Grow Your Own or Buy In? The CEO Succession Gamble Retail Can’t Afford to Lose

Two announcements landed in the same week that tell you everything about the debate tearing through UK retail boardrooms right now.

On Tuesday, Asda’s executive chairman Allan Leighton stood up at Retail Week × Grocer LIVE and declared that the supermarket’s next CEO would be promoted from within. No external search. No beauty parade of outsiders. 

His logic was blunt…

Every successful Asda CEO since the 1990s - Tony De Nunzio, Paul Mason, Andy Clarke, Roger Burnley. All came up through the business. 

Leighton went on to explain that “the history of Asda is that it’s very difficult to bring someone in from the outside.”

Then on Wednesday, Primark confirmed that Eoin Tonge, who had been running the business on an interim basis for a year, would become permanent chief executive. 

Another internal appointment. Another board that looked at what it already had and decided the answer was inside their own building.

So that settles it, then. Grow your own wins? 

Not so fast.

The Numbers Tell a More Complicated Story

While Asda and Primark are betting on insiders, the rest of the market is moving in the opposite direction. According to a report from The Conference Board, external CEO hires in the S&P 500 nearly doubled in 2025, jumping from 18% to 33% of all appointments. That pushed internal promotion rates below 70% for the first time in eight years.

In UK retail specifically, 40 permanent CEO changes were recorded in 2025, nearly double the 22 the year before. The revolving door has never spun faster. And globally, another group reported that 86% of new CEO appointments in 2025 were first-time chief executives who had never held the top role at a listed company. Average outgoing CEO tenure dropped to 7.1 years, down from 8.3 years in 2021.

That is not a market in equilibrium. 

That is a market in flux, and every board is being forced to answer the same question…

Do we trust what we’ve built internally, or do we reach outside for something different?

The Case for Growing Your Own

Leighton’s argument has real weight behind it. 

He is not speaking from theory. He is speaking from the lived experience of leading one of UK retail’s most celebrated turnarounds, then watching four successive CEOs - all internal - maintain the trajectory he set. He knows the Asda culture is distinctive. He knows outsiders have struggled with it. And he is building a leadership team with the explicit intention of producing his own successor.

There’s data to support this instinct. Internally appointed CEOs consistently serve longer tenures than external hires. Longer tenure means more strategic continuity, less disruption, and a greater return on the board’s investment in that leader.

Primark’s appointment of Tonge follows a similar logic. 

Here is a leader who already understood the ABF group structure, had credibility with the parent company board, and had spent a year proving he could run the business in practice, not just in interviews. 

ABF chairman Michael McLintock pointed to Tonge’s “understanding of the business combined with his financial acumen and strategic clarity.” In other words: he’s already one of us, and he’s already shown he can do the job.

I’ve seen this play out dozens of times in my own career. When an internal candidate truly fits, when they understand the culture, carry the respect of the team, and have the strategic capability to evolve the business… 

There is almost nothing more powerful. 

It is seamless. 

The organisation doesn’t skip a beat.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth that too few boards want to hear.

The Case for Buying In

Not every business has an Allan Leighton building a bench. Not every leadership team contains a ready-made CEO. And the data on what happens when boards promote the wrong insider is sobering.

Between one-third and one-half of all new CEOs fail within the first 18 months. That statistic, first published by Dan Ciampa in Harvard Business Review, holds whether the appointment is internal or external. The critical variable is not where the leader comes from. It is whether they were the right leader for what the business needs next.

And sometimes, what the business needs next is a fundamentally different perspective. 

Primark’s own announcement illustrates this perfectly. In the same breath as confirming Tonge, ABF created an entirely new Chief Commercial Officer role and went outside to fill it by appointing Filip Ekvall from H&M Group and outdoor retailer BRAV. That’s not a contradiction. That’s a board being honest about what the existing team can and cannot provide.

External hires bring something internal candidates often cannot: 

• pattern recognition from different contexts. 

• A supply chain director who has rebuilt fulfilment at a competitor. 

• A digital leader who has scaled e-commerce in a market your business hasn’t yet entered. 

• A chief customer officer who has navigated a brand repositioning you’ve never attempted.

One external CEO I placed into a mid-sized fashion retailer - the board initially wanted to promote from within, but when we mapped the leadership team’s capabilities against the strategy they’d just signed off, which required a complete digital transformation and international expansion, there was an honest gap. 

The internal candidates were excellent operators but the business needed a builder. 

The external appointment was difficult at first. 

But eighteen months later, that leader had delivered a new e-commerce platform and opened two new international markets. 

The internal team, freed from trying to do something they’d never done before, flourished under someone who had.

The Real Question Boards Should Be Asking

Here’s what I’ve learned from nearly three decades of placing senior leaders in retail: the grow-versus-buy debate is the wrong debate.

The right question is not “internal or external?” The right question is: have we built a leadership bench strong enough that the choice is genuinely ours to make?

Because the worst possible outcome, the one I see more often than I’d like, is a board that promotes internally by default. 

Not because they’ve identified a standout successor. 

Not because they’ve rigorously assessed their leadership pipeline against the strategic demands of the next three to five years. 

But because the alternative feels too risky, too slow, or too expensive.

That is not succession planning. 

That is avoidance.

And the opposite failure is equally damaging: a board that without thinking, reaches outside because it has lost confidence in its own people, without first doing the diagnostic work to understand what capabilities are actually missing.

Allan Leighton can afford to commit to an internal succession because he has been deliberately assembling the team to make it possible. 

He named them: Rachel Eyre as chief customer officer, Chris Chalmers leading data and loyalty, David Lepley promoted to run Express. 

He is building his bench in public, with intention.

Most boards are not doing this. 

A Practical Framework for Your Next Board Meeting

If you sit on a retail board or run a leadership team, here are three questions worth putting on the agenda before your next succession conversation:

First, could we fill our CEO role internally within 90 days if we had to? Not “would we like to” - could we? 

If the answer is no, your pipeline has a gap that needs addressing now, not when the vacancy arises.

Second, does our internal bench reflect where the business is going, or where it’s been? This is the trap. Your best operators may be brilliant at running today’s model. But if your strategy demands digital transformation, international expansion, or a fundamental repositioning, you need leaders with the capability, and the experience, to build what doesn’t yet exist.

Third, when was the last time we independently assessed our top team against external benchmarks? Internal confidence is not the same as market-tested readiness. 

The best succession plans stress-test internal candidates against the external market, not to replace them, but to sharpen the board’s understanding of what “great” looks like for the role they’ll need to fill.

Closing Thought

Asda and Primark made different journeys to the same destination this week. 

Both chose insiders. 

But the reason those choices look smart is not because internal is inherently better than external. 

It is because both boards did the work to ensure they had genuine options.

The most expensive leadership mistake in retail is not hiring the wrong outsider. 

It is not promoting an unready insider. 

It is arriving at the moment of decision without having built the bench that gives you a real choice.

If you’re not sure whether your succession pipeline is ready for what comes next, that’s a conversation worth having - and one we’re always happy to explore.

Maarten Jonckers

Managing Director, Nicholas Alexander Executive Search

www.nicholasalexander-es.com