Publication
The Mismatch
Why Leadership Appointments Fail and What Context Explains
The first time I watched a leadership appointment destroy a strategy, I made the standard mistake: I assumed someone had hired badly. The search had been rigorous. The process included a credible assessment battery, structured competency interviews, and a careful reference stage. The person appointed was accomplished, and the strategy they were hired to execute was the right one for the situation. Fourteen months later, the strategy was suspended and the leader was being managed out, and the post-mortem produced the vocabulary that follows these situations: "culture fit," "execution gap," "wasn't quite right." It was all accurate. None of it explained anything.
The explanation required a different question. The board had asked, in effect, who is the most capable leader available for this role. The question they needed to ask was what does capable leadership actually require here, in this ownership structure, at this point in the business cycle, under these operating conditions. These are not variations of the same question. The gap between them is structural, and it is where most leadership appointments fail.
I have watched this gap produce the same result across enough different contexts that it has stopped being an observation and become a diagnostic (which is not the same as becoming comfortable with it). PE-backed companies stall at value creation inflection points because the leader who negotiated entry conditions is not the leader the post-acquisition operating situation requires. Family-owned businesses navigate succession competently on paper and catastrophically in practice because the successor's capability is assessed against generic criteria rather than the specific relational architecture of the business they are inheriting. Listed companies under shareholder pressure appoint executives with strong public-company credentials and discover, late, that the credentials measured the wrong thing for this company at this moment. The pattern is not random. It is predictable. What varies is the context in which it manifests.