great CEO, with a strong team of direct reports, achieves the same balance more cleanly. Indeed, Joe Griesedieck, Korn Ferry vice chair and managing director for the firm’s Board and CEO Services practice, agrees. “Looking at the number of CEO appointments over any period of time, the co-leadership model does not prevail, and is in fact a rarity,” he says.

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