In the summer of 2003, Michael Fiddelke was a graduate student at Northwestern, spending a few months in Target’s finance department as an intern. He went back to campus, finished his degree, and returned the following year as a full-time analyst. Twenty-two years and ten internal promotions later, on February 1, 2026, Michael Fiddelke walked into Target’s Minneapolis headquarters as chief executive officer.
He is 49 years old and has never worked anywhere else.
That sentence describes something close to extinct in corporate America. Median job tenure in the United States fell to 3.9 years in January 2024, the lowest level since 2002, down from 4.1 years just two years earlier and 4.6 years a decade before that. Workers between 25 and 34 stay at a job for a median of under three years. Baby Boomers, the generation supposedly known for company loyalty, held an average of 12.7 different jobs between the ages of 18 and 56. Fiddelke has held one employer and ten different jobs inside it.
Twenty-Two Years, Ten Titles
Fiddelke’s rise wasn’t a single lucky break. Target moved him through finance, merchandising, human resources, and operations, roughly every two years, according to his own account to CNBC. He became chief financial officer in November 2019, added chief operating officer to his title in 2024, and held both jobs simultaneously until Target hired a new CFO in September 2025. As CFO and COO, he led an efficiency drive that Target says delivered more than $2 billion in savings, and he oversaw investments in the retailer’s nearly 2,000 stores, its supply chain, and its digital operations.
Board member Christine Leahy described him as bringing “fresh eyes” to the job, an unusual phrase for someone who has spent his entire adult working life at the same company. But it captures what boards are actually betting on when they promote a lifer: someone who knows every system, every relationship, and every failed initiative well enough to fix things quickly, without the ramp-up time an outsider would need.
Michael Fiddelke Is Not Entirely Alone
He’s also not unique this cycle. Nike’s Elliott Hill started as an apparel sales intern in 1988 and became CEO in 2024, after climbing the ranks roughly every two years for over three decades. Nasdaq’s Adena Friedman started as an intern before eventually taking the top job. Principal Financial Group named Deanna Strable CEO in 2025, another executive whose career began as an intern at the same firm. For a few years running, a small cluster of major American companies have all reached for the person who started in the mailroom, or close to it.
But the broader data runs the other way, and it’s worth being precise about where. Among S&P 500 companies, external CEO hires nearly doubled in 2025, from 18% to 33%, according to a joint report from The Conference Board, Egon Zehnder, and Semler Brossy. That pushed the internal promotion rate below 70% for the first time in eight years. Boards, especially at the largest public companies, are increasingly reaching outside for “fresh perspectives” rather than growing their own.
There is one lane where insiders are actually gaining ground: the CFO’s office. In 2025, CFO-to-CEO promotions hit a decade high, with just over 10% of sitting CEOs at Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies having come directly from the finance chief’s chair. Every one of those moves was, by definition, internal. Fiddelke’s exact path, analyst to CFO to COO to CEO, sits squarely in the one part of the succession pipeline where climbing the ladder is becoming more common, not less. He isn’t a throwback so much as proof of a narrow, specific lane that’s still open even as the wider road toward internal promotion narrows around it.
It’s also cheaper. Companies that hire externally pay a real premium: outside CEOs earned roughly 33% more on average than internally promoted ones in 2023. Growing your own chief executive saves money as well as ramp-up time.
What He Walked Into
Target handed Fiddelke a genuinely difficult inheritance. The retailer closed out 2025 with same-store sales down 2.6% for the year, its 11th straight quarter of flat or declining sales. Full-year revenue landed at $104.8 billion, and adjusted earnings fell 8.2% to $8.13 a share. Foot traffic had dropped for six consecutive months, following backlash and boycotts after Target scaled back its diversity programs. A companywide survey found roughly 40% of the retailer’s 260,000 employees said they lacked confidence in the company’s future.
Nine days into the job, Fiddelke pushed out two senior executives, chief commercial officer Rick Gomez and longtime chief merchandising officer Jill Sando, replacing them with his own picks. It was not a gentle continuity handover. Whatever “fresh eyes” meant in the boardroom announcement, the new CEO moved fast once he actually had the title.
The First Quarter
In May 2026, Target reported its first full quarter under Fiddelke, and it beat expectations by a wide margin. Sales rose 6.7% to $23.4 billion against an analyst forecast of 3.4% growth. Same-store sales climbed 5.6%, the retailer’s first positive comparable sales number in five quarters. Nonmerchandise revenue, membership programs and Target’s online marketplace, jumped nearly 25%.
Target shares fell almost 4% on the news anyway. Investors welcomed the numbers but questioned whether the momentum would hold through a full year. Fiddelke, for his part, didn’t oversell it. “We will not confuse this progress with potential,” he told reporters on the earnings call, adding that the business tends to perform better when it chases “a strong trend with a little bit of inventory” rather than betting big and risking disappointment.
Not everyone is convinced the succession itself was the right call. Ahead of Target’s June 2026 shareholder meeting, a group of investors filed a formal letter urging shareholders to vote against re-electing Brian Cornell, who moved into the role of executive chair, and board chair Christine Leahy. Their argument: keeping Cornell on in a paid advisory role while promoting a 22-year insider signals “continuity without correction,” not the genuine reset they believe Target’s five years of underperformance demands.
Too Early to Call
It’s tempting to read Fiddelke’s rise as proof that company loyalty still gets rewarded, that the intern who stays for two decades can still end up running the place. The data doesn’t fully support that as a broad rule. External CEO hiring at the biggest public companies is rising, not falling. What Fiddelke’s story actually proves is narrower and more interesting: that a specific route, staying at one company long enough to run finance and then operations, remains one of the more reliable paths to the top job, even as the overall trend toward hiring outsiders accelerates around it.
Whether Fiddelke’s own version of that story ends up as evidence the model works, or as a cautionary tale about boards choosing the safe, familiar option during a crisis, isn’t settled yet. One strong quarter against brutal prior-year comparisons and a shareholder revolt questioning the board’s judgment are both true at the same time. Fiddelke seems aware of exactly that tension. He just doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to declare it resolved.
