Methodology: Board Monitor 2026 and Route to the Top 2026
In the first quarter of 2026, Heidrick & Struggles fielded an online survey that garnered 1,033 respondents, including CEOs, executive directors, and independent board directors. Respondents were globally distributed: 29% were based in Europe, 28% in North America, 21% in Asia Pacific, 12% in the Middle East, and 10% in Latin America. Respondents represented organizations across a broad range of company sizes, with 19% reporting annual revenue $5 billion or higher. Forty-seven percent of respondents were from publicly traded companies; the remainder represented a mix of private equity-backed, venture capital-backed, family-owned, employee-owned, and nonprofit organizations. Companies spanned a wide range of industries.
Alignment score
The alignment score measures how consistently an organization is operating across its leadership and governance system. It looks at whether key groups and processes are working in sync—specifically:
- among board members.
- between the board and CEO.
- between the CEO and executive team.
- between executive attraction, development, and succession planning efforts and their strategy.
- between CEO succession planning and organizational strategy.
- among the quality of their leadership pipeline and their strategic needs over the next 2-3 years.
- among their executive attraction, development and succession planning efforts with each other.
- among their executive attraction, development and succession practices across their organization.
CEOs and directors rated alignment across these areas using a four-point scale from “not aligned” to “very aligned.” These responses were then averaged to create a single alignment score for each organization, which was further simplified into a binary distinction: aligned vs. not aligned.
Capability gap
The current CEO capability fit score measures the extent to which the factors respondents say are most important for organizational success in a volatile environment are reflected in the CEOs' strengths. It was constructed using two survey questions:
- “Thinking about your organization’s ability to achieve its strategic goals in the context of ongoing volatility, which one factor among those below do you expect to have the most influence?”
- “Among the following capabilities or areas of knowledge that can be important to meeting strategic goals, which are you/the CEO best at?”
Each organizational strategic factor respondents could select for the first question was mapped to core CEO capabilities respondents could select for the second question. If at least one of the mapped CEO capabilities was selected, the respondent was classified as a capability fit. If no CEO capability was selected, this organization was classified as having a capability gap.