Leadership Squared

The Power of Industry-Leading CFO-CEO Relationships

Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Batman and Robin. Great partnerships are legendary.

So Russell Reynolds set out to understand another famous partnership: that of the CFO and CEO. To do so, we surveyed more than 100 CFOs at leading U.S. companies. What we found were clear strategic benefits to a strong CFO-CEO relationship. But the survey also uncovered that many top executive partnerships have a way to go to reap the rewards of a high-performing partnership.

Relationship status

In our survey, 82% of CFOs surveyed gave their CEO high marks for overall effectiveness. Further, the vast majority of CFOs said they trusted their CEOs.

But there’s still plenty of room for improvement. Less than half of our respondents gave CEOs a high score when it came to their ability to coach and develop the CFO. And only 49% of CFOs surveyed said they had a “very strong” relationship with their CEOs, the highest relationship ranking in the survey’s 5-point scale.

Before we delve into what differentiates very strong relationships from the rest of the pack, it’s also worth noting what doesn’t. Although commonly assumed to be an important predictor of CFO-CEO relationship strength, our survey found that structural factors have surprisingly little impact, as shown ...

Originally published December 2016 by Russell Reynolds Associates