Sharing the Mic on Earnings Calls Predicts CEO Promotion, Study Finds

A new academic study has identified a surprisingly specific behavioral signal that predicts which executives will eventually become CEO: whether they invite colleagues to speak during quarterly earnings calls. Researchers at Columbia Business School analyzed transcripts from roughly 78,500 earnings calls conducted between 2010 and 2020, tracking more than 10,800 executives across nearly 2,500 public companies over a decade.

The numbers are striking. Among all executives who appeared on earnings calls, just 6.7% were eventually promoted to CEO. But for those who regularly passed the mic to colleagues — inviting them to add context, detail, or perspective — the promotion rate nearly doubled to 13%. Columbia Business School associate professor Wei Cai, one of the study's authors, argues this behavior signals something boards and investors find genuinely valuable: the ability to coordinate across a complex organization, not just perform well in front of analysts.

Critically, the effect holds regardless of company performance or question difficulty. Cooperative executives were equally likely to invite colleagues to speak whether the quarter was strong or weak, and whether the analyst question was softball or pointed. That consistency matters — executives who only bring in colleagues when the news is bad, potentially to deflect blame, are actually less likely to be promoted than those who share the spotlight unconditionally. The researchers also found that the breadth of collaboration matters: executives who engaged a wider range of colleagues on calls fared better than those who consistently looped in only one or two familiar voices.

Shareholders appear to notice too. When a company promoted a CEO who was measurably more cooperative than the outgoing one, the stock price logged an average 0.6% gain relative to expected returns in the three-day window around the announcement — a modest but consistent premium that suggests markets price in the value of collaborative leadership style.