Here is a number worth sitting with. More than two-thirds of CPOs have been in their role for less than three years (Russell Reynolds Associates, n.d.). That figure has been consistent for over a decade.

The usual interpretation is that the talent market is thin. That the job is hard. That board expectations have outrun what most procurement leaders can deliver.

All of that is true. But it points to a different question: if the CPO role has a structural attrition problem, what does that say about how we approach procurement leadership development?

What this article covers: The CPO role has been fundamentally rebuilt over the past fifteen years, from technical procurement leadership to enterprise-level commercial strategy, risk, sustainability, and AI adoption. Yet most procurement executive training and leadership programmes still train for the old job. This article examines the structural gap between what CPOs are now required to do and what the profession’s development infrastructure actually builds. Reading time: approximately 8 minutes.

How the Chief Procurement Officer (CPO) role has been rebuilt

A CPO at a large enterprise today is being asked to do something that did not exist in its current form fifteen years ago.

The traditional path into a senior procurement role was built around technical mastery: category management, sourcing process, contract negotiation, supplier management.

Learn these disciplines well enough, run them at scale for long enough, and you would eventually step into a CPO role where you applied the same skills at a higher level of complexity.

Today’s CPO is expected to manage third-party risk at board level, providing the executive team with ongoing intelligence on supply market volatility, geopolitical exposure, and critical dependencies.

They are expected to contribute to sustainability strategy through the supply base.

Many are now directly involved in M&A due diligence, providing commercial analysis of target companies’ supplier relationships and cost structures. And all of them are being asked to lead AI adoption across a function that, in most organisations, is still working out what good data looks like.

The new mandate: what procurement leaders are now expected to deliver

McKinsey’s Procurement 2030 agenda identifies the new currencies of procurement value: net margin improvement, supply continuity, revenue enabling, working capital management, carbon reduction, and supplier-led innovation (McKinsey & Company, 2023).

External spend typically represents between 50 and 80 percent of a company’s cost base, more than almost any other controllable variable in the P&L, but has historically received less executive attention than sales productivity or operational efficiency (McKinsey & Company, 2023).

That is changing. And as it changes, the expectations placed on the CPO are rising faster than the profession’s development infrastructure has kept pace with.

Deloitte’s 2025 Global CPO Survey, drawing on responses from more than 250 CPOs across 40 countries, found that capability gaps and talent gaps rank among the top four barriers to procurement value delivery. The barriers are internal, and they are about people (Deloitte, 2025).

The same survey identified the two largest competency gaps in senior procurement teams: digital skills, and what Deloitte terms consulting skills, the ability to diagnose a commercial problem, advise on it clearly, and build internal demand for procurement’s involvement. Their framing is direct: in procurement today, you need to sell more than you buy (Deloitte, 2025).

These are capabilities the traditional development pathway was never designed to build.

Why hiring out of the gap doesn’t solve it

The visible symptom of this gap is CPO turnover. When leaders cannot meet the expanded mandate, organisations respond by hiring externally, often from outside the profession entirely.

Finance executives, management consultants, and operational leaders have all been brought into senior procurement roles on the basis that commercial acumen and stakeholder influence matter more than technical procurement knowledge.

Sometimes this works.

More often it produces a different kind of gap: a CPO who can speak the language of the board but lacks the domain credibility to lead a technically capable procurement function or challenge category teams on the substance of their strategies.

Either way, hiring out of a gap is a symptom response.

It addresses the immediate vacancy without touching the structural problem: procurement has not built a development pipeline that reliably produces the leaders the role now requires.

The talent market is thin because the profession has not invested systematically in developing that talent. The two problems reinforce each other.

The three capability gaps that procurement leadership training rarely closes

The profession does not lack training. There is no shortage of category management courses, negotiation workshops, sourcing methodology programmes, or certification pathways. Most large procurement functions invest something in capability development each year.

The gap is in leadership development, specifically the layer of capability that sits above technical competency and determines whether a CPO can do the job the role now requires.

Three gaps appear consistently across the research. All three require dedicated, structured procurement leadership training to close. None of them emerge naturally from technical experience alone.

Commercial and financial acumen at enterprise level

Building board-level investment cases, reading a P&L, understanding how procurement decisions flow into EBITDA – this is not taught in most procurement programmes. It is assumed, or hoped for, or expected to arrive through experience. A CPO who cannot make a financial argument in the language their CFO uses will not hold the room, regardless of how strong their category strategy is.

Stakeholder influence without formal authority

The ability to be invited into decisions rather than called in to execute them requires a different kind of development from what sourcing process certification provides. It is earned through credibility built over time, through being useful before you are required. This is a learnable discipline, but it must be developed deliberately through structured procurement executive training that uses real commercial scenarios, not abstract leadership theory.

“Stakeholder influence is earned through credibility built over time – through being useful before you are required.”

Strategic judgment under pressure

How to prioritise when everything is urgent, how to make decisions with incomplete information, how to hold a position under pressure from a divisional head who outranks you – this requires structured development over time. It does not emerge from a two-day workshop.

McKinsey’s benchmarking data across more than 2,000 organisations shows that procurement functions in the top quartile achieve more than five percentage points of EBITDA margin advantage over those in the bottom quartile (McKinsey & Company, 2024).

The gap between leaders and laggards, across twenty years of data, is explained by operating model maturity, governance, and the quality of leadership running the function.

Top-quartile performance requires leaders who can build and sustain a top-quartile function, and those leaders require development that most organisations are not currently providing.

What the data says about organisations that develop procurement leaders well

It would be convenient to frame CPO underperformance as a selection problem, choosing the wrong people, hiring from the wrong pool. But the tenure data suggests something more systematic. The organisations producing CPOs who last and lead effectively are the ones treating procurement leadership development as a strategic investment.

Deloitte’s longitudinal survey data is consistent on this point. Across twelve years of CPO surveys, the organisations in the top performance tier, those Deloitte calls Orchestrators of Value, invest systematically in capability development at the leadership level. Their talent strategies look fundamentally different from those of following organisations. Ninety percent of top-performing CPOs report that their teams have the skills to deliver their strategy, compared to less than half of those in the following tier (Deloitte, 2023).

That gap in confidence reflects a real gap in capability, and it is largely explained by investment decisions made years earlier.

For organisations serious about building CPO-ready leaders, the starting point is usually a structured assessment of where the gaps actually are.

A capability assessment or skills gap analysis at the individual and team level makes the investment in development more targeted and the outcomes measurable, rather than designing a programme around assumptions.

What this means for how you develop your future procurement leaders

For any CPO building a leadership team, or any organisation trying to develop its future CPOs, the question is whether the development approach has kept pace with the role.

Most have not. They are still investing in technical capability, still treating leadership development as a one-off event, and still hoping that people will step into the executive role and find their footing.

Some will. The attrition data suggests most do not.

The next article in this series examines the specific capabilities that separate CPOs who succeed in the expanded mandate from those who struggle, and why closing that gap requires a procurement leadership programme that looks nothing like an advanced procurement course.

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Frequently asked questions

What skills does a modern CPO need beyond procurement expertise?

The expanded CPO mandate now requires commercial and financial acumen at enterprise level, stakeholder influence without formal authority, and the ability to lead digital and AI adoption across the function. Technical procurement expertise remains necessary but is no longer sufficient. Most procurement executive training programmes focus on technical skills; the capability gap is in the leadership layer above them.

How long does it take to develop a CPO-ready procurement leader?

Structured procurement leadership programmes that develop commercial, strategic, and leadership capability typically operate over 12 to 24 months. A two-day workshop does not close capability gaps at this level. The organisations producing durable CPO leaders treat development as a multi-year investment, not a training budget line.

Why is CPO tenure so short?

Russell Reynolds Associates data shows more than two-thirds of CPOs have been in their role for less than three years, a pattern that has held for over a decade. The primary driver is a structural mismatch between the capabilities the role now requires and what traditional procurement development pathways actually build. The profession has invested heavily in technical training and lightly in the leadership development the role now depends on.

References

Deloitte. (2023). 2023 global chief procurement officer survey (11th ed.). Deloitte Consulting.

Deloitte. (2025). 2025 global chief procurement officer survey (12th ed.). Deloitte Consulting.

McKinsey & Company. (2023, September). A new era for procurement: Value creation across the supply chain. McKinsey & Company.

McKinsey & Company. (2024, July). Next generation operating model in procurement: GPE 360 benchmarking. McKinsey & Company.

Russell Reynolds Associates. (n.d.). The evolution of the CPO: From cost control to value enhancement [as cited in IndustryWeek]. Russell Reynolds Associates.

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