How Stanley Black & Decker built a 100-day CEO transition comms plan

No matter how great a new CEO is, their announcement will always cause some nerves among employees. What will change? Are their jobs safe? Who, exactly, is the new boss?

When Stanley Black & Decker promoted Christopher Nelson to CEO in October 2025, Alyssa Winterstein, senior communications manager for CEO/CFO and enterprise-wide content strategy & integration, knew employees needed to be guided through the change well before his first day. The company had been through years of strategic change, including divestitures, and Winterstein knew employees needed reassurance that the transition was not another sudden pivot.One thing working in their favor: the new CEO was their current COO. That meant he was a known entity and they could start co-messaging him alongside the current CEO right away.

“On announcement day, we had a co-interview with the outgoing CEO and incoming CEO to show the passing of the baton,” she said. “We wanted it to feel like a united front from the beginning.”

Over time, they continued to put the incoming and outgoing leaders on stage together.

“In the major settings, the prior CEO might take 20 minutes and the incoming CEO would take 10,” Winterstein explained. “Then we slowly started to flip that.”

This type of comms planning helps make a CEO transition feel less abrupt for employees. It gives people repeated chances to hear how the incoming leader talks about the business, how his priorities connect to the existing strategy and how the outgoing leader is helping frame the handoff. Winterstein will share more about her 100-day comms plan for the transition at Ragan’s Employee Experience Conference in Nashville this August.

What should a 100-day transition plan look like?

Winterstein said a key part of the CEO transition comms plan was activating around 200 senior leaders at Stanley Black & Decker to support employee-focused messaging. During the leadership change, instead of gathering once a year to hear from the CEO, the group of leaders met with the new chief executive once a month to figure out how to position the change within the company.

“The CEO comes to them and says, ‘Here’s everything that’s on my mind. Here’s where I’ve spent my time. Here are the key topics, and here’s what you can share with your team,’” Winterstein said.

Communication cascades matter during a leadership transition because employees rarely process change through one enterprise-wide message. The CEO can set the tone early, but senior leaders help translate it by team and function.

“Our senior leaders are force multipliers of the message,” Winterstein said. “We are building a belief in where we are headed, and that makes it easier to cascade. It reinforces confidence and clarity across the organization.’”

When creating a 100-day comms plan for a CEO transition, here are a few places Winterstein said are helpful to start:

• Identify the questions employees are most likely to ask.
• Give senior leaders clear language to use with their teams.
• Create a regular cadence for leaders to hear from the CEO.
• Reinforce what is changing, what is not and how the transition connects to the company’s future.

But these types of tactics only work if the comms team and its partners are on the same page before the change actually happens. Winterstein emphasized the fact that consistency is key. Employees should not hear one version of the change from the CEO, another from their manager and a third from their department lead. The comms work behind the scenes is what makes the message feel steady in front of employees.

“We met regularly so that any one of us could walk into a room with the new CEO and say the same thing,” Winterstein said. “‘Here’s is the best use of time with each stakeholder group and messaging that aligns to the broader strategy.’ That was the work before the announcement, after the announcement and throughout the first 100 days. It’s necessary every day as things shift.”

To register for Ragan’s Employee Experience Conference, click here.

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications.