US companies are increasingly separating the roles of the chairman and the chief executive officer. Boeing, Dell, the Walt Disney Company, MCI, Oracle, and Tenet Healthcare have all done so during the past year, and a new study finds that roughly one-third of US companies have adopted such a split-leadership structure, up from a historical level of about one-fifth.1
Yet while more companies—in the US and elsewhere—agree that separating the two roles makes sense, many are less sure about the best way to proceed. This uncertainty results in part from the polarized opinions of key stakeholders about whether to separate the roles in the first place and in part from the absence of widely disseminated best practices. For instance, company directors and investors in the US seem to support splitting the roles—hardly surprising, given the mounting pressure on boards to become more independent of management—but CEOs are understandably less certain.2
Experience from the United Kingdom, which has experimented with the split model for more than a decade, indicates that companies should move deliberately and judiciously. What may seem like a straightforward change of roles is actually a complicated process influenced by unpredictable factors—especially the personal interactions of the...