McKinsey & Company on Wednesday appointed senior partner Andrew Pickersgill to the newly separate role of board chair, a structural change aimed at establishing more independence between the firm’s board and management in the wake of scandals tied to past client work.
Bob Sternfels, McKinsey’s global managing partner, will continue to run the firm day to day under the new arrangement. The separation of the chair role from the firm’s top operational leader is intended to provide stronger governance and oversight, McKinsey leaders said.
“We provide governance and oversight,” Pickersgill said in an interview. “When the system works well, we build trust in the partnership.”
The firm is also slimming its governing body, the shareholders council, to 12 senior partners elected by their peers plus Sternfels, down from 30 members previously. Board members will step down from other appointed internal roles under the revamp, though they will continue to work with clients.
The governance redesign dates to a 2023 meeting in Seoul, where McKinsey’s senior partners gathered to discuss the firm’s future direction. “We polled everybody to say, ‘So, do we want to go do this?’” Sternfels said. Out of those discussions came a multiyear effort to overhaul McKinsey’s governance structure.
Much of Sternfels’s tenure as global managing partner has been spent trying to steer the firm past a series of crises. In 2024, McKinsey agreed to a $650 million settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, accepting responsibility for its role in helping Purdue Pharma boost sales of the opioid painkiller OxyContin. That same year, a McKinsey subsidiary reached a separate Justice Department settlement to resolve allegations that it paid bribes to officials at two South Africa state-owned companies.
Pickersgill, a McKinsey veteran of more than 25 years who previously chaired the committee that elects the firm’s senior partners, said the board’s mandate includes challenging McKinsey’s leaders and asking big-picture questions about the company’s direction, particularly in the era of artificial intelligence.
“It’s a lot of how you learn how the fabric of the firm works,” Pickersgill said of his years of service on governance committees.
McKinsey leaders said the changes were necessary because the firm has grown into a sprawling organization with about 2,700 partners and roughly 40,000 staff worldwide. McKinsey has resisted incorporating, opting instead to maintain the flat partnership structure that has defined it for much of its 100-year history.
“We want to preserve this idea of one unified global partnership, and so that has required some changes as it continues to scale, and the environment gets harder,” Sternfels said.