A succession is the one chance to change the top team. In this study, the top team's age profile mostly stayed the same.

You are three months from a CEO handover, or a leadership change one level below it, and the shortlist is on your desk. Every candidate is credible. Several look a lot like the person leaving, and a few look a lot like the people already on the executive team. The brief you gave the search was "fresh thinking." The question worth asking is what the list in front of you is actually optimized for.

A paper in Human Relations gives that question some evidence. It is titled "Wrinkle of change? The reproduction of executive age profiles across CEO succession episodes," by Mariano L. M. Heyden of Monash University, Heidi M. Wechtler of the University of Newcastle, and Sebastiaan van Doorn of the University of Western Australia. It was published online on 18 April 2025 and appears in volume 79, issue 3. This is not a new paper, and I am not presenting it as one. I am writing about it because its question is one every board and executive team faces whenever a seat turns over.

The method, as the abstract describes it: the authors built a sample of 391 successions in 297 S&P 500 companies from 2000 to 2020 and tested their hypotheses with hierarchical linear modeling. That is a statistical analysis of a sample of successions, not an experiment and not a survey of what anyone intended. One limit up front: the paywall kept me from the full paper, so everything here comes from the published abstract. I cannot tell you how age was measured, how large the effects were, or what the authors list as their own limitations.

Counter to the trend of the general workforce becoming more age-diverse, executives appear to have become more age homogenous and increasingly older at appointment.

Heyden, Wechtler and van Doorn, abstract, Human Relations (as published via Crossref metadata)

What the abstract reports: they find "general support" for the idea that the age profiles of departing CEOs and of the incumbent top management teams tend to be reproduced across succession episodes. They frame this as age homophily, a response that may appease some of the disruption a succession brings. The detail that stands out is about outsiders. The abstract says some of these tendencies "may be reinforced under outsider CEO successors," which runs against the usual expectation that an outside appointment brings upheaval. Note the hedge in both places. It is general support, not a universal rule, and "may be" is the authors' own wording.

Here is why this lands differently for the person at the top than for anyone else in the building. A succession is one of the few moments when the person at the top, or the board acting for the organization, can reset the composition of the team in a single decision. Everyone below that seat inherits the result. You also see the candidate pool through a filter you did not design: the search firm's shortlist, the board's sense of what a credible CEO looks like, the comfort of the directors who will work with the person. Nobody in that chain has to intend sameness for sameness to come out. And the people best placed to say the slate looks narrow are the ones least likely to say it to you, because their own futures depend on the outcome.

The part the research doesn't say, but that I'll say plainly: this study is about age, and age is a proxy for a lot of things it does not measure. Who gets chosen when a seat turns over is a question about experience, networks and how people look to the existing group. I am inferring that the same pull toward the familiar operates on other dimensions, and that inference is mine, not the authors'. I am also not claiming that reproducing the old profile is a mistake. Continuity can be the right call. The point is only that it should be a call you make, not one the process makes for you. Those cautions are mine, not the authors'.

One more limit on reading it: the sample is S&P 500 companies, so these are the largest public firms, and I would not assume the pattern carries to a private company or a family firm without evidence. Treat it as a well specified question, not a settled finding.

One thing to do this week. Before the next senior appointment, write down, in a few lines, what you want the team to be able to do next year that it cannot do today. Then lay the shortlist beside that statement, not beside the incumbent's résumé, and ask of each candidate whether they add something the team lacks or restate what it already has. If you cannot name what is being added, the process has been choosing for comfort, and you can still change that before the offer goes out.

This is the kind of pattern the Leadership Profile at /wiring-map is built to make visible: how you tend to decide at the top, and what that does to the people you surround yourself with.