At a recent HR leaders’ network event, CIPD’s immediate past president Vicky Wright quoted a new survey that found the average tenure of CEOs was 4.5 years.

This is interesting: is that longer than you thought, or less? Either way, it certainly means CEOs tend to be on their way before the five-year plan reaches full bloom, or ignobly fails. It’s also an average; meaning, of course, that a good proportion are in role less than four years.

If you square this against the average tenure of workers in organisations (median of 5.1 years), and the time it takes to change culture at organisations (rarely overnight), this means most employees tend to outlive CEOs, and get more than their fair share of cultural change - we all know how new CEOs love to tinker, if not tip the entire organisation on its head and shake it until everything falls out.

It’s even tempting to conclude that average employee tenure is six months longer than CEOs’ tenure because once another CEO comes in and undoes everything their predecessor did, a significant proportion of employees promptly quit, exasperated. But, of course, statistics don’t quite work like that.

Nevertheless, with a recent survey revealing that only 58 per cent believe their company is safe in the CEO’s hands, and with the zeitgeist billowing firmly against established authority - be that expenses-drenched MPs, Twitter-shy celebs or even entire sectors - it’s not an exaggeration to say that societally we have something of a leadership crisis, and organisations are by no means immune to that.

In seeking to play the longer game, in aiming for more sustainable organisations, should our leaders stay longer, committing themselves more explicitly to their organisations?

Or is there something to be said for a fresh vision re-energising organisations every half a decade or so, without which they become stale…?