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A bad leadership hire doesn’t always look like a bad hire.
That’s part of the problem.
The obvious failures are relatively easy to recognise: somebody leaves quickly, performance deteriorates, relationships break down or the organisation has to start the search again.
But some of the most expensive leadership appointments are much less dramatic.
The individual has the right experience, they interviewed well, their references were good, nothing is sufficiently wrong to force an immediate decision, but then, they just don’t move the business.
Over time, the signs begin to appear, decisions take longer, a transformation programme loses momentum, the team stops raising difficult issues because they’ve learnt that doing so doesn’t change anything, strong, good, if not some of your best performing people begin quietly looking elsewhere.
By the time the organisation concludes that it has made the wrong appointment, the cost can be considerably greater than the salary or original search fee.
So perhaps the more useful question isn’t simply how do you identify a bad leadership hire?
It’s how do you reduce the chances of making one in the first place?
What counts as a bad leadership hire?
Not every unsuccessful executive appointment is an outright failure.
Sometimes a perfectly capable leader has simply been appointed into the wrong environment, against the wrong mandate or at the wrong point in an organisation’s development.
That’s an important distinction.
At Executive level, most shortlisted candidates are going to be credible, they will usually have strong CVs, significant achievements and the ability to perform well in an interview.
The harder question is whether what made that individual successful somewhere else will make them successful here.
That means understanding considerably more than what they have done.
How do they make decisions?
How do they behave when the evidence contradicts their view?
How do they lead through other people?
How do they respond to challenge?
What happens when they need the support of people they don’t directly control?
And does that match the organisation they’re about to join?
What actually causes bad executive hires?
In our experience, lack of experience is rarely the only problem.
More often, something went wrong much earlier in the process.
Sometimes the mandate wasn’t sufficiently defined before the search began. Everyone agreed they needed a “strong COO”, “commercial CCO” or “transformational leader”, but there was much less agreement about what actually needed to be different 18 months after that person arrived.
Sometimes the process placed too much weight on CV, previous employers and interview performance and too little on how the individual really operates.
And sometimes cultural or stakeholder fit was assumed rather than tested.
The original draft identified another problem that I think is particularly important: urgency.
An Executive seat is empty, the business wants somebody in, the Board wants progress, candidates are moving elsewhere. Speed begins to feel like success, you know a person.
But speed can also encourage organisations to trade depth for momentum, a fast appointment is only a good outcome if it is the right appointment.
Does the problem sometimes start with the role rather than the candidate?
Absolutely.
This is something we are seeing more frequently as Executive roles become broader.
Organisations combine Operations with Customer, Customer with Transformation, Technology with Data and AI, or Strategy with increasingly large delivery responsibilities.
There can be perfectly sensible reasons for doing that.
But every additional responsibility doesn’t automatically come with the authority, resources or organisational alignment required to deliver it.
We recently explored this in What Actually Predicts Leadership Success and Bigger Jobs Same Problems.
One person can be accountable for an outcome while several other executives still control the levers required to achieve it.
You can recruit an exceptional person into that situation and still end up disappointed.
That’s why one of the questions we increasingly think Boards should ask before beginning a search is:
If this person left tomorrow, would we design the role this way again?
Sometimes what looks like a recruitment problem is actually a role-design problem.
What are the warning signs before you make the offer?
Some of the most useful indicators don’t appear on a CV.
Listen to how candidates describe disagreement.
When somebody in their previous team challenged them, was that person regarded as difficult, or useful?
Ask about decisions they got wrong.
Can they genuinely identify occasions when new evidence caused them to change direction, or does every story ultimately prove that their original judgement was correct?
Look closely at how they achieved results.
Did they build capability around them and deliver through people, or was success repeatedly achieved despite the people around them?
And create some challenge in the assessment process itself.
A candidate’s response to a thoughtful disagreement can tell you considerably more than another rehearsed competency question.
Those are exactly the sorts of behaviours that conventional CV-led assessment can miss.
What does a bad executive hire actually cost?
The obvious calculation is salary, bonus, benefits, search costs and potentially severance.
That’s the easy part to measure.
The organisational cost is much harder.
It might be the transformation programme that stalls while everyone waits for the leader who was supposed to unblock it.
It could be decisions deferred, customers affected or commercial opportunities missed.
There is also a people cost.
If employees repeatedly raise concerns and nothing happens, eventually some stop raising them.
Others leave.
And when a senior appointment eventually has to be replaced, the organisation isn’t necessarily returning to where it started. The next leader may inherit lower confidence, lost momentum and a team that has already been through considerable uncertainty.
That’s why the true cost of a poor leadership appointment tends to compound over time.
How do you reduce the risk of a bad C-suite hire?
I’d concentrate on three things.
First, define the mandate before defining the candidate.
Don’t begin with the job description, begin with the outcome.
What needs to be demonstrably different 12–18 months after this person arrives?
What decisions will they own?
What authority will they have?
What are the organisational constraints?
And what is likely to make this particular job difficult?
That creates a much more useful search brief than a list of responsibilities.
Second, assess how somebody operates, not simply what they’ve done, or where they have worked.
Past achievement matters enormously, but context matters too.
Structured assessment, behavioural evidence and properly conducted referencing can help establish how somebody makes decisions, influences, responds to pressure and leads through others.
Third, take organisational fit as seriously as capability.
Not “culture fit” in the sense of finding somebody who looks and sounds like everybody already there.
The question is whether this person’s way of operating is likely to be effective within the organisation they’re joining.
A brilliant operator who requires complete autonomy may struggle in a highly federated organisation where progress depends on consensus.
A collaborative leader may struggle in a situation requiring rapid and unpopular intervention.
Neither person is necessarily the better leader.
One may simply be much better suited to the job that actually exists.
The original resource captured these three principles well.
Can a bad leadership hire be fixed once it’s made?
Sometimes.
Not every difficult first six months means the appointment was wrong.
Clearer expectations, better sponsorship, coaching, honest feedback or changes to decision rights can make a substantial difference, particularly where the leader has the underlying capability but something in the environment is preventing them from using it effectively.
But there is a point where organisations need to distinguish between something that can be developed and a fundamental mismatch.
If the role requires collaborative leadership and the individual consistently overrides challenge, that’s different from somebody who simply needs better stakeholder support.
If the organisation needs significant change and the individual repeatedly defaults to preserving the status quo, more onboarding may not solve it.
The longer a fundamental mismatch is managed around, the more expensive it can become.
What actually predicts leadership success?
This may be the most important question.
There is no single assessment, interview question or personality profile that can guarantee a successful Executive appointment.
Nor should there be.
But we can get considerably better at understanding the relationship between three things:
The mandate. The individual. The environment.
What does the organisation actually need this leader to achieve?
What evidence do we have that this individual can achieve it?
And does the environment they’re entering give them a realistic opportunity to do so?
That’s the thinking behind Impact 360, our approach to Executive Search.
It doesn’t replace experience, track record or judgement.
It adds another layer to them, looking beyond whether somebody can do the job towards the harder question of whether they are likely to succeed in this particular job, in this particular organisation, at this particular point in time.
Because by the time somebody becomes an Executive candidate, an impressive CV should really only be the beginning of the conversation.
Considering your next senior appointment?
We believe some of the most important decisions in Executive Search happen before the market is ever approached.
Defining the mandate, understanding the environment and agreeing what success will actually look like gives you a much stronger basis on which to assess the people who could deliver it.
