Leadership Transitions Report: Third Quarter 2026

Reffett Associates tracks more than two hundred organizations in the sectors we recruit for, looking for the events that come before a leadership search: a new chief executive, an interim appointment, a transaction, an announced retirement, a missed payment. This is our first quarterly read of what those signals add up to. We do not name organizations here; the patterns are the point.

What changed, by sector

Share of tracked organizations showing each type of signal over roughly the past year. An organization can show more than one.

1. The search is usually one level below the headline

A new chief executive makes the news. The searches follow a few months later, one level down. Across all seven sectors, the pattern repeated: a new leader arrives, spends a quarter assessing the team and then replaces or adds the operating, finance and growth leaders beneath them.

Internal promotions produce the same effect more quietly. In grocery and consumer alone, we counted at least six promotions this year that left, or will soon leave, a senior seat with no publicly announced successor, most often a chief operating officer or chief merchant role. Every promotion creates a vacancy; it just does not come with a press release.

For a board, the most useful succession question after a leadership change is not "who replaces the leader?" but "who replaces the people the new leader moves?"

2. Government contracting: capital is driving leadership

More than four in ten of the government contractors we track had a transaction in the past year: sponsor acquisitions, add-ons to existing platforms, carve-outs from public parents, a merger of two portfolio companies and two companies going public through special purpose acquisition mergers. A third changed chief executive, and two in five added senior leaders below the chief executive in the same period.

Each kind of deal creates its own hiring need. Roll-ups that have made three acquisitions need one leader who can run delivery across all of them. A company heading toward public markets needs a public company finance team before its registration is filed, not after. And sponsors buying their first federal business often do not yet know where the cleared, federally fluent candidates are. The window is usually the first six to twelve months after close, when transition arrangements expire and the permanent team is built.

A newer pattern is defense manufacturers adding capacity. At least six of the companies we track opened new plants, announced major expansions or signed long-term production agreements this year, several adding hundreds of jobs. Production scale-ups need plant, quality, supply chain and program leadership that most of these companies have never had to hire at this pace, and they need it before the new lines are running.

3. Grocery and consumer: a generational succession wave

Nearly half of the grocery and consumer organizations we track changed or announced a change in their top seat this year, and five have a chief executive or senior officer leaving on a set date between now and early 2027. Many of them are not publicly traded or private equity owned; they are family-held, employee-owned or member cooperatives, where the board and the owners make the decision together and the incumbent has often been in the role for decades.

Two patterns stand out. Owners are stepping back into the chief executive seat as a bridge while they decide on a permanent successor. And regional operators are buying smaller family chains faster than their management teams can absorb them, which tends to produce an operating leadership search within a year of the deal.

4. Higher education: interim has become the holding pattern

Half of the colleges and universities we track have a president or chancellor seat that is vacant or held by an interim or acting leader. Several of those interim periods have now run nine months or longer, and in a few cases the permanent search has been announced but never launched. In one western state system, six community and technical colleges are led by interim presidents at the same time.

Financial pressure is part of the story. Federal research funding cuts, enrollment shortfalls and operating deficits appear in about a quarter of the institutions we track, and boards facing a budget question are reluctant to launch a presidential search in the middle of it. Several searches that did conclude this year ended with an internal appointment, and at least one board chose to run its process without a search firm at all.

An interim period has a shelf life. The longer it runs, the more of the cabinet ends up interim too, and the harder the eventual search becomes.

5. State and local government: the manager's chair keeps turning

Half of the cities, counties and public agencies we track changed or began replacing their city or county manager or chief administrator this year, and about four in ten have a top seat held by an acting or interim leader or vacant. The vacancies feed each other. In one Pacific Northwest metro area, four suburban cities were recruiting city managers at the same time, and at least two of the openings we track were created when a manager left to take another city's top job.

At least one city is searching for a manager it has had to replace repeatedly in recent years, where the problem is fit and retention rather than the size of the candidate pool. At the largest authorities and utilities, the chief executive appointment is often political rather than searched; the department and division leaders beneath them are where formal searches happen.

6. Associations, nonprofits and independent schools: tenure is the signal

A third of the associations, nonprofits and independent schools we track changed chief executive or head of school in roughly the past eighteen months. Many of those transitions stayed inside: an interim made permanent, an assistant head of school promoted, a divisional director moved up. Internal succession can work well, but it leaves the promoted leader's former seat to fill and often arrives without the outside perspective a board expected to hear.

The quieter signal is tenure. About one in five of these organizations has a chief executive who has served seven years or more with no public succession plan. Succession planning at that level usually takes one to two years to do well, which means the boards that start early are the ones with real choices when the time comes. Board turnover is worth watching too: new chairs, expanded boards and rotated officers appeared at several of these organizations, and new boards often revisit leadership within a year or two.

7. Companies under financial pressure: the finance seat moves first

We also track mid-market companies in bankruptcy, default, forbearance or with going-concern warnings, because distress opens leadership seats faster than any other event. More than a quarter of them lost or replaced their chief financial officer in roughly the past eighteen months, and in most of those cases an interim, often the controller or an outside restructuring adviser, took the seat. One interim finance chief held the role for more than two years.

About four in ten went through a sale, a lender takeover or a recapitalization, and about one in five brought in a chief restructuring officer. Both lead to the same place: new owners, creditor-appointed boards and restructuring officers hand the business to a permanent team, and the incentive plans they write are built around the team they intend to have rather than the one they inherited.

8. Manufacturing and industrials: long tenures end, and promotions leave gaps

Nearly half of the manufacturers we track changed or announced a change of chief executive this year, including three leaders who had been with their companies for more than a quarter century. Most successors came from the operating seat, a chief operating officer or division president, so the question after the announcement is who runs operations now. In at least nine cases a promotion left a senior operating, division or finance seat behind it, and in one case a chief operating officer left one manufacturer to become chief executive of another, opening a seat at each.

The finance seat is moving too. About a quarter of these companies have a chief financial officer transition underway or just completed, several announced a year or more ahead of the retirement date. Of the six chief executive or finance searches announced publicly, four named an outside firm already engaged, which puts the more open opportunity in the seats a new leader reshapes afterward. One announced merger says openly that the combined company's executive team is still to be decided. Plant investment is the other theme: at least two large manufacturing investments with dated ramps, one moving production back to the United States, will need plant and operations leaders in place before the lines start. Our manufacturing list currently leans toward larger public companies, so read these figures as the pattern among established manufacturers.

What this means for boards and hiring executives

• Plan for the second wave. If your organization has a new leader, expect two or three senior searches within eighteen months and decide now which ones you will run and how.
• Put a date on every interim. An interim appointment without an end date tends to become a deferred decision. A fixed term sets the search timetable for you.
• Treat a transaction as a leadership event. The deal model assumes a team. Check that the team exists before close, not six months after.
• Look at the seat a promotion leaves behind. Promoting from within is often right. Make sure the vacancy it creates gets the same attention as the promotion.
• Start succession early when tenure is long. A leader in the seat seven years or more is not a problem, but the plan to follow them should already exist.

How we compiled this report

These figures come from the Reffett Associates Signal Watch, a set of sector watch lists our team maintains to follow leadership change in the markets we serve. Every signal comes from public sources: company, institution and agency announcements, securities filings, bankruptcy dockets, nonprofit Form 990 filings and trade and regional press, including GovCon Wire, Washington Technology, Grocery Dive, Inside Higher Ed and Government Market News. Data is as of September 29, 2026. Each organization was classified by hand and can appear under more than one signal. The organizations on our lists are chosen because they are likely to face leadership change, so these figures describe the pattern of change in each sector, not its rate across the industry as a whole.